I was sitting around the other day, enjoying a nice cup of coffee and started wondering. When was it that I actually started drinking that stuff? A million cups ago, it must’ve been when I was in grade school.

My earliest memories of java are of old silver percolators with little glass tops that the coffee bubbled up into. It was brewed when the bubbling stopped. And I recall my granny dropping saccharin into hers and then pouring it into a saucer to blow on it so she could cool it off. That looked good and I wanted in. I got into it by spending time with my dad aboard the Coast Guard buoy tenders he ran, wanting to drink it like him and the rest of the men. It was a “grown-up thing.”