Sooner or latte

a friend of mine is going to have to give up the coffee habit. I worked it out recently and the habit is costing him almost a hundred dollars a week for three cups each day. Still, coffee is an important part of his life and I hope he can still afford at least one cup a day when he retires.  

The coffee habit is not nearly as bad a habit as that of cigarettes. Someone told me not so long ago that a packet of cigarettes costs upwards of forty dollars. It seems that both coffee drinking and cigarettes are expensive but I would much prefer people indulged in the former.  It is much healthier - and not just for the coffee drinker. It is also friendlier.

This morning I have been invited to "coffee" with a cousin. He is my "second" cousin. His father and the Senior Cat were first cousins. I grew up seeing P... on an intermittent basis. Our parents would catch up at school holiday time. P...is a couple of years younger.  He is, as he puts it, "the last man standing" in his family. His parents have gone and so has his sister.  Meeting him there in the shopping centre is important because such meetings are more than "just a cup of coffee" or tea or whatever you like to drink.

His father, an engineer and Riley car enthusiast, died many years ago. For all his engineering skills and his capacity to pull a car engine apart and put it together again he was hopeless at home maintenance. It drove his wife, F..., crazy at times. He did not drink coffee and detested tea made with tea bags. We got along well...because, according to him, I knew how to make a "proper cup of tea". P...gets his engineering skills from his father perhaps but in the field of forensics instead. P...drinks coffee as well as tea.

F..., his mother, was one of those incredibly able secretaries, the sort that allow their bosses to get on with their work and achieve much more than they otherwise might. Her boss thought so highly of her he gave one of the eulogies at her funeral. She was also a history enthusiast and avid reader. We would sometimes go to Writers' Week sessions together. I enjoyed introducing her to people I knew because she could always put people at ease. When she was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer's I felt angry for her because words were so much a part of her life.  She drank both tea and coffee and used them as a social occasion. P... has inherited her ease with people and it makes it easy to be with him even though we do not see one another often.

P...lived interstate and it was hard for him, particularly hard because his sister J... was not at all well. She kept her own cancer diagnosis to herself for as long as she could. Their father never knew. Their mother only knew once it was no longer possible to hide how ill she really was. Many cups of coffee  (and tea) were drunk while all this happened.

P... is the last of them and has now come for the funeral of the man he was named after. Coffee appeared in that relationship too. It appeared often. 

I too think of P... and this other P... every time I see the coffee drinker. They knew each other as I knew them. It was on a casual sort of "hello, how are you" type basis in the shopping centre. The senior P... was very kind to the Senior Cat when my mother died. They would sometimes "have coffee" in the shopping centre. P... once remarked our shopping centre was the equivalent of the old village green and perhaps he was right. We locals see one another there. People drink their coffee there. They chat to each other and ask "Do you mind if I sit here?" when seats are taken elsewhere. They read the newspapers put out each morning. There is an easiness about all this that matters more than most people realise. It allows us to connect with each other.

And perhaps that is why the coffee drinker I am thinking of does what he does. He can stand there and chat to someone else buying coffee while the Syrian refugees who own this smallest of small venues prepare their coffee and pass it over.  There is more to buying coffee than ordering it and paying for it.   Eventually the worker regulars will join the retired regulars and the conversations will go on - sooner or latte.