Tim was helping me clear the jetsam of our lives off the kitchen table where it tends to collect. One of the items was an old-fashioned coffee mill I picked up at a second-hand shop for ten bucks. I used to collect old-timey coffee making stuff until it started taking over a lot of the free space in the kitchen and dining room and wherever else I could find a spot. I finally got rid of almost all of it, except for the coffee mill. I kept it mostly because it was decorating the top of the china hutch.
Then the coffee mill I had been using wore out. It wasn’t made to last. First of all, it was almost entirely made out of plastic except for the burr, the shaft and the crank, so it was more or less inevitable that it would break long before I was ready to get a new one. And I would never be ready to get a new one, because a coffee mill that was built to last would run me a couple hundred dollars, which is why I bought the cheap plastic one in the first place.
When I accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to fix what was broken on the plastic one, though, I started thinking seriously about investing in an expensive one, because there was no way we were going to go without coffee and I figured we might as well splurge on a really good coffee mill that would stick around until we both keeled over from caffeine-induced coronaries, or the revolution began and we had to grab our go bags and head for the hills, whichever came first.
But on that particular day that the cheap plastic coffee mill broke, I had to make coffee, and I had no way to grind the beans. Well, I had an old blade grinder, and I considered breaking it out of storage for this one-time use, but then my eye fell on the decorative coffee mill.
When I say “decorative,” I mean it looked pretty to me. I’m not sure that anybody else would think of it as particularly decorative. It had a body made of an unidentified blonde wood, finished in a still-shiny lacquer and a thumbnail-sized decal bearing the trade mark of a Dutch coffee nobody has heard of in decades. It had a shiny chrome crank with a wooden knob on the end, and a chrome dome that opened with a twist. I believe I may have thrown a tiny handful of beans into it after I brought it home, just to see if it would work, but I never used it to make an actual pot of coffee. Until this morning.
I mean, what did I have to lose, really? Not much. I measured out the beans, spooned them in through the top, cleaned out the little drawer that catches the grounds, and cranked away at it until I could hear the last of the beans had gone through the burr. Slid the drawer open again and TA-DAH! And it made a great pot of coffee. Been using it every morning since.
Tim doesn’t drink coffee and he might not have recognized a coffee mill even if he did. And this isn’t the first time he’s pointed at an anachronistic appliance in our house and asked me, “What’s that?” Back when he was just a toddler, I found a rotary phone at a second-hand store, brought it home and plugged it into the jack in the living room. (This was back when you could still do that.) Then I dialed the ringback number (it grieves me to realize I don’t remember that number anymore) and, when it run, Tim laughed and said it was “Neat!” Then he asked, “What is it?” Until then, a telephone to Tim was the push-buttoned Princess that hung on the wall in the kitchen that bleeped with an electronic sound instead of going rrringgg like a bell. I didn’t expect there would ever be another occasion I could stump him with a gadget that was easy for me to recognize but looked like a museum exhibit to him.
This Is Drivel 