Coffee Cups

The Vanessa Mug, surrounded by other memories.

                                                   

     When Charlotte and I were wealthy and travelled a lot, we always bought some piece of art as a memento of each trip.  On our first trip to Maui we picked up a large piece of scrimshaw, with the image of a clipper ship etched into an antique ivory walrus tusk.  Once, in New York City, we bought a framed watercolor in a little gallery off the lobby of the Plaza Hotel.  We have ceramic “Day of the Dead” bride and groom statuettes from San Miguel de Allende, and a wedding cup signed by Maria Many-Goats from the Jemez Pueblo.  All this stuff is nice and we keep it together in a bookshelf and dust it.  Sometimes.

     I involuntarily quit being wealthy some time ago, but I haven’t ceased to travel.  Now, instead of art, I collect coffee mugs.   They are much less expensive, offer infinite variety, and are colorful and useful.  Two entire shelves in my kitchen cabinet are devoted to assorted coffee mugs. I drink out of a different one each day, and it rewards me with pleasant memories.

     Every morning I reach into the cabinet and blindly pick a mug for my coffee.  Sometimes I reach way back on the top shelf and sometimes I pick one in front on the bottom shelf.  It is important that I not repeat yesterday’s mug, because I don’t want to repeat that memory.  Memories are like old friends—they’re better when you stumble onto them and they come back into your life, fresh, vivid, and unrehearsed.

     Here is a mug from the gift shop at Crater Lake.  A little blond cutie with dimples and tight britches sold it to me when Wayne and I visited there.   Did you know that it snows over forty-four feet per year up there?  Not inches, feet.  Snow plows run year round.
    
     Mike Brown took his family up there once and it snowed--whiteout blizzard conditions--the entire time they were there.  Three days and they never caught a glimpse of the lake.  His son, the lawyer, stills calls it the "alleged" Crater Lake. 
    
     The white mug over here is from Scarlett O’Hardy’s Gone with the Wind Museum in Jefferson, Texas.  In back there is a black mug with gold lettering from the restored Georgian Hotel, on the beach in Santa Monica.  We got that at Rachel’s wedding—what a great week.

     My grandsons picked out the Route Sixty-Six mug in Clines Corners when my friends Collins and McMullen invited us up to Gunnison for fly fishing.  The boys will never forget that trip, nor will I.  Ben still gets a faraway look when he remembers all the bacon Mullens stir-fried one morning, and none of us will ever forget the fresh-caught, pan-fried trout James cooked over the campfire.

     This morning, I’m having my Columbian coffee in a “Vanessa” mug with the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame logo on one side.  The regular Ranger logo mugs were priced at $12.95, plus tax, but they had three leftover “named” mugs--Jonathon, Vanessa, and Susanna--on clearance at $1.95 each.  When I was single, a sweet girl in Houston named Vanessa used to do nice things for me, so I saved eleven dollars and got two sets of fine memories for the price of one.

     Involuntarily getting un-wealthy is not the end of the world.   I have a lifetime of memories…..and a cabinet full of reminders.