Morning Diary with Coffee

Hope and coffee spring eternal

I’m now twice as old as I once was. Consequently, I’m carrying around many years of memorized brick-a-brack and facts - a veritable history of reference.

The idea that the day starts with a bang is greatly exaggerated. I decide that 7:10am is a good time to rise. I make every effort to walk with a certain articulation of my feet, making certain that I don’t avoid tending to the area below my vision where tragedies happen. Even the accidental kicking of a shoe can bring on the pain of surprise or the surprise of pain. I get to the kitchen and start the fuel – the coffee. A gift from a neighbor has resulted in a grinder/brewer that produces a mug of coffee from whole beans in about 2 minutes. This allows me to start up the computer and have at the intellectual challenge of New York Times puzzles – the famous mini-crossword, Wordl, and Connections (which usually waits until the afternoon – part of a habit from my bifurcated days as a staff musician where I’d take the subway home in the middle of the day, solving it the puzzle onboard).

This morning, while addressing the uncovering of mystery words, and experiencing a coffee high, thoughts start racing: associations of the past, analyses of the news or of movies and old TV shows – maybe even a book that proved too sour in its direction. The oddity today was the way my brain had of stacking connections of its own, pertaining to well-known people. I think of a congressional panel – an oversight committee where a certain secretary of state was recently being effectively grilled by a famous senator – oh what IS her name? Terrible. The name isn’t simply there on the table to pick up. I have to put in my call slip at the research library of my mind and ask who she is. Ah! Warren. It’s Warren. But which Warren? I realize I haven’t gone over this name in any rational way lately; whatever underpinnings produces that reference is still being searched by the librarian of whom I have confidence – the librarian who knows that the stacks are complete but not yet fully activated.

Meanwhile, I think of the movie I’d seen the night before – all about the Blacklist. Who was the young actress (unrelated to this movie) who was scuttled by the list for twelve years? No answer from my librarian. Okay – the associations. I know She played Mrs. Colbert on In the Heat of the Night, but who was the deputy in that movie? That’s gone. Well, she was in Shampoo as well, opposite – gosh, again, a blank.

As all this is grinding forth, the librarian has started to produce the answers I am seeking. Warren is Elizabeth! That’s who knocked around the secretary of state. And just as this is causing me to shake my head with wonderment, I remember that it was Warren Oates who briefly assisted that mystery actress. Guess what the Shampoo answer was -- Warren Beatty!

Somehow, my mind has decided that it is play time. From the mystery of one Senator Warren’s first name, I create two new mysteries of people whose first name is Warren. And still, the name of the actress playing opposite two of them is missing. That name comes hours later in the sunny afternoon, after I have long given up fretting about forgetting it. In comes Lee Grant. It had probably never occurred to me that Lee isn’t that common a name for a woman. Without the nascent references to any onomatopoeic images, the name just floats in its own private pond until it is moored to something more readily available. I do this a lot with certain names – particularly those I have already convinced myself that I never remember. I have to craft references that eventually become invisible, so that the name simply rises up when I need it.

I leave the mental library after a while and pursue a more comforting world where memory struggle is, well, forgotten.