I have been consuming brewed black coffee every morning, to go with corned beef pandesal. My dine-in beverage is always served with warm and cold water on the side, plus two brown sugar and half a cup of milk. Breakfast takes up at least two hours while I watch a K-drama episode with an ear-phone plugged into my ears. Between 7 and 9 AM sipping the hot brew relaxes and empties my mind of serious stuff.

While I prefer the coffee black to go with my bread and meat, I always pour the hot milk and stir in the brown sugar on the remaining coffee when I’m done eating. The coffee that I take with me to work will be my drink for the whole day. Little by little, it will be consumed while I labor on my lesson plan, check student papers, and deliver the class lecture.

I used to feel guilty about the cost of this habit. But not anymore. Breakfast time is a healthy downtime for me. I walk three blocks more from the coffee shop with a backpack that has my laptop. On the road, there is not much to see, but there is room for meditation. My mind doesn’t wander away much from the day’s routine, however, I become more alive and ready for what may or may not happen. My pace is uncalculated, there’s no reason to hurry. I have been savoring this slow pace enhanced with good coffee in a mug that fits in another bag I carry, a sling bag. Walking gets organically woven into this slow movement and I say that it is my morning exercise. Coffee will never leak from the mug in this fifteen-minute walk, but I’m mindful of its presence, as it has become a paraphernalia of my senior year.

MEMORIES OF PURE AND ADULTERATED COFFEE

As a ten-year-old child, I used to run to a nearby sari-sari store in the morning to buy coffee. The vendor will grind a ganta of Barako and wrap the ground beans in a cone-like roll of writing paper. My mother will boil water in the kettle and when the bubbles appear, she will pour the coffee. She will turn the fire to its lowest before pouring the aromatic breakfast drink into our tin bowls. We dipped our bread in the coffee, or if we were having rice, we poured the coffee onto the rice, and we ate our coffee-brimmed rice with pinais or pinangat na isda.

In my grandmother’s house, she served ‘utaw‘ or boiled ground black rice. We considered utaw our First coffee since it would always be the one served with hot bread as soon as we woke up. Then at around 10 AM during my grandfather’s break from weaving palm leaves into panels that would be lined up for roofing a nipa house, Nanay would serve the real coffee in tin mugs. We knew it was time to eat again, with coffee aroma wafting in the atmosphere. Her grandchildren would all sit on the wooden bench around the long wooden table. As our palates demanded, we poured the second coffee liberally on our fried rice, scooping mouthfuls and strips of tinapa with our bare hands.

Coffee and rice had been the comfort fast food up until I was a teenager. We did not filter our coffee and recycled the drink many times until it turned into a pale black and lost its aroma. We took it with bibingka, sweet potato, cassava cakes, boiled bananas, and pancit. When I left the province to work in Manila, coffee became rare and special. There was no way I could get it fresh and cheap from a nearby store. Instead, it was available in ‘three-in-one’ sachets of beans that were often boasting their quality. To me, a three-in-one tasted something akin to baking soda mixed with sugar. But I drank it anyway, as I hurried up before walking or riding the bus to work. Coffee wasn’t a beverage but a comrade, a prompt for the empty stomach during the early rush hours. The morning routine required a partial or full sip of this hot blend, to ensure that I was fully awake and ready to brave the day.

UNCONSUMED COFFEE TO GO FEEDS THE WRITING HUNGER

Consuming coffee little by little while writing is like having an hourglass that tells me when my blogging time is up. I started with a full mug of leftover coffee and after three hours, it was finished. Drinking coffee has made writer’s block less daunting and more tolerable. A  reason to plod on was that the mug was still half full. When I’ve consumed all the coffee I bought, I can pause from thinking. Though I have penned thoughts rather than ideas, I am not hungry for more. Tomorrow, when the day begins, I can buy brewed coffee again, and go back to writing.