A Ritual Spanning Generations

It's a relaxed summer evening. I'm enjoying a swim with my daughter during a visit to the grandparents. Tonight there is a creamsicle colored dusk that seems to stretch implausibly late in a manner analogous my my daughter's implausibly long legs extending above the water's surface as she performs underwater handstands.

I remember when the whole of her body fit on a single pillow. She appropriately rolls her eyes when I give in to nostalgia and remind her of this fact, or worse, reads the look on my face and voices my thought before I've spoken it.

For an adolescent, to know and love someone is to exhibit intimacy with the way that they irritate you. I take what she offers.

She emerges from the water and, apropos of nothing, asks if I would consider allowing her to begin drinking decaffeinated coffee.

When she and her brother were younger, we would sometimes kill an hour going through the exercise of persuasive arguments, coming up with a controversy and asking each sibling to argue one side of it, regardless of whether they espoused that point of view.

This debate team exercise equipped her to make the case for decaf with conviction and eloquence. I offer that if she can show me some data to support her assertion, I'll seriously consider it.

Coffee is our family ritual.

Sometime during my high school years, my parents reached a level of financial security that enabled dad to purchase a gleaming chrome espresso machine.

Like Cuban dominoes when my grandparents came over to visit, or the cans of Old Milwaukee that dad kept cool in a fridge in the garage "for guests," espresso was part of an adult world that I was excluded from.

Which is why it felt monumental at age 14 or 15 when he pulled my first shot of espresso, sweetening it to the point of saturation as Cubans do, and invited me to sit and drink with him.

It was my invitation to move from the kids' table to the adults' table, and the transition felt even more seismic than the physiologic changes wrought by caffeine and sugar. I never looked back.

Throughout high school, dad and I shared weekend espressos together.

When I got my license and inherited the big red station wagon with the "I'm the mommy, that's why!" bumper sticker, I drove it downtown to meet friends to socialize or study at the independent coffee houses that overran my hometown at the time with exotic names like Cafe Siena, The Green Dragon, and Espresso Roma.

[This weekend I took my kids downtown to a local ice cream shop whose exposed brick wall surprised me: it was the former Espresso Roma of my vanished youth, where a friend's older sister (stunningly attractive and troubled and entirely out of my league) once served me coffee with a smile that melted me.]

When I returned home to visit mom and dad during medical school, sometime during the weekend we'd set aside an afternoon. My father, uncle and I would stop at my grandparent's apartment (they had moved to be closer to their sons as they aged) and the four men, comprising three generations, would take my grandfather out for coffee.

We'd stake our claim to a sidewalk cafe table, greeting passersby and savoring the sunshine.

A decade later, when I proposed to my wife, my parents gifted us a beautiful and noisy chromed espresso machine. My wife rightly pointed out that, since she does not drink coffee, this was more a gift for me than for us. I tried to defend it as a generational rite of passage. Mine was the weaker argument.

There are photos of each child, propped upright in a bumbo on the kitchen counter, smiling next to me as I polished my morning espresso. I would encourage them to smell the grounds. Make them a steamed milk stained with a single tiny espresso spoon's worth of coffee.

During elementary school they competed for la gota, the final drop of coffee where the excess sugar precipitated into a sticky sweet sludge of pure delight.

My oldest is now approaching the age when I gained entry to the literal and figurative adults' table.

When the day arrives, I plan to prepare her that first espresso with the same love, sweetness and solemnity that marked the start of my adulthood.