Morning Coffee
by Anitra L. Freeman
On Tuesday morning we could not make coffee. The drains were plugged due to an influx of Republicans in South Chelsea. The entire dorm was languorous. Annabel thought she was her grandmother. Mindy thought that she was Archibald MacLeish, but Mindy always thinks that she is Archibald MacLeish. -- but never his grandmother. Mindy is not the grandmotherly type.
Only three of us were still functioning. I left Megan and Tamara running used coffee filters through the ventilators while I went out to buy brewed coffee. I had barely reached the bottom of the porch stairs when the shop on the corner -- the right corner of the porch stairs (... well actually the porch stairs has only the one corner, the left one having been lost in that tragic "aardvark" incident, involving Uncle Bob, the pump-handle, and the "aardvark"...) the little shop that sells mementoes of overseas tours, so that you can annoy your neighbors with slides from Tierra del Fuego without ever having to go there to be annoyed yourself (Have you ever had coffee from Tierra Del Fuego? Of course you haven't. That's what I'm talking about. And Uncle Bob was wrong about that too, I'll have you know.) -- that shop began offering a sale on a round-the-world trip souvenir package for the price of a used bus ticket to Albuquerque. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life to forge past and turn left for Seattle.
But, of course, Seattle is always to the left, and it always has the best coffee. (That's because Seattle's coffee does not come from here, or from Tierra Del Fuego, for that matter.)
Halfway down the block, however, I ran out of chocolate (Tierra Del Fuego also is not known for it's great chocolate. Thank GOD I haven't wasted any part of my life there) so I stopped at the lemonade stand that sells Mountain Dew in dixie cups for a nickel. It's quite as good as Seattle coffee, if you've never been there. Besides, they have aardvarks.
When I got back, Mindy and Megan had bound the comatose dorm members into a raft and sailed off for Tupelo. Uncle Bob finally took his Republican out of South Chelsea, to everyone's relief. The plumbers were handling the aardvark problem in Phi Beta Kappa, so Tamara, Annabel and I got all the Mt. Dew to ourselves. It was just enough.
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