My earliest memories of coffee go back much further than when I decided to start drinking it myself. Coffee, more accurately coffee time,was a part of daily life since as far back as I can remember. Coffee was the thing I had to wait for my parents to finish before they could attend to my pressing needs--a ride to the local pool, or help navigating MS DOS to play computer games. There were always endless cups of coffee to be finished. Now that I'm older I appreciate that my parents have made a habit of sitting down together to pause the frenzy of daily life, to enjoy the simple pleasures of conversation and coffee (and usually cookies).
If you haven't heard yet, we are currently hosting a little contest at the Blue Moose in an effort to collect some stories about early memories of coffee. We're trying to capture the experience of coffee, reaching back to the time before there was a Starbucks on every corner. The coffee itself may not have been anything special, but that's not really what this is about.
To get you thinking about your own stories, here's our first entry, sent to us from Drew:
It was the summer of 1990. I was 18, my brother was 20, and he had a 1979 Honda Civic. We drove to the Rockies to climb mountains and quickly ran out of money. We had to get back to Vancouver as quickly as possible to conserve funds. On the way home we came through the Okanagan on a beautiful August evening. We had scrambled to the true summit of Mt Norquay above Banff that morning and were dead tired. We stopped at an A&W in Kelowna for dinner and with our burgers had giant cups of coffee – a first for me as I had never drunk it beyond a sip before. Black, crappy coffee served up almost boiling hot from a glass carafe. Heading out of Kelowna as the sun set we were listening to old 1930’s radio serial dramas on the car AM radio until the station faded somewhere on the Connector. We came into Hope around midnight and everything was closed. The caffeine buzz faded out west of Hope along the 1 and we ended up sleeping for two hours, our seats tilted back as far as they would go, with the car pulled off on a dead-end side road near Herrling Island. Next morning the next coffees went down easier in Chilliwack and we made it home by 8 AM, ahead of the morning rush hour and me with $2.69 in mixed change left in my wallet.
Nothing so memorable as that first cup of scalding, crappy coffee. Thanks Drew! If you want to enter our contest (you could win a $50 Blue Moose giftcard!) send your entries of 250-ish words to Wes at info@bluemoosecafe.com.
