Coffee: Defying Gravity

Coffee: Defying Gravity

I never thought I’d be one of those people who has the luxury to spend their days – or any day at all -- in a café, laptop open, with an annoying look of seriousness on the face, looking like she was a hairbreadth away from discovering the cure for the malady of the moment. I was a practicing lawyer, working diligently and rather desperately to pay off my $100,000 student debt – which seems almost a paltry amount now when I think how much my own kids’ college education will cost in ten years’ time, never mind graduate school. It seemed horribly unfair to me then that I was slaving away writing sober, controlled, uninspiring briefs, arguments to be presented to disinterested judges about subjects in which I had minimal interest, while others pursued their dreamy love affair with the written word while imbibing the only readily-available, legal, non-depressant, mood-enhancing drug out there: caffeine. To be precise, ingesting it in the form I like best, the elixir made from steaming hot water and shining, dark-roasted coffee beans. Coffee. 

I have drank coffee every day of my life since age 12 or 13, except when I’d had the stomach flu or fasted for Yom Kippur (note: caffeine withdrawal results in positively the worst headache this side of a machete in your head; be sure to begin mixing with increasing amounts of decaf a couple weeks in advance of going cold turkey). During college days at Berkeley I spent nearly all my lunch breaks in one local café or another, be it the famous Café Mediterranean, Café Roma in Elmwood or my favorite, Café Bottega on Telegraph Avenue, where one dollar bought me a giant croissant, a cappuccino that I can still taste to this day, and as much Baroque music as I could stand. The former two cafes live on, as much historical landmarks as cafes, but the latter is sadly defunct. More recently, as a lawyer, whenever I had the dreaded brief due the following morning and I knew there was no hope of coming home before midnight and more likely not before 3 a.m., I always made sure to get a fresh, fully caffeinated large or venti at 5 p.m. from the Starbucks at the foot of my office building. I wasn’t winning the war against procrastination then, which served as both blessing and curse: procrastination provided a sense of excitement (can I get it done? will inspiration strike when I need it?), along with the hellish fear that I would fail to deliver -- and thereby end up living under the freeway. But coupled with the right dose of my motivator/savior, caffeine, a la giant cardboard cup of java, usually I did a fine job with getting the briefs done, and well. (I’ve since learned that beginning way ahead of deadline results in better work product. Plus, editing is fun! Not so getting out that first draft, which is a tad too much like giving birth without an epidural.)

I thought about researching coffee’s history but quickly realized that’s been done. There is nothing new under the sun, certainly not coffee. The first coffeehouse opened in Oxford, England in 1637 by a Turkish Jewish proprietor, Jacob. Meanwhile on the Continent, the Catholic clergy had condemned coffee as the “drink of the devil” until Pope Clement VIII tasted it, thought it delicious, and gave it the papal seal of approval in the early 1600’s. Venice opened its first coffee shop
in 1645 and the brew’s popularity took off from there. But my favorite story concerns the mythical 7^th century B.C. Persian king, Kai Kavus, who, after drinking what must have been some very intense coffee, defied gravity and levitated. All I can say is – bring it on. I’ll have what he’s having.

But only since I’ve been away from the daily grind of law for almost a decade do I really get to appreciate that cup of coffee in the way it was meant to be: just for itself, not for what it can do for me and my productivity. I love you for you, coffee!

So this is my personal ode to coffee. And unwittingly, probably also to the mother that taught me to drink it. A love for coffee is one of few things she and I both share. (The other is Beethoven. For another day perhaps.)  

I think my mother lived off of black coffee. And perhaps green apples. I never saw her eat more than a bite, but she made coffee every day and night. Unlike me, she is impervious to its insomnia producing effects and can drink a fully caffeinated pot just before dropping off to sleep. Me, I would be up till 4 a.m. with the most amazing thoughts, colors and patterns drifting through my brain in kaleidoscope,
like the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine movie at warp speed.

It turns out that my visions bordering on hallucinations aren’t that unusual. At too high doses caffeine can indeed cause mild hallucinations. Caffeine also has psychotropic, or mood-altering – specifically, mood-elevating -- properties; it creates a partial endorphin release by ‘stimulating beta-endorphin levels in the blood,’ whatever exactly that means. Endorphins of course are the brain’s own painkiller, natural morphine as it were. What else causes endorphins to be released? I bet you can guess at least one of them -- exercise, acupuncture and sex. Haven’t tried acupuncture, but running and the other are both pretty awesome under the right conditions. I’ll be the first to add coffee to that short list.

