Quiet Time

[Bob Stepp]

He sat at the head of the kitchen table bathed in the almost garish light of a single bare bulb directly over the table, and like his Mother before him he sipped a little of the morning’s first cup of coffee from the saucer instead of the cup. He always drank two cups, no more, no less of hot, black, percolated coffee and smoked one cigarette rolled from Prince Albert tobacco in a pouch while sitting at that table. He never said a word as he sat there, his chair turned sideways to the table, his legs crossed at the knees staring into the distance with his one good eye. Seems his other eye fell victim to a fork wielded by his sister when he was ten years old. It was an accident as the story goes.
After that second cup he would stand and stretch and pull the other strap of his overalls over his shoulder and hook it to the bib, look down at me sitting there at the side of the table and say, “Come on, let’s go.”  That was his second sentence of the morning; the first was about fifteen minutes ago when he shook me awake and said simply, “Wake up, time to milk.”

I became a part, or I should say a witness to this ritual when I was about seven or eight years old...old enough to help at the barn and to learn to drink coffee too. I had to have milk and sugar in mine....that stuff he drank should have melted the spoon. I don’t guess Mr Coffee makers had been invented yet. Probably wouldn’t have mattered. I doubt he would have bought one. I still have the percolator although the innards have become lost somewhere in the moves over the years. Wish I still had ‘em though; I’d like to try a pot of the stuff without the milk and sugar.
I can still see that kitchen as plain as if it was this morning; one open room served as both kitchen and dining room where three meals were served every day. Like one of those one-camera movie scenes I’ve circled that room and watched my Daddy sitting at that table, sipping coffee and smoking one cigarette, looked at him from every angle, staring at something that only he could see..in a world of his own. And I have wondered what was he thinking...was he dreading the day ahead, was he wishing he had done something different with his life, was he worried about how much milk we’d get today? Or was he doing what I’m doing now.......going back through his memory banks and looking at the pictures stored there....pictures of his own life and the good days and the bad days....the sunsets and sunrises he had seen from the barn.....the cold of Winter and the heat of a Texas Summer.....the droughts and the floods.
I’d like to know what he was thinking all those mornings....or would I?

[Jaylee53]

Wonderful story. You paint well with words too.

[Stir Young]

Thank you for posting this, Bob.  That mysterious generation of men, lots of thinking, pondering, weighing and musing, all without saying much.  I think the old saying about "having big shoes to fill" was meant as a tribute to these men.