You Know. You Dump.

 

It’s only been a year.  Well, eighteen months.  Certainly, a coffee maker should last longer than that. I don’t have a great fondness for the device but rather the output.  You know.  You dump the old grounds.  You fill it up anew.  You fill the vessel full of water, and dump it in the other receptacle, place the put beneath the coffee and press two buttons, and then, a third.  Should start hissing.  Didn’t stay around to check.  I went off back to my office and returned with minutes to spare to on the way out the door to take the older one to work and the machine hasn’t done anything. 

Cursing, I press the two button one button combo again.  Then other combinations.  My daughter groans that it is time to go and there will not be any coffee on this ride.  Later it takes me about eight minutes of robotic repetition of techniques which repeatedly fail for me to conclude that the thing is broken and beyond my capacity to repair.  There’s a French Press around here somewhere.

 

Later that night my wonderful cousin and her family arrived at the New Paltz bus station having traveled about nine hours down from Lake George.  In town from Arusha, Tanzania the kids, teenagers both, are going to start school in the States.  Alone.  This gives my daughters a point of comparison to their own sense of compromise.  I’ve never pondered gluten free pizza.  We searched and yeah, Roccos pizza has gluten free.  Go Rocco.  We pick up the pies and the garlic knots and the meatballs and load them into the car.  It’s nine thirty at night and the liquor store is closed.  So is Tops.  And they have just texted that their bus is in, down the street. 

They look so great.  The children I remember now nearly adults.  We reacquaint ourselves with how to fold the seats up so we can accommodate everyone and soon, gratefully they’ve picked up the thread of conversation we’d last explored in a pool in Zanzibar.  Unlike so many other kids they meet here my kids are anxious to talk about music and games and what it means to straddle two very different cultures and have parents from different civilizations.

 

 

 

 

Friday, 08/06/21