A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup

I dragged my weary bones out of bed this morning only to realize the ultimate horror: No coffee in the cupboard.

In a semi-panic I rifled through my typhoon stash, where I had squirreled away a small jar of instant. No dice, though; I’m hopelessly disorganized, and my vital reserve of coffee has been misplaced–probably filed away with various and sundry automobile fluids. The only time I’ll find the instant jar of java is when I’m searching for my jug of 90-weight gear oil.

I guess we’re all entitled to one overriding addiction, and mine is coffee. Not mere caffeine, mind you: I’ve been in countries where tea is the only available brew, and, for me, it’s no substitute.

So, crazed addict that I am, I began scampering in desperate circles. I checked my coffee maker in the hopes that yesterday’s old, soggy grounds might still be in the basket. It sounds gross, I know, but at 5:30 a.m. it was the only ray of hope to cling to.

No dice, however. The grounds had been discarded into the garbage the prior day….

The garbage! Aha! So there was hope. No, I couldn’t really do that…could I?

No, not me….

Darn, the garbage had been thrown out.

Good thing, actually, since I don’t want to know if I would have stooped to such lows.

I once wound up in a similar predicament in Tokyo, where I was crestfallen in the lobby of the Diamond hotel, which, at least in the early morning, was devoid of the necessary brew. As luck would have it, a couple of Aussies with bloodshot eyes and cranky dispositions were also wandering around the lobby in distress, and we struck out into the streets in hopes of finding a vending machine to fill the void (Tokyo is chock full of vending machines). Finally, salvation was found in a can of “Mr. Brown” coffee, which was better than nothing.

There are a lot of ways to catagorize the world’s countries, but my basic benchmark is this: Some places have real coffee, some don’t. England, for example, and France…you can’t get real coffee from those barbarians (“Cafe au lait” is NOT real coffee, anymore than Brie is a substitute for real American cheese).

But Saipan, well, we’ve got coffee here. Big cans of the stuff at Price Costco. Cups of the stuff at Coffee Care and McDonald’s and Herman’s (great place, by the way), and everywhere else.

One lesson I keep learning in life the hard way is “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” We’re probably all guilty of that. I just hope I don’t have to learn it the hard way again when it comes to the essential element of life: coffee.

I have, of course, now renewed my stash of the vital bean, and tucked away a number of spare provisions.

But if you ever happen to encounter a wild-eyed guy with short hair digging through your garbage one morning–don’t shoot! It’s only me.