Coffee Filters Can Trigger Memories

One of the things I catch myself doing now that's just like him is blowing on coffee filters to separate them. We use the same coffeemaker, and although we should be using French presses or reuseable filters by now, we both use the soft, white, papery filters that come in plastic-wrapped packs of hundreds. He would grab a bunch with his strong fingers, and then hold it up to his lips and blow on the edges. The filters would flutter like butterflies in a summer breeze until the one at the edge would separate enough for him to grasp it with his finger and thumb.

So this morning I get up and decide to make coffee, and I reach for the filters, take out a few, and blow on them. He never told me that this is how you do it - although he's given his opinion unsolicited on many subjects in his time. I learned this way by just watching him. Maybe I watched him more than I realize. Now that I'm grown and married I'm starting to notice all the little ways I've turned out like him. Once I would have done anything to turn out as anything but like him. But now I'm finding that I don't mind as much as I thought I would.

For example, we are both early risers. We've been similar in this way since I was little. Some of my earliest memories of sleeping over at friends' houses are of me, awake at 7 a.m., lying on my back and memorizing my friends' rooms during the long morning hours before they would wake up. I was usually the first awake at slumber parties, lifting my head to find a floor full of sleeping girls still working off their exhaustion from activities the night before, namely, sneaking each other's bras into the freezer and going by groups of twos and threes into the bathroom to say "Bloody Mary" and doing makeovers. In eighth grade, my dad was stationed at Hickam Air Force Base in Oahu, and my parents decided to enroll me in Sacred Hearts Academy, an all-girls Catholic school that seemed practically on the other side of the island, in Honolulu. My mother got a job there, and I could go for free. For every school day that year, I was up at 5:45, pulling on my sailor blouse and pleated skirt, eating my Cheerios quietly in the dark kitchen while my little sister slept and my dad practiced T'ai Chi to the instructional video in the living room. My mom and I had to pull out of the driveway in our maroon Volvo station wagon by something like 6:30 to make the drive from the Air Force Base to Honolulu along the Eisenhower Interstate, where morning traffic sometimes crawled and I passed the time looking out at the sparkling blue ocean and imagining I would be spending the day at the beach instead of in my classes. My mom had an office at the edge of Sacred Heart Academy's beautiful campus, with concrete steps leading up to it and an iron railing surrounding her deck. While she unlocked the door with her keys, I would always look out towards the tall buildings downtown, gleaming in the everyday morning sun, imagining I could see dolphins playing in the blue surf just beyond. Inevitably I would have to look away and head for the courtyard, where we began the day by standing in lines of classes and saying the pledge of allegiance and then morning prayers. I always wished that just one day, I could skip school and start walking towards those gleaming buildings and that shimmering blue surf, spend the day in the sunshine among the people downtown, people who were so lucky to be done with school.

Another time, I did what ordinary school kids would never do: I spent the entire summer rising before dawn, as did my sister, so we could go to summer swim practice at the elementary school. Girls' swim season was in the fall, and I had decided to join my little sister, who was part fish, on the swim team instead of playing soccer that year. Our soccer team had been 0-1-14 the previous fall, and I didn't want to experience that heartache again.

I had never really learned to swim until I was 11 years old. My dad decided, while we were stationed in England, that it was time for us girls to learn. He took us, one at a time, beginning with me, to the local pool a few nights a week. He would disappear into the men's locker room, and I would have to navigate the women's locker room all by myself: find a spot and change, while trying not to gape at the fleshy bodies of other women or listen to their conversations. I would dance through the showers that we were required to take before entering the pool, and meet up with my dad in the pool facility. He taught me how to float on my back, and how to tread water, and finally he managed to get some resemblance to swim strokes out of my gangly 11 year old body. I wasn't a great swimmer, but I was out of danger of drowning now.

However, I still had a vague fear of the water. And then I decided one day that I would join the swim team, and conquer that fear. This is actually one of the only truly independent decisions I remember making in high school. The swim team at our school was very good, with an excellent coach who was also our youth group leader. I had spent the guys' swim season as the manager of the swim team, charting times and announcing events and riding the bus with forty-something shaved boys all over the Southern Tier to swim meets, with April as the only other girl to keep me company. April was a pretty girl in my class who had potential but got pregnant too soon. That happened to a lot of girls at my high school.

