The best cup of coffee I ever had.
memory's best hits.
I REMEMBER THE best cup of coffee I had in my life was in San Diego at a place called The Cup. It was during a road trip to a wedding when I was twenty-two and still living in Missouri, then. A friend from Boy Scouts was getting married and I got roped into hopping in a minivan with all his groomsmen to drive from Missouri to California with all his possessions hitched on the back of a U-Haul. We camped in tents along the way, one night in New Mexico and one night just outside of San Diego and on that morning we woke up to the foggy ocean. On a mountain, watching surfers waddle down with their boards, watching him watch them, I remember feeling proud of him. Ever since he was twelve when we first met, he always dreamt of escaping the Midwest, away to somewhere he belonged. He was born far from where he was supposed to be—it happens—so he was just coming home.
IT WAS AROUND 7 am when we walked into this place called The Cup to the smell of fresh coffee beans and muffins. I bought a regular coffee, black, self-serve. When I tell you I sat outside on this foggy morning and took a sip of this thing and saw God, it is because I cannot find the right words. I drank plenty of good coffee since and I really wouldn’t know if they were any better than what I had in San Diego at The Cup. They could have been, there’s really no way of telling. All I have is the memory of how good it was in that moment, fresh off feeling proud of my friend for moving to California and being twenty-two and anxious of what I was to do with my life. I had no money, so as a wedding gift I recorded the whole trip and made a video for him and his wife. It’s still unlisted on YouTube. I won’t show it here—there’s still something special about the intimate 90 views it has—but it’s good work. I wish I could tell that twenty-two-year-old me that this would lead to something, that this love for creating wasn’t unimportant. I couldn’t make something like that video again. There’s a certain magic about that age of dumbness where chaos hasn’t bumped you into place yet and you make whatever the hell you want without any voice telling you it’s too much, too corny, or too on-the-nose. It’s only when you know better that you start to stop thinking your honesty is enough.
YOUNGER EYES SEE the world with more saturation—literally. The clear human lens yellows as a result of absorbing UV light to protect the back of the eye and this dulls the vibrancy of color perception overtime. When I was eight, a cheese pizza after a day at the hotel pool was a gourmet meal. Yet now, a cheese pizza after a long day at an amusement park is a sign of defeat, the last resort after trying all the restaurants you needed reservations for. Somewhere inside me, that cheese pizza is still a Michelin-grade meal. There is still a child in me that believes that, but so much needs to be shed to see the world that way again, it’s nearly impossible. I’ll sit at a cafe in Melbourne or New York now, sip a cappuccino and it blows me away, but it’s not the same. I’m not as lost as I was back then, in San Diego, and this cappuccino isn’t as there for me as that random cup of coffee was back then. What’s important is at the time, that was the best cup of coffee I had in my life and by memory, it still is—partially by fact but mostly by choice. No amount of reality can change what memory ingrained in permanent ink.
I love that you added a playlist to this and gave it audio ambiance. I have a running 'Baron's Playlist' featuring several of the musical gems you use on Insta. I've tucked my own into it as well.
I think it's all about perspective... the coffee, and the pizza. When you're a kid, your sphere of known reality is marble-sized. Swimming pools, and cheese pizza, and bicycles are almost everything in relation to the measure of that marble. The more you grow, the more you see through your heart, and head, and eyes, and the swimming pool becomes the ocean, the cheese pizza becomes a multi-course meal served on fine china with linens and a string quartet. The bicycle becomes a machine with four tires and good speakers that flies along the road. The marble has grown as big as the whole wide world, and so has the view.
Years on from that, perhaps simplicity returns in another way as our perspectives have expanded enough that we see ourselves minuscule in the vastness of the universe. The ocean reduces to a little pond down the lane where we stroll to feed the ducks. A warm cup of tea is plenty satisfactory, and the wheels have transformed into a park bench or a café table where we sit with a friend to remember the moments that stand out most.
Moments like that cup of coffee in San Diego, on a foggy morning, with love and pride stirred into it like the sugar and cream of life. The best cup of coffee ever.
Perhaps it isn't the color that changes so much in our view as the relativity of the size of our world and our experience in it that evolves with time. Perhaps it's both, or neither, but it's an interesting point to explore. I'll be thinking about it a while.
Thank you.
The comment about your eyes becoming more yellow is fascinating. I never knew that and now I’d quite like for that to stop happening.