I started drinking coffee in the fall of 1997, a week or so after my thirty-second birthday, a new father, a young teacher, at best an acquaintance with the bean and the flavor, certain up to that point that I would never, ever, forever-never drink coffee.

My parents both drank coffee. They also both smoked. Other than my grandpa’s pipe, I hated the smell of tobacco, the smoke cloud that filled our VW van on trips, that accompanied meals and vacations and trips to the store and birthdays and holidays. 

Dad was worried that the four of us might take up smoking some day. So much so that when I was five, during an episode of The Brady Bunch on television, he had me try a cigarette. He was canny, my dad, and he knew it would disgust me. At that point he also knew that the habit overwhelmed whatever resistance his life offered. It was the early seventies, an era of cigarette smoke so plentiful you can see it in photographs, either clearly pooling above split fingers or a fog covering the entire scene.

I gagged on the puff I took. I never looked back. One time, at my sister Cara’s wedding, I took a puff of a cigar, a tribute to her and a fitting signal that I accepted the fact that my entire family, save Cara, ironically, smoked. 

I have no judgment on smoking, nor consider that I am somehow better because I don’t smoke. I hate it, for sure, but I love so many people that smoke, unconditionally, and know that judgment is much more harmful to me than the smoking is to them, that I can just let it go. 

I still don’t like to be around it. 

Perhaps this is why I didn’t like coffee. Mom and dad always smoked when they drank coffee. The smells and the tastes are mingled in my head. 

I look back now, with the sharp focus of a coffee-lover, and think it would have been great to love coffee earlier, back when I could have better savored certain moments. Early mornings in Vermont at the children’s summer camp I called home, on the porch of the dining hall while the fog was still settled like a sleeping cat on the lake. Pre-dawn breakfasts on my cycling trip across the United States in 1991, a hot cup of coffee on our little MSR camp stove framing days already bursting with possibility and mystery. Pre-race morning jolts when I ran cross-country and track at Manchester College, my anxiety seated at the table already, happy to accept caffeine as a close friend. 

But I hated coffee. And those memories are pretty damn good already without it.

I became a barista several years before I accepted coffee’s calls, during the fall of 1993 while a graduate student at John Carroll University in Cleveland. I had started taking the coursework for teaching certification during my final year at Ball State while getting my masters degree in Physics. John Carroll was a perfect stop on the way to becoming a teacher and I was always happy taking interesting jobs, even if they involved pretending to love something I hated.

When I showed up for the interview to become a barista at Coffee Adagio in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Mike, the owner, asked me what I’d like to drink. Knowing that liking if not loving coffee was a prerequisite, I asked for a Cafe Mocha, thinking that a bit of chocolate would temper my dislike. I shook uncontrollably throughout the interview, to the point that signing paperwork was difficult. 

There is a lot of caffeine in a Cafe Mocha, it turns out. Especially with a double shot of espresso, as apparently I warranted, being such a hearty coffee lover.  

Coffee Adagio was unique as Mike bought fifty-pound bags of coffee and roasted them in the back of the shop during the day. The cafe was suffused with the aroma of roasting coffee at all times, that smell working on me until I grew to truly love it, and, to this day, miss. We also served a hipster-level array of single origin coffees–Kenya AA, Sumatra, Kona, Yirgacheffe, and so many more.

This, too, would have been a great time to be a coffee lover, access to freshly roasted coffee from all over the world, a top-tier commercial espresso machine and steamer, high-end Italian syrups and the skills to make lattes, cappuccinos, machinatos, espresso, and to experiment at will.

Swing and a miss. 

So, when I began going to early morning breakfasts with friends before our teaching day started I had tea. 

Even then, tea was annoying. Despite having several British friends and loving sweet butter crumpets, and drinking gallons and gallons of tea while hating coffee, I really don’t like tea.

So, when my fourth year of teaching started that fall, my son Jack Henry offering me many opportunities to wake early, my friends all drinking coffee for breakfast, my memories of working as a barista not too distant, the smell of smoke still ever-present in a diner of course, I said yes to coffee.

Now, as I finish this little essay, my third cup of coffee tucked away, the last little sip gone cold, caffeine ripping through my system, it might appear that I’ve always loved coffee, that I must have, that any aspiring fifty-seven year old poet would. 

Not so, but for the past twenty-five years, yes, indeed, I have loved coffee. Here’s hoping for twenty-five more, and, being a bit greedy, a few more after that. 

Author’s note–I don’t think Mike is actually the name of the owner of Coffee Adagio. From a cursory look on the internet it appears they are no longer in business. Apologies for not remembering you, Mike, if you happen upon this account. And for claiming I liked coffee.