Remind us a coffee you’ve shared with a lover.

A single coffee? I’ve shared several coffees a day for the last 24 years with my lover, who has also been my husband for the past 15 years (anniversary this week). I think my marriage is pretty much about coffee. Right now we are putting a scoop of Illy, ground for auto-drip, in with whatever organic coffee beans we use for our morning coffee. It darkens and deepens it and that’s good for a marriage. We’ve had stove-top espresso makers and plunger pots too, but we always come back to auto-drip, except when we are travelling in Europe when it is all about the latte or café au lait or café express or espresso or macchiato. On several trips to Paris we had coffee problems because I would drink coffee and then we’d go out and I’d immediately have to pee so to use a bathroom, we’d go into a café and buy an espresso so I could use the bathroom and then a few blocks later, same problem, over and over all the way to the Louvre. We were drinking coffee and peeing all over Paris. Eventually we figured out that if we aimed our walk past a McDonald’s we could use the bathroom without buying anything because in Paris as in America the McDonald’s workers don’t give a shit and why should they? So we could make it to Musée Marmottan or the Orangerie with only one pit-stop. I’m really stupid without coffee. My husband is less so, being a very flexible personality, and he has a thing about quitting things. He likes to do it to see if he can. Not me. I need my coffee in the morning, a tea or coffee in the afternoon and wine at night. All else is chaos. I never quit anything, or no, that’s not true, I quit smoking about 23 years ago, and never started again. But that’s probably enough quitting for me for a lifetime.