BLACK SUNDAY

I bought something today that makes me very happy: a Bialetti Moka Express. I have always wanted one, mainly for the way it looks — like a corseted Victorian matron: simple and sturdy and squeezed in the middle. No frills. No nonsense.

I had never had coffee made from one. I didn't even know how it worked until I opened the box today and read the instructions. They were a paragraph long. That increased my passion immediately — the fact that the operating manual could be read in 20 seconds and mastered by a first-grader. I have a brand new car stereo that I can't switch from CD to radio because I'd have to dig out the 100-page instruction book to learn how to perform that simple maneuver. I have a digital camera at home and a state-of-the-art iMac at work that will be grossly underutilized because I can't bring myself to wade through the how-to manuals. I'm not a Luddite or a helpless female or retarded or anything — the other day I hooked up a VCR to the TV, didn't I, Christy? — I just find instructions mind-numbingly tedious and a little intimidating, and I get agitated when I'm reading them and find myself getting more confused instead of less confused. It's like when I ask the HR lady at work a simple question about my health insurance and she gives me a ridiculously rude and Byzantine answer. Call me finicky, but I like my Human Resources people to be human and resourceful, and I like my directions to be direct.

Here is how the Moka Express works: You give the clerk at the store $19, then you put the contraption in your car and fondle it all the way home. In your kitchen, you unscrew the two halves. You put cold water in the bottom half. You put espresso in the filter that fits between the two halves. You screw the top back on and stick it on a hot burner until the top half fills with coffee.



I expected that the coffee would be delicious, and it was — viscous and dark and slightly smoky. But I didn't expect the joy of watching it being made. It turns out you can open the lid and see the chocolatey rich liquor gush and spurt up into the top half. It gave me the same unadulterated joy that I'd get every time I watched the opening credits of "The Beverly Hillbillies" — you know, where Uncle Jed misfires a bullet and up through the ground comes a bubblin' crude. Swimmin' pools, movie stars.

Another great thing is that I finally got to use my tiny green cups that I bought with my friend Amy last spring in Atlanta. I consider the demitasse one of the great inventions of humankind — a promoter of civility, gentility. You just act better with a tiny cup in your hand. Think about it.

While I'm on the subject, here's a quick rundown of some significant coffee moments for me:

• Drinking coffee with my dad as a preschooler. He worked the night shift on the railroad, and about 10 every night he'd make a big thermos full of milky, sugary joe. He'd put so much milk in his thermos that there'd be coffee left over in the pot, and he'd pour himself a big cup and me a little cup, all white and syrupy sweet, and I'd drink it on his lap while he smoked a Marlboro. One of my dad's charms, although my mom would disagree, is that he sees no problem whatsoever with pumping a 4-year-old full of caffeine and sugar — in a cloud of secondhand smoke — at 10 p.m.

I credit this early exposure to coffee for caffeine's having no apparent ability to keep me awake. I built up an immunity.

I remember my mom telling my dad that coffee would stunt my growth, and he said something like, "Petite women are prettier anyway."

One time I got in trouble because my mom caught me dumping about half a pound of sugar into a cup of coffee. For some reason, I thought the sugar was what made it white like my dad's. She told me it was the milk.

After they divorced, when I was pushing 5, I started taking my coffee black. Because I lived with my mom and that's how she drank it. Any time someone asked her if she wanted cream or sugar she'd sneer real big, like they asked her if she wanted a turd in it, because cream and sugar reminded her of my dad.

• The first time I was old enough to stay home without a baby sitter, age 11 or so, my parents went to a cocktail party and I made myself a big old pot of Maxwell House and drank the whole thing like it was a pitcher of Tang. I sat in our green recliner in the rec room, fueled by a wicked java buzz, and wrote a short story. I still recalled the experience vividly in college while reading DeQuincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater.

• When I was 16, I lived in France for a year. It was my first exposure to espresso drinks — cappuccino and cafe au lait and just straight black espresso. The question there was not "cream or sugar?" but "un sucre ou deux"? referring to the ubiquitous sugar cubes, which some people would just dip in their cafe and let melt on their tongues.

The town I lived in, Toulouse, had a large Arab population from former French colonies, so there were a number of Middle-eastern restaurants. A girl I was crazy in love with took me to one and bought me Turkish coffee and — worldly teen that she was — said, "Don't drink the debris floating in it."

• In college, my first date with the man I would marry was for coffee at a Perkin's Restaurant.

And we consumed several hundred gallons in the basement of the student union while he tutored me, rather unsuccessfully, in algebra.

At his apartment, he served me instant coffee out of a small jar, with powdery lumps of nondairy creamer. I didn't mind.

(There's an X-rated coffee incident involving him, but you have to buy me dinner before I tell you that.)

• In law school, I spent countless days at Rick's well-appointed apartment, bumming his liquor and java and vast CD collection. He made me delicious Turkish coffee in a copper-plated ibrik, but my favorite was the kind he'd make in a big glass bottle with a paper filter, and he'd sweeten it with half-and-half and hazelnut liqueur. He gave me a tiny espresso machine that belonged to his brother. Or maybe he just let me borrow it (?)

• When I was living with Beth, and camping with Beth, we made coffee in a cheap percolator on an open camp fire. Cold air. Sun rising. Whole new day ahead.

• When I met George, I got the pleasure of seeing a grown man order, with evident pride, a double grande decaf skim iced pumpkin mocha with sugar-free vanilla syrup, or whatever the name of that drink was. ("Dude! You can't order that with me standing here; people will think I'm a fag hag, in addition to being a lesbo"). But I've learned to love when hetero guys do totally gay things with a completely straight face. George never lets me down.

• When I met Ben, I asked if he wanted one spoon of sugar or two, and he said six.

• On my and Erin's trip to New England, when our detour to Salem led to a tourist trap, we tried to redeem it by ducking into a coffee shop and loading up on spice breads and latte. And then we went back for gelato. Coffee shops are on every corner now, like bars, conveniently located to redeem a lot of ill-fated hours and unfortunate decisions.

• After I married Steve — well, even before — he brought me coffee in bed every morning. Not instant, but made from a French press. It was a while before I understood that that was not a usual thing for a husband to do. I admit, I took him for granted. One winter day I was very depressed. I didn't want to get out of bed. I said something pitiful and melodramatic, like "Give me one good reason to get up, to live." And — I'll never forget this — he appeared in the bedroom door, in answer to my question, with his goofy smile and a raised, steaming cup, and said, "Coffee?"