Back to my dear mother: A half pound of Sumatra is one of the few things I know I can buy her without her saying “You shouldn’t spend your money on me, I don’t need it, but thank you anyway.” And a pound of ground Peets Coffee is one of the few things she has occasionally brought or sent down from Berkeley that is fully, gloriously appreciated. This condition appears to run in the family. My brother, too,
adores coffee. He is even more of a purist junkie than I am, completely disassociating himself from Starbucks, which he considers “too LA” (he lives in Oakland) and previously sporting a bumper sticker on his car stating ‘Friends don’t let friends drink Starbucks.’ (He’s a lawyer too. Go figure.)

Unlike him, I became enamored of Starbucks when I first discovered it in Chicago, ironically enough, while on business in the early 1990's. I thought the logo and name were pure genius, and holy moley, that was unexpectedly incredible coffee! So much so that I read the autobiography of Howard Schultz, a founder and former and current CEO of Starbucks, “Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time” (2007). The guy is an inspiring leader. And there I also learned of the intertwined connection between Starbucks and Peets Coffee, the dark stuff I grew up with and loved in Berkeley. To make a long story short, Alfred Peet, who opened Peets Coffee in 1966 in North Berkeley, taught the original Starbucks’ founders how to roast coffee beans in the manner he learned growing up in the Netherlands. Peets was the inspiration for Starbucks. And when Schultz acquired Starbucks from management in 1987 because management decided to focus instead on Peets, which by then it also owned, Schultz agreed to a five-year non-compete agreement for the San Francisco Bay Area -- precluding him from opening any Starbucks stores there until 1992. Of course, the very fact that a non-compete agreement was necessary attests to the fact of competition, however good-natured -- or not. Today, there is still the sense that Peets is Berkeley and Starbucks is LA – as evidenced by my brother.  

Although this isn’t about any coffee chain in particular, I’d feel I was slighting Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf if I didn’t at least mention it. Herbert B. Hyman opened CB&TL in LA in 1963. Today it is privately-owned and run by the global Sassoon
family. All its products are kosher. While I appreciate this background and
information and even write at CBTL quite often as it’s the closest café to my kids’ school, the bitter truth is … CBTL just doesn’t do it for me. I could be anywhere. The coffee is perfectly good and I drink it. It just has no claim to my heart.

When my brother and his artist wife visited me recently, he sweetly told me that I needed to put more coffee into the drip coffee maker for their fully leaded version. It was a Starbucks-roast from Costco that I used, not the Peets to which he is completely loyal. (He usually brings his own but somehow didn’t this time.) So I followed his instructions, dumping considerably more of the ground stuff into the gold filter than I usually do. And after I shared some of the resulting really dark brown liquid with him and my sister-in-law, I was bouncing off the wall for hours
afterward, as happy as can possibly be this side of paradise. Yes, even before googling "caffeine and endorphins” it was clear that the caffeine in coffee did
something wonderful to the neurons in my brain, causing them to fire just like the endorphins I get from running six, seven, on rare occasion eight miles under the open sky …

Which brings me to putting my two favorite addictions together – coffee right after an exhilarating run where I swear I was airborne. Yes, I drink the coffee after running as well as before; caffeine improves sports performance but that’s not where my main interest lies -- and everything appears perfectly right with the world. Every blade of grass fits exactly where it’s supposed to. The ocean’s waves breaking on the sand sound perfectly in tune with the clouds hovering overhead, if just for an hour or two. It’s as if I can see through the opaque veil that exists in daily life to the amazing, mind-blowing connections behind it, seeing the millions of neurons firing in my brain and across the universe simultaneously, inward and outward both. I think I glimpse the interwoven yarns of the giant tapestry then, and even though I can’t quite read the message embroidered within in – I’m still much too close to the individual fibers to see that; maybe next time I can levitate higher for greater perspective? -- I know there is one. That just might be defying gravity.

All I need is the air that I breathe, the run, and the Sumatra.

So thanks, Mom, I needed that.

Footnote: Want to know where I wrote the majority of this -- open laptop, annoying serious look and all? I won’t spill the beans and play favorites, but … It was Starbucks. Or … It was Peets.