Correspondence: Je suis avec vous

By Moristotle

Moristotle, that verse you wrote about Trump retreating “to private room to grab your pussy,” has anyone commented that the verse presumes the generalized reader, which includes men, to have a pussy?

A what champion?

Front-page news in Chapel Hill yesterday was that two local coffee houses (Open Eye Café in adjacent Carrboro and Caffe Driade in Chapel Hill) boast a barista champion, "southeast titlist Michael Harwood," who "is headed for the nationals in Houston."
    I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of a barista and, accordingly, never suspected that there were barista competitions. But, hey!, this is America, the land of "reality TV."
    But I quickly caught on that a barista is the person who prepares your individual cup of coffee at fine restaurants and coffee houses. And Michael Harwood sounds like a coffee artist:

...Harwood began practicing for the competition and preparing his signature coffee....
    To develop his signature drink, Harwood bought a whole bunch of ingredients from Weaver Street Market and began experimenting. Eventually he came up with a drink that included the juice from Moro blood oranges, Sourwood honey with a caramel note from Lee's Bees in Mebane [Mebane!], a bit of rosemary and milk from Maple View Farm. [p. 6, Chapel Hill Herald]

    The article quotes Mr. Harwood:

I almost got perfect scores on that drink, and it definitely put me over the top to win.

    But besides prepare four cups of a near-perfect signature drink, listen to what else contestants must do:

...make four cups of espresso and four cups of cappuccino within 15 minutes, while explaining to the judges about the farmer who grew the beans, why he selected the coffee, and some of the techniques he was using.

I hope to be able to tell you soon how I think it tastes. Sounds wonderful. I'll have to visit either of both of the cafés, which are owned by Scott Conary and Elizabeth Meunier, who also own the Carrboro Coffee Company. The article reports that Mr. Conary

is considered a world-class expert on specialty coffees and he serves as a judge at the regional, national, and world levels. He'll be certifying the judges at the barista world championship in Bogota, Columbia, this year.

The next day. I just got off the phone with Michael Harwood, who says that he and his barista colleagues are enjoying his celebrity. He's going to let me know when I can come by the Open Eye for a cup of his signature drink. It's not always available, as their supply is small right now of the Honduran coffee the drink calls for.
    I was amused to hear the person who answered the phone at the Open Eye say to Michael, "Celebrity, you have another call." Scott Conary tells me by email, "He is indeed, and deservedly so, a celebrity! Who doesn't like watching and interacting with a master craftsman who is also an ambassador for his industry?"

Rounding third

I've felt this morning as though I were again a potent young male brimming with juice and the motive energy to deliver it in continual spurts of seminal fecundity. (Either feeling that way or like a middle-aged female novelist making up phrases for her next commercial romance?)...At any rate, my almost manic sense of having so many ideas desperately wanting to be expressed inspires the lust for life I sometimes feel in whose sway I simply do not want to die, must not die yet, not yet.

Alas, the young-male metaphor is, in fact, just a metaphor for this gray-headed sixty-five-year-old. Yet the feeling of that restless sexual motive is real and does, as I say, seem apt for the élan vital (or something) that was sweeping through me...Was sweeping through me? Yes, now it seems already to have died down and left me in its wake rational and contemplative. But hopefully not spent. So many ways to go, in which to head?

Home

On a particular day in early May our move from the house of twenty-five years to the temporary apartment (on the way a few weeks later to the new house abuilding) arrived at that point where we had to start sleeping in the apartment, which I may have thought could never for a moment achieve the status of "home." On that day, and for a couple of days thereafter, both of us (my wife and I, not to mention perhaps our dog) were confused and ambivalent about what to call "home." The day after our first night in the apartment, for example, one of us said, as we returned to the old house for some more things to remove before the closing, "Let's go back home...."

But for weeks now we've referred to the apartment as home. I call my wife from the sidewalk waiting for the bus to tell her I'm leaving work, I'll be home soon. Or last night, at the president's barbecue, we looked at each other and one of us said, "Ready to go home?" (Ready to go home and watch another episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?....) I noticed, even on our vacation in California, and on Bainbridge Island, that we spoke of "going home," back to my sister's house from the harbor after getting off the boat from Santa Cruz Island, back to our daughter's condo from watching "Iron Man" at a movie theater, back from the Suquamish Museum or from the Naval Undersea Museum to my high school Latin teacher's condo we used on Bainbridge Island for our last three nights on the West Coast.

What makes a place home? Possibly it's having the sheets you slide between to sleep at night. Or the place where you park your toothbrush and dentifrice. Where the coffee beans are in the morning. Something utterly basic and essentially everyday. Even the visiting team's third-base coach unselfconsciously waves his (or her) runner..."home." Home is where you score?

Hitting the books early

I woke up very early this morning. Last night, inadvertently, I made our after-dinner coffee with regular beans rather than the usual decaffeinated. While I had no difficulty going to sleep around 11:15, I did at some time in the night think about how Mormons don't as a rule drink coffee or tea, while Muslims of the desert put cardamon in theirs to make it more palatably bitter and...other manifestations of the Tower of Babel that seems to define life on earth. At around 3:30 I got up with the curious idea of looking at random in a book of "sacred literature" and seeing what I hit. I selected Stephen Mitchell's Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry:

            Eternity
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
                        – William Blake

And, on the facing page, also from William Blake, the very lines I shared with Maliha only a couple of weeks ago, when we were discussing innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

I turned to go back to bed, but since that selection from Blake reminded me of Maliha, I decided to "get a hit" from the Qur'an. As I walked back to the bookshelf I imagined opening the book near one end. To ensure that I didn't consciously choose either the front or the back, I rotated the book with my eyes closed before opening it. It was the back, where my thumb covered the opening verse of Surah 58:

            She Who Disputes
...And God hears both your sides in an argument,
for God is all-hearing, all-seeing.
                        – Thomas Cleary translation

"Bitter like death and hot like love"

Part of enjoying reading Muhammad Asad (not the Prophet Muhammad's) The Road to Mecca, the story of his encounter with Islam, is picking up many tidbits of "local color," such as this one:

...in Arabia coffee is freshly roasted for every pot. As soon as the beans are lightly tanned, he [his friend Zayd, his traveling companion in the 1920s] places them in a brass mortar and pounds them. Thereupon he pours some of the boiling water from the larger pot into the smaller, empties the ground coffee into it and places the pot near the fire to let it slowly simmer. When the brew is almost ready, he adds a few cardamon seeds to make it more bitter, for, as the saying goes in Arabia, coffee, in order to be good, must be "bitter like death and hot like love."

Mr. Asad is the author of a work I have mentioned: The Message of the Qur'an, a twelve-pound tome of almost 1,200 8.125" x 11.25" pages, which I am blessed by the good graces of a dear friend to have as a reference.