Meet The New Coffee Cup ... Not Quite The Same As The Old Coffee Cup.

It is by cuppa alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Coffea arabica that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by cuppa alone I set my mind in motion.

-- What Piter de Vries actually meant in that movie

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I have in front of me two coffee cups. To people of my self-styled bent, consciously continually inventing themselves in the DIY mold of the self-made artist/street philosopher king having a single dependable, 'companion' coffee cup is a thing of psychology, speaking to the needs of talisman and ritual. I've written about it before, back in 2015. The time has come, my friends, to speak of it again.

Why? because of a deed wholly unexpected, a pleasant and unexpected surprise having come my way. 

I don't write often of my family, not because we're terribly estranged, but we live kind of in different worlds (or, to be more precise, they live on Planet Earth while I've always lived in a sort of dimension of my own, a thing which has been known ever since I was a weird little kid in the then-rather-banal-and-normal Silverton). Currently my Mom, my kid sister and her husband and their kids live in Jackson County - same side of Oregon, different corner. Siskiyou Country rather than Willamette Valley.

During this time of wildfires we had occasion to think of them; when the phone call came from my sister, I didn't hesitate to pick up. As it turned out, their house and little town are fine and fire didn't come close. But she did want me to clarify my postal address, so I did, and all she said was that she was going to send me a box. 

It's at this point I'm hoping you followed the link three paragraphs up. If you don't feel like scrolling back up, here's the link again. Follow it. I'll wait. 

Back? All orientated? Good. The box contained a brief and dear letter, a repayment in gratitude, and the object on the right in the picture below:

On the left, the original edition acquired in Seattle in 1985. On the right, its successor, provided by my sister, who had noticed in my earlier sharings that the original warrior was in distressed shape, and she remembered how fond I was of that cup. And I am still wowing over this, because, as far as I can tell, finding vintage Bearly Surviving mugs (which seem to have become collectors items) that were originally sold thirty-five years ago is no mean feat. I mean, I've cruised the 'Web trying to find this particular model ... it's larger, about 21 ounces, than most of the non-spill travel mugs they sold back then. Vanishingly rare, as in, I've not found a-one yet. 

Several years ago, I shattered that mug, and managed to keep all the fragments, and held on to them until I found a glue I could actually use and since about 2014 or thereabouts I was drinking out of this beloved mug again. And, somehow, my sister, who now has my awe and respect for this, found another one just like it. I seriously can't even here. And I had no idea. Totally out of the blue here.

My life is filled with people, from the Brown Eyed Girl on down, who do little things that indulge me to make it possible for me to try to invent myself as the creative artist I should have always been. I don't recognize that enough. This'll be one of those things now that'll stay with me in that way.

The cup, it will be noted, has been christened (as see the picture that follows). And, away we go - for another thirty-five years? Who knows. It's possible!

And so it brews.