The doctor keeps asking me if I drink coffee. Really, he seems obsessed with the idea. “How often?” he asks. “How many cups a day?”
“I do not drink coffee,” I tell him again. “I don’t like the taste.” He is skeptical. He asks me if I’m sure. I’m starting to get irritated. I tell him, “The only time I can stand it is in a desert, like coffee ice cream.” He shakes his head. That’s not what he’s looking for.
Finally, he tells me, “Well, you have all the symptoms of a caffeine headache. I don’t know what to tell you.”
We are at an impasse.
As I’m driving home, I think, “Well, that was a waste of time.” Yes, I live and work in the United States, and no, I don’t drink coffee. I do not stand around all day with a cup in my hand. Despite the memes and jokes, I am human before that first cup–without that first cup.
He didn’t even ask me about tea.
When I get home, I decide to fix myself a little treat, to erase that frustrating interaction with that weirdly insistent doctor. The weather has been miserably hot, and I’ve taken to freezing milk in ice cube trays and blending it with different flavors to make a kind of low fat ice cream. So I open the freezer, take out a tray of frozen milk cubes, and dump them in the blender. Then I rummage in the freezer until I locate a second tray. It’s full of rich black cubes that sparkle with ice crystals. I’ve made them extra strong because blending them with milk will dilute the—.
Oh.
“I don’t drink coffee,” I think. “I eat coffee.”