Why I Started Writing This Down

A former history teacher. A morning cup. Fifty years of paying attention.

I taught American history for twenty years.

In that time I gave approximately four thousand cups of bad coffee the benefit of the doubt. Vending machine coffee. Breakroom coffee. The kind sitting on the burner since six in the morning that someone covered with a lid at ten as an act of misplaced optimism.

I retired early. I had time in the morning. I started paying attention to what was actually in the cup.

Paying attention to coffee is not unlike paying attention to history. Both reward the person who asks where something came from and why it ended up here. Both have something to say to the person who reads the label before buying.

These notes are what I write when something is worth writing down. About coffee, mostly. About American landscape. About the Smithsonian paintings that end up on specialty coffee bags because a founder’s father kept his neckties pressed and hung in order, and someone understood that a brand asking to be part of your morning should be built from something real.

America turns 250 this July. There is a coffee on my shelf built for this year and this year only. It is named George, after George Washington, roasted in the United States, specialty grade, lab tested. Molasses, toasted almond, hints of mocha, heirloom citrus. His term ends December 31, 2026. After that he goes into the record and stays there.

I will write about him. I will write about the parks and the paintings and what Thomas Moran saw when he traveled into Yellowstone Territory in 1871 before most Americans knew what was there. I will write about what it means that a Polaroid photograph taken on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July, 1976 ended up on a coffee bag fifty years later.

I will write when I have something worth saying.

That turns out to be most Wednesdays.

— G