“I’ll meet you for coffee…”
We all know that’s not what I mean. We almost never meet for the coffee. Sometimes we don’t even drink coffee at these coffee meetings because it’s the New Year and we are on some cleanse or something. But I have totally fallen in love with coffee times.
If you draw the continent of Africa and put a dot smack dab in the middle, you won’t be far from where I grew up. We went back to visit because I wanted my husband, Jeff, to feel the spongy grass under his feet at the airstrip and bounce over what passes as a dirt road. I wanted to climb over barb wire fences and walk through the cow pastures to market with him. But I never expected that there, in the middle of Africa, we’d discover the value of meeting for coffee.
There, you see, people just stop by. Abruhamu’s face was deeply lined when I was a child but when he stopped by for coffee he looked exactly the same as he always had even though I now had children of my own. He shook his finger at me telling me I was a daughter of Africa but I didn’t come back enough and I didn’t know the language well enough and I didn’t eat enough.
I didn’t know the language well but I did know enough to hear the welcome in that reprimanding finger and those half accusing words. He was yelling at me, but not for what I was doing – for the fact that I hadn’t done it sooner. So I sipped my tea in the smoky kitchen and watched him shuffle to a wooden chair. When he was settled, I brought over his cup and he put in so much sugar I knew it’d never dissolve. He sighed as he took a sweet sip then settled in to tell me his stories – stories of my dad as a kid, stories of his kids and their kids, stories no one else could tell in quite the same way.
When Jeff and I got back to New York, memories of connectedness over coffee fresh in our minds, we went out and bought 2 beautiful mugs. We planned on starting our own tradition of coffee times together. We still have our coffee times but now it looks a little different. Now our 4 teenagers join us in the early morning. Over coffee, we usually discover we have forgotten some school event, or are short one vehicle to get someone to work. Now we mock each other, argue, and laugh together- but we make it happen. Because we realize it’s not about the coffee –it’s about the meeting.