I'm not a one-sex person, and yet I hate the term bisexual. It sounds creepy to me, and I don't think I'm creepy. There are times when I feel downright romantic.
With sex my wife thinks twice before she turns me down. Yeah, once in the morning and once at night.
I think sometimes in the focus on deep friendships and on romantic relationships, we can lose sight of how important the small connections we make are with strangers and with people that we may encounter for just a few seconds or a few minutes, whether it's the barista at our coffee shop or the stranger next to us on the subway.
As children in the seventies we were told about nebulous 'strangers'. By definition, we didn't know who these strangers were, and we didn't know what they wanted to do, but only that they were sinister. I think that was the stage the seventies were at.
I often work and write in coffee shops, observing the baristas and eavesdropping on interesting conversations.
The Arabs understandably did everything they could to protect their monopoly. Coffee beans were treated before being shipped to ensure they were sterile and could not be used to seed new coffee plants; foreigners were excluded from coffee-producing areas. First to break the Arab monopoly were the Dutch, who displaced the Portuguese as the dominant European nation in the East Indies during the seventeenth century, gaining control of the spice trade in the process and briefly becoming the world's leading commercial power.
It might be that some day I shall be drowned by the sea, or die of pneumonia from sleeping out at night, or be robbed and strangled by strangers. These things happen. Even so, I shall be ahead because of trusting the beach, the night and strangers.
When I'm with the wife, and we're having a romantic night, I occasionally think about a glass of red wine, but I'll order a sparkling water. I'd like the wine, but it wouldn't end with one glass, so I don't even go there.
Building a little bonfire at night on the beach and lying on a blanket with my wife under the stars is not only sexy, it's romantic.
And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.
I think empathy is romantic. I think humor is romantic. Kindness is romantic. I think those kind of gestures of caring and love are romantic.
Harry Reid is not funny; he's creepy. Nancy Pelosi is creepy. Charles Schumer is sneaky and creepy.
Before I started Coffee of Grace, I assumed all coffee came from Latin America or Indonesia. I wasn't familiar with African coffee.
There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!
I grew up not liking coffee, even though I'm from Brazil. Then I realized when I moved to San Francisco that it's not that I don't like coffee, I just didn't like the coffee I'd had before. I fell in love with my morning cup of coffee, and my second one at 11 A.M., and so on and so forth.
My frontal lobe doesn't function well. When I'm out with friends, I typically have a cup of coffee, and that's not good for my sleep. And yet I'll do it again, night after night - 'Oh why did I have that cup of coffee?' I can't stop it because I love it.