BLACK COFFEE

I love black coffee.  Not straight black coffee. Black with sugar. A good bit of sugar.  Enough sugar to power through the acrid sharpness of that first sip with a cloying sweetness.  My mother used to make iced coffee in the summertime when I was a child and I’d greedily inhale them bracing myself against that first slap of bitterness then savoring the sweet syrup to follow.  Sometimes the sugar wouldn’t dissolve completely and there would be a gritty paste at the bottom of the glass I’d dig out with a spoon.  But that all came to an end before I started Kindergarten.

 We lived in a small house on Spring Valley Lane and I wasn’t in school yet.  It was a brand-new housing development along Old Evan’s road full of young families.  All of the houses were single story with two car garages, and all of the garages had washers and dryers.  All the houses had front lawns with trees that would quickly grow into big shade trees buckling the sidewalk in their haste.  The 6 houses in the middle of the block-3 on each side of the street-were full of children under 5.  As it was the early 70’s, and as it was a sleepy town and an even sleepier block in that sleepy town the lawns were full of children at all times.  Not one of my friends ever went to preschool. We were a preschool.  In the 70’s children were still being booted out of the house right after breakfast and not given a second thought unless they failed to show up for food.  Occasionally a mom would be outside pulling weeds or planting things or doing laundry in the garage whose door was wide open so we could access an endless supply of bikes and balls and jump ropes and wagons.   Our school bell was the sound of the first garage door going up.  Minutes later all the garage doors were up and we all streamed into the street and onto the lawns.

On Spring Valley Lane you didn’t have one mom you had many moms and if any mom told you off you listened.  Then your own mom would come out and yell at you again for what you did but mostly for getting yelled at by the other mom.  You learned early that your own mother would never be your advocate against any injustice if another mother tagged you as the guilty party.  The moms didn’t hang out much.  They were all pretty busy doing their own mom things but in the 5 or so minutes a day they did chat they managed to convey a lot of information about who was up to what, who would go far in life and who would likely end up in jail.  At the same time, they managed to resolve each other’s laundry issues, recommend recipes, set up sleep overs and, discuss how dangerous certain foods and beverages were for children.

It was dinner time and the moms had come out to collect their kids.  My mom came out with her iced coffee and I rushed to grab it from her hands.  In small town California in the early 1970’s I’m fairly certain the only people drinking iced coffee were me and my Vietnamese mom.  It obviously wasn’t a Coke because you drank Coke straight from the glass bottle it came in so the question rang out “What’s she drinking?” It was Helen the neighbor next door whose front lawn was the slightly thicker and greener half of our front lawn. 

“Is ice coffee” my mom replied.

“GASP!  Oh, she shouldn’t have that!  It’s got caffeine!  It will make her short!”

Considering my mom is only 4’11 and my dad only 5’7 the odds weren’t good for me being tall. In fact, the odds were nonexistent.  Helen was a VERY tall woman, and her husband was Paul Bunyan. They were the largest people on the block by a good foot and a half.  Their son, a year younger than my younger brother, was nearly as tall as me.  She was pregnant with their second and not inclined to stop “until I get a baby girl” so there would be no shortage of tall children on our street thanks to them.  But those words put the fear of god into my mom in that moment and she yanked that glass out of my hands and stared at me with a look of sheer terror. 

I whirled around to look at Helen.  My mom’s English wasn’t great.  I did most of the talking and all of the translating for her but didn’t know where to begin with this one.  I was nearly 5 and could read and write but I had no idea what this caffeine was.  More importantly, what did she mean it was going to make me short?! 

“I won’t grow anymore?!’ I demanded of Helen

“Oh, you’ll grow, honey.  You just won’t be very tall.”

“But what does that mean?”

“You just won’t be tall like me.”

I wasn’t sure how to take that. I mean, she was duck-your-head-walking-through-doors tall.  She was tall in a way where people often stared at her with mouths gaping.  And while I wasn’t convinced that being her size was all that great, apparently it was better than being short.  I was already pretty pissed off about the fact that I was never going to have my dad’s green eyes or my grandma’s blue eyes.  All the other girls on my street had green or blue eyes and I wanted them too.  I wanted their blonde hair as well, but I learned on TV that I could get that from a box in the drug store so once I had enough money that would not be a problem.  But this short thing and the role of my beloved coffee in the stunting of children was going to need some sorting out.

I looked at my mom and the glass of iced coffee she was holding very far from me.  I must have looked pretty sad because all she said was “Sorry.”  I don’t know if she was sorry because she’d doomed me to a life in miniature or because I couldn’t have my coffee.  Regardless, even if this caffeine thing was a hoax it had been decreed by a mom that caffeine was detrimental to a child’s height and coffee was its carrier so goodbye iced coffee.  The moms never broke rank and my mom being the youngest and wanting the most to fit in would definitely not go against the other moms.  My black coffee days were over.  All my coffee days were over.  No more Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk.  No more 7-11 coffee with at least 6 packets of powdered creamer.  No more coffee at Denny’s with the milk from the little metal pitcher.  In fact, it would be another 11 years before I’d have coffee at all.  I’d don my black beret and drive across the county to check out a bookstore called Upstart Crow and Company that promised a bit of bohemia in the suburbs.  Smack in the middle of the store was a coffee bar selling European coffee drinks I’d only read about.  I never bought a book, but I did buy 2 espressos that I filled with individually wrapped sugar cubes and savored with a smugness only a rebellious 5-year-old in a 16-year-old body could muster.

Helen saw that I was crushed and felt bad.  I wasn’t on Helen’s list of kids likely to be juvenile offenders or unwed teen moms.  She genuinely liked me, and I genuinely liked her too.  She helped me navigate things I was probably too young to need to navigate but come with being an immigrant.  To her this was just one more bit of knowledge we needed in our assimilation.

“Hold on a minute” she called out as my mom and I walked towards our front door.  I didn’t even look her way afraid of what other bad news she was about to drop on me.  I heard her screen door slam then quickly slam again and in a flash she was right next to me with something cold pressed against my arm. “Maybe you’d like this instead” she said smiling.  I looked up and beamed as I took the cold, glass bottle of Coke from her hands.  It was just like in the TV commercial.  Maybe I had lost my beloved coffee but there was a new icy brown liquid in its place and a smiling mom handing it to me while my smiling mom looked on.

We left Spring Valley Lane when I was 8.  I grew to be 5 feet and ¾ inches tall.  Taller than my mom and about the same height as all the women in my father’s family.  Icy cold Cokes would delivery me from many a hangover through my teens and twenties, but today my summertime go to drink is an iced black coffee with one sugar.  My mom has moved on to iced mocha with whipped cream and an additional 3 packets of sweet-n-low; a concoction that makes my eyes roll and head shake every time I take her out for a coffee. 

And sixteen years after that fateful night nutrition labels on soda bottles would become mandatory in the USA. 

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