Considering a cup of coffee

A note from my travelogue...

To drink a