First the milk, then the sugar

DAVID SILVA

When I was very little, I loved to watch my mother make coffee.

Mom made her coffee the old-fashioned way. She’d plop a cup or so

of ground coffee into a small pot of water and then put the pot on a

burner. Once the water began to boil, the steaming black crust that

had formed on top of it would suddenly break apart and slip beneath

the bubbles. This was the part that most fascinated me. Every time I

watched that dark continental plate of grounds sink beneath the

water, I’d imagine that this was what would happen to the West Coast

when the Big One finally hit.

My mother would pour the coffee through a copper strainer into a

steel coffeepot and set it aside. Then she’d pour some milk and a

couple of teaspoons of sugar into a small cup and fill it with the

jet-black brew. Mom was ritualistic about this sequence of

ingredients: first the milk, then the sugar, and only then the

coffee. If one of my aunts ever made coffee for her and poured the

coffee in the cup before the milk and sugar, or poured the coffee and

sugar in the cup before the milk, or poured the coffee and milk in

the cup before the sugar, my mother would stop her and tell her she

was doing it all wrong.

It seemed that Mom was always making coffee, was perennially in

the process of boiling or straining or pouring. I once asked her why

she drank so much of the stuff, and her answer was that it helped her

to cope.

“It’s either coffee or booze, and we’ve got enough boozers in this

family,” she said.

My mother had six children and went through at least as many pots

of coffee a day.

It happened that one day I finally asked my mother if I could have

some of her coffee. This was one of my frequent boundary-testing

requests -- I was barely 7 and fully expected to get the same

response as the times I had asked her to let me drive the car or have

a puff off one of her menthol cigarettes. So my jaw dropped when Mom

simply took a last sip of her coffee and then handed me the cup.

It was as if the concept of a 7-year-old Puerto Rican boy asking

for coffee struck her as the most natural development in the world,

the way the mother of a 7-year-old girl might expect her daughter to

one day ask for a pony. I was so surprised that I quickly grabbed the

outstretched cup and drained its contents before Mom had a chance to

change her mind. This, I would learn an instant later, was a fairly

bold move, as my mother favored Cafe Bustelo, a powerful Cuban

espresso made all the more potent by Mom’s old-fashioned way of

preparing it. The moment that dark-brown liquid hit my central

nervous system my entire body started vibrating like a tuning fork

and didn’t stop until sometime well after midnight, when I had

vibrated myself into unconsciousness.

I had no way of knowing it at the time, but I had just

kick-started a lifelong addiction to caffeine.

For the next few years, I fed the monkey with Pepsi and Coke and

the occasional sips of Cafe Bustelo begged off Mom. By the time I was

13, I was brewing my own every morning, old-style -- with the pot and

the strainer and the milk and sugar on the bottom of the cup. What

effects this had on my development is hard to say. I was always a

jumpy, hyperactive kid, and the advent of all that extra caffeine and

sugar certainly didn’t make me any less jumpy and hyperactive.

But in a wholly unforeseen way, my mother’s strong coffee made me

a calmer and more collected person than I might have otherwise been.

This was because for the first time, my mother and I shared a bond

that was hers and mine exclusively.

Mom never drank coffee with my brothers, to my knowledge. But

almost every day when I came home from school, sometime in the hours

before dinner, Mom would look in on me and say, “Mijo, would you like

some cafe?” And we would sit down together at the dining room table,

drink our coffee and eat hard Cuban crackers and talk about the day.

This wasn’t passive time, the time we spent together then. It wasn’t

like when we watched TV, silent and looking away from one another,

but active time, chatty and animated, because that’s what coffee will

do to you.

To this day, coffee remains the primary vehicle by which my mother

and I communicate. I doubt if I’ve shared a single important piece of

news with her that wasn’t shared over coffee.

I’ll come by for a visit or for some big celebration, and the

pattern is always the same. First there is the commotion of hugs,

followed by loud and boisterous banter over dinner. Then afterward,

when my brothers and sisters are watching a video or out in the

garage shooting pool, my mother will say to me, “Mijo, would you like

some cafe?” And she and I will sit apart from the others, and the

real talk will begin.

Over the years, as my tastes grew more sophisticated, I tried from

time to time to modify my mother’s coffee routine. I brought her

whole Kona beans and an electric grinder from Trader Joe’s. She

politely made exactly one pot with them and then put the grinder and

beans away on the back of a high shelf, never to be seen again. I

urged her to consider using a French press, saying it worked just as

well as her own method but with fewer loose grounds and sediment.

“What do the French know about anything?” was her response. My

mother is half French, and what she was really saying was that she

considered such devices “newfangled,” and so by definition inferior.

One day about 10 years ago, my mother had her blood pressure

checked, and her doctor advised her that she might live a lot longer

without the six pots of espresso every day. Shortly after, she traded

in the Cafe Bustelo for Yuban and a Mr. Coffee. We still have our

long chats, though they’re nowhere near as chatty and animated as

before. I try not to be sad about this development.

Every day when I make my morning coffee, a part of me feels I’m

honoring my mother by holding with tradition. Yes, I grind the beans

fresh and use a French press. But I’m scrupulous in the sequence of

ingredients: first the milk, then the sugar, and only then the

coffee, because any other way is just wrong.

* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News editor. He can be reached

at (909) 484-7019, or by e-mail at david.silva@latimes.com.