Rainey Blogs on Some Days

Like most people, I have a morning routine. If any of this routine is interrupted, my day is ruined. Here’s the routine: I get up when I get up. I do not use an alarm. If I go to bed early, I get up early. If I go to bed late, I get up a little later. This is very simple. If I’m driving to the Midwest and have to leave at 3 a.m., I use an alarm. Otherwise, I get up when I get up. The next thing I do in the morning is go downstairs and start the coffee. When I make the coffee, I hate when I find the grinds from the day before in the metal filter . This is very disturbing to me and makes me angry, but my anger lasts only a moment. After I dump the grinds in the garbage and rinse out the filter, I am back on track. I can put the new coffee grinds in the filter, fill up the water to the 9-cup line for the three of us drinking coffee, turn on the coffee pot and away we go. By the way, I have never had a coffee pot with a timer that I can set to start up at a certain time so the coffee is...

She [Rosie] was seizing the day her way—a made bed meant you were in their world. All kids wanted to dive into bed and be lying down safely, especially until about noon. --Anne Lamott, Imperfect Birds , 154. At my age, sleeping in is no longer a gift. I suppose because I recognize that one never knows how many more mornings of coffee, cool air, and cardinals singing cacophonous songs there are to go. So in middle age, sleeping in seems more like a punishment. This is a big difference between us and the mutant ninja teenagers, who still have so much of life ahead that sleeping until noon seems like a rationale thing to do. But for me, getting up early while the streets are silent and the sun is rubbing its sleepy eyes, starting its daily ascent, is so much better than rising up into a bright midday sun. I am not opposed to an afternoon nap now and again though.

I visited my Grandpa Rainey—my dad’s father—in the hospital the other day and he asked me if I like coffee. “Yes, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to go start the coffee,” I told him. “That’s how I knew she wasn’t going to make it,” he had told me in March when I was home for my Grandma Rainey’s funeral. “She stopped drinking coffee.” If there is any metaphor for life that both sides of my family shared, it is coffee. As long as we are drinking coffee, we are alive. We have a reason to get up in the morning, to brew a pot, to hear the coffee moan and travail until the dripping stops and the coffee pots rests, her work done for another day. We pour a cup, put in our cream and sugar, grab a Bible or newspaper, and come alive for a new day. We start the day this way during the deep chill of a winter morning or on dewy spring days just after dawn. When we drink coffee, we are alive. When I was growing up, I was not as close to my dad’s family because my parents divor...

Strangely, Mark McGwire's confession to using steroids when he broke the home run record sounded very similar to mine. "Now that I have become a blogger, I have the chance to do something that I wish I was able to do nearly thirty years ago. I never knew when, but I always knew this day would come. It's time for me to talk about the past and confirm what people suspected. I used performance-enhancing coffee during my years at J.L. Buford elementary school, Casey Junior High, and Mount Vernon Township High school. I remember getting up and having a couple of cups of coffee and reading the newspaper while I was in fifth grade, a pattern that continued throughout junior high and high school. Not only did I drink coffee, but I also had cream and sugar. And many of you will remember that my grades shot up in fifth grade to straight A's after I previously had been a mediocre student. I also tried out for the basketball team and made it the next year, even though I could o...