The Story of Estevan
An uplifting story of the brave coffee maker who helped keep my shit together.
There are patterns that occur in life that can inform you if you are in fact doing well or are about to watch your atoms skitter off madly in all directions. In my case, the harbinger of any potential discorporation is my relationship with our coffee maker. No, our coffee maker is not a human, it’s one of those drip machines from Oster, but I’ve chosen to name it Estevan.
If I am doing well and my life is mostly in balance, Estevan will be cleaned, filled with fresh water, the filter removed and replaced, carefully filled with fresh coffee grounds the night before, and is programmed to wake up 15 minutes before me to brew a pot of coffee. If I’m doing REALLY well then I’ve decided to use freshly ground coffee from The Roasterie down in Kensington instead of Fine Grind McCafe (blarg). There is a sense of peace when you go to bed knowing that Estevan is on the job and is patiently waiting to fulfill his destiny.
If I’m not particularly balanced I will be awake about 10 minutes before Estevan and stumble around the kitchen hastily rinsing and refilling his pot, eviscerating his soggy-grounds-filled filter, and smashing it all back together like a kitten trying to catch a koi fish on a laptop screen saver; patting, tapping, and nudging the thing earnestly while at the same time seeking to understand the shape of reality through the gauze of a dimensional veil. By the time I hit the brew button the kitchen counter looks like an interdimensional battle has taken place and the combatants are millions of beings the size of coffee grounds, their blood spilled like so many coffee stains, filters stuck in clumps — some with three filters nested, some with two, still others torn and stuck to the cupboards above — how the hell do you separate these damn things? Estevan takes it all in stride and gurgles to himself.
For most of 2021 I have been unbalanced, yet day after day Estevan has bravely gone into the breach each morning and has done his best. He doesn’t seem to mind the chaos but I can’t help but feel he needs more structure in his life.
It’s because of this that I haven’t mentioned the fact that I know he’s stealing and might actually be a lazy bastard. You see, I fill the tank with 10 cups of water and he only serves 8 cups of coffee. In the fifteen minutes that Estevan is “working,” he’s actually just drinking two cups of coffee. Should I talk with him about this? Should he be punished? Or, have I just found myself in a symbiotic relationship with my coffee maker and should just marvel at the connections we make while spinning through the universe and sit down and have a cup o’ joe with him in the morning?
