Windows Past and Present

Seeking paradise each morning

Photo by Tú Bông on Unsplash

Johnny Cash defined paradise with these simple words:

“This morning. With her. Having coffee.”

While Johnny Cash was unmistakably talking about June Carter Cash, “having coffee with her” takes on a lot of new meaning this year. I had my first morning coffee with my daughter, and sadly the last coffee and call with my grandmother.

Coffee and my grandmother goes back to her kitchen, with it’s one dominant feature. By a round table, there was a massive picture window overlooking a rolling backyard perched above a gully and my grandfather’s nature sanctuary dedicated to migratory birds.

Grandma and Grandpa would have coffee every morning together, armed with their birding list and binoculars to track their avian visitors. Over steaming hot coffee and delicious cinnamon rolls piled high with homemade frosting when visitors were in, conversations would be punctuated with brief backyard observations. A blue-jay might be “at it again,” or a cardinal would be back. Though cardinals populated the area, my grandparents always seemed to know if it was a recurring visitor or not. It’d be particularly special when a new bird arrived that season, with conversation ending until binoculars swept the bird’s features and it’d be marked on the list.

Our conversation and mornings flowed through these moments, with loving attention back to the people around the table and colorful coffee mugs soon after. I was too young to drink coffee in my grandmother’s kitchen, though it was what all the adults did for most of the morning. Once I started, however, it was always meaningful to have coffee with them even if it wasn’t always by the picture window.

Fast forward to this past summer.

I took a call that my grandmother wasn’t doing great. I said a few words of love and updates on what we were doing, unaware it’d be one of the last times I’d talk to her.

The next day, my daughter was born. My first morning coffee with her included a joke lecture about the gold standard, mostly because I didn’t know what else a baby would want to know at a day old.

We had barely been home a day when we heard that my grandmother had passed away. It was an intense mix of the most joy and most sadness I think I could have felt at one moment with the arrival and departure of meaningful women in my life.

One of those mornings of early parenthood, I was sipping coffee with my wife and daughter looking out our own window on our own Brooklyn backyard. My wife’s eye caught a flash of blue in the backyard: “look at that, don’t see many blue-jays this time of year.”

I looked out the window to see a blue-jay perched on the fence. I grabbed my wife’s hand, smiled at my baby daughter, and said “yep, that blue-jay is at it again.”

While nothing felt okay given the passing of my grandmother and the urgent newness of fatherhood, I felt the warmth from my sleeping daughter, curls of steam from coffee in the morning light, and the living echo of my grandmother’s memory in this blue-jay. There was comfort amidst uncertainty that, by keeping her memory alive through this small ritual, that it would all be okay.

That morning…with her, my wife and daughter…having coffee… this modified version of Johnny Cash’s paradise, enriched by the promise of more to come. ¹

1. Developed for Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium 19, “Windows”