Anyway, I decided to go out for the girls' swim team, and I had made my decision by the end of my sophomore year. So I had a long summer of early morning swim practice ahead of me. Joanne and I would get up early and grab our gym bags, and our dad would drive us down to the elementary school while our mom still slept. We live about two and a half miles out of town on a hill, and I remember how beautiful some of those mornings were, with the early morning sun shining up on the hill, and a thick white blanket of summer fog hovering over the valley that we descended into. He usually brought a cup of coffee along with him for the short drive down and back, and I remember he didn't use a lidded cup, just one of his many mugs, set into the cup holder, and the coffee swirled around and sometimes splashed out a bit.

After a few hours of grueling morning swim practice, we would drag our tired bodies out of the pool and shower and change, one of us inevitably waiting for the other to finish dressing so we could leave together. We would walk out the front doors of the elementary school into the full sunshine and busyness of the late morning, when the rest of the world was up and enjoying the summer day. It wasn't a far walk down North Academy to our grandmother's house on Cherry Street. It was our grandmother who would drive us back up the hill after summer swim practice every day, since both of our parents would be at work. We'd get home and make huge breakfast-brunches: eggs, cinnamon toast, orange juice, cereal. After we ate, I would go back into my bedroom and sleep until one o'clock. Joanne would stay in the living room and watch t.v. One o'clock was when our soap opera, Days of Our Lives, came on. It was the most popular soap opera amongst our circle of friends in that small town. That entire summer consisted of getting up early, riding down to the school with Dad, swimming our hearts out, walking to Grandma's, and making breakfasts and sleeping until the middle of the day. As it turns out, I was never a great swimmer. I was usually put in the "exhibition lane," i.e., the lane for those of us who will not earn the swim team any points whatsoever, but the coaches needed to put us in somewhere.

When I was in my second semester of college, I had a Biology class that met on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings. It was "Baby Bio," for non-majors who were fulfilling general education requirements. This was actually the last semester that the college had Saturday classes before they decided to do away with them. However, I managed to land an includes-Saturdays class before they stopped. I remember attending class in the science building at 8a.m. on Saturday mornings, with most of my classmates rolling in in their pajamas (I was too self-conscious to participate in that) and trying to learn about cell structures and plant life. I was never really bothered about that early Saturday morning class, while it seemed everyone else couldn't stand losing their chance to sleep in one day a week (Sundays were church).

Now, as a woman who hasn't been married that long, I've noticed that I cherish my time in the mornings. While Ryan continues to sleep in bed, I climb out and head for the living room, usually with some book and my journal, to sip coffee or tea and write, read or pray. Sometimes I just sit quietly. In the summer I would have the glass door to the deck open and let the breezes come in through the screen after a rainy night, water droplets clinging to my plants on the back deck and birds singing their songs as the early dawn turned into day. In the winter, I'm sneaking a blanket off the bed to take with me and curl up under, and I'm more likely to fix myself a hot cup of something or heat up my rice buddy to put on my lap under my books. No matter the season though, I cherish this quiet time to myself in the early morning. And one morning it dawned on me, how much this is like Dad. For as long as I can remember, he has been up before the rest of us, sipping his coffee, meditating on the couch, practicing T'ai Chi in the living room. I think he also needs that quiet time to himself before the day begins. And now look at me: sitting on the couch, sipping coffee, just like my dad. I'm even interested in T'ai Chi now (he got me the same instructional video on DVD for Christmas) and maybe meditation. He is even a writer like me, I realize, although he fills his journals more with philosophical musings and insights he has about the books on Eastern Wisdom that he loves to read so much.

As I was unwrapping the T'ai Chi dvd for Christmas, I remarked laughingly on how much I'm turning out like him to the family. Christmas is a lot easier for our family now that Joanne and I are grown and on our own; somehow it has mellowed out. When I said this, and pointed out how I'm up before my husband and having my coffee in the morning, etc., Dad seemed pleased and said, "I remember when you were younger and it used to be scary, how much you sounded like me in the way you thought things out," and his tone of voice and face said just the opposite, that it wasn't scary at all, but delightful to him that I sometimes was a miniature version of him as I was growing up.