CoffeeBeanShop

Evolutionary Brew:
The Significance of Ephemera

by Nicole Gray (bio at end of story)

have what some might call a mundane fixation. I love ceramic mugs, teapots, bowls, pitchers, creamers, and salt- and peppershakers. For me, my eclectic collection, varied in style, quality and value, has come to symbolize stability and spiritual well-being. Ceramic dishes are not only beautiful to behold, but their perfunctory utility is an assumed feature. And though there is such a vast assortment of ceramic art and pottery, ceramic mugs can still be divided into two basic categories---china and earthenware. Using this oversimplified schematic, china is most useful for sipping tea in polite company and earthenware mugs are made for the dark comfort of coffee.

I own a set of four earthenware mugs. Objectively, these mugs could be described as generic, maybe even prosaic. These mugs are the color of wet New Mexican mud, offset by an off-beige psychedelic band on the rim. I inherited these mugs after my mother died. She had owned these mugs since she had moved into her last home, a small bungalow-style attached home in northern Virginia. Every morning, my mother made drip coffee using a cone filter and a glass percolator. It took the coffee at least 10 to 15 minutes to drip through the filter, but my mother was very patient. When I came home for college breaks, I insisted on drinking from these mugs. My mother and I sat together drinking coffee watching early morning talk shows and ruminating on all of our mutual concerns. At this time of the morning, the sun was bright but not blinding, and at this time, my mother and I were most optimistic. We both had nasty demons that we battled. I was facing a most unhappy adolescence and my mother was fighting early onset breast cancer.

On the mornings when I was home, we used the brown earthenware mugs. I had an unusual attraction to these mugs and secretly coveted them. Since my senior year of high school, coffee and its consumption had become a type of fetish for me. I drowned all my sorrows in coffee and became invigorated by its very smell or simply the suggestion of going to a café in town near my small liberal arts college. When I went away to college my mother had bought me an electronic coffee maker. Armed with filters and several cans of Maxwell House, I felt prepared for harsh Vermont mornings. Within a month, I had purchased a French press. I was too sophisticated for General Electric-generated coffee. Two weeks after this upgrade, I owned a grinder and I ground my own fresh beans. A whole corner of my room was devoted to the grinding, brewing, and consuming of coffee.

Towards the end of the year, production demands overshadowed issues of quality. I was consuming so much coffee that the French press was simply inadequate. In addition to my coffee needs, my friends needed coffee too, and sometimes people I didn’t know stopped by for a little java fix. So, I made a trip to a local store and purchased an industrial size coffee maker. The Percolator-Plus made up to 40 cups at a time. It was metallic and had a spout that made serving coffee easy, yet it was light enough that I could tip it to the side when the coffee level got low. Eventually, I put a can on the table next to the coffee and people made donations to help offset the cost of supplies. Despite my tremendous dedication to coffee, I did not even own mugs. The mugs I used were borrowed from the college cafeteria. These mugs were six-ounce white cups that can best be described as earthenware cups posing as china.

Two years after graduation, my mother died from breast cancer. I was living in a distant city and flew home for the funeral. After the funeral, my sister and I sat at the table in the dining room stunned and silent. I went to the cabinet and looked at the mugs and made a pot of coffee. We sat up all night drinking coffee and started our long dark voyage of grief. I was so overwhelmed by my mother’s death that I packed her things very haphazardly. Months later we discovered that many things had been misplaced and forever lost. The four ceramic mugs sat in a small china cabinet in my apartment. The day of the funeral, I had wrapped the mugs in newspaper and placed them in my suitcase. While performing this task I was amazingly clearheaded. I looked at those mugs and imagined that I would drink from those mugs with my own daughter.

Every cherished dream that I had for a happy life was represented by a brown mug; and even now when I reach into my cabinet, I feel that energy. My mother and I had created our own heritage, taking a conventional household object and sublimating our dreams and the significance of our lives into a ritual.

Five years later, my boyfriend and I were browsing in a secondhand store in a chic Brooklyn neighborhood. At the very back of the store, assorted dishes were arranged on a bookcase. An eclectic assortment of plastic drinking cups with attached straws sat next to big 1970s-style ashtrays. Immediately to the left of the ashtray, I spied a brown teapot— a New Mexican mud brown teapot, offset by an off-beige psychedelic band. I realized that this ceramic dishware was now officially memorabilia, and my boyfriend bought the teapot for $30. I told my grandmother about this incredible find, and she replied,"Oh, yes, I remember those mugs. I bought them for your mother as a temporary set while she was moving. The set cost me $3.99." I was stunned. I had never affixed an actual cost to those mugs. They had been and always will be beyond price for me.

As it turned out, my mother would never sit in Starbucks and ruminate about her latest woes, which by now might be whether or not to get plastic surgery to preserve her preternatural beauty or whether to dump her stolid husband for a newer, younger, more virile version. She might also be contemplating all the newfound joy thrust upon her by a capricious universe. I would sit across from her ensconced in my own updated ruminations. There we would sit, mother and daughter, sipping coffee and indulging our bittersweet concerns. Surely, my mother would have mastered the lexicon of contemporary café culture. She would undergo her own coffee evolution. Certainly, walking into her kitchen, there would be nary a Maxwell House can in sight. Instead, her fresh beans would sit on the counter in fancy glass color-coded jars next to her department-store grinder. And how would she drink her full-bodied brew while she watched Oprah? In her psychedelic-rim brown mugs. Of course.

© Nicole Gray. All Rights Reserved.

Finalist - Evolutionary Brew: The Significance of Ephemera by Nicole Gray

Nicole, a freelance writer working in New York City and New Jersey, tries to avoid irony and embraces grounded optimism. Her passions include cardio-kickboxing, house music, short stories and strong coffee. As a medical writer, she indulges her deep interest in the biomedical sciences, while managing to eek out a living. Nicole also writes for science journals, web sites and fitness organizations, and has contributed to Barnes&Noble.com, Office.com and the New Jersey Tech News. She recently completed a mid-length memoir and is currently shopping it around for an appropriate venue. Her motto is, "Life is a caffeinated experience punctuated by bouts of intensive rest and profound reflection." Good for you, Nicole!

Editor's Note: "Ephemera" was chosen for the first round for the following reasons: Without a doubt, the title pulled us in immediately, as it tickled our curiousity. Then, we began to read about a character who collected everything under the sun, a collection which symbolized "stability and spiritual well-being" for the character. That was a hook, and it's also the essence of the form. By the end of the story we felt as though we had been in and out of the collections of cups, brewers, love and loss ourselves. Excellent writing, correct punctuation, no spelling errors. The end tells all.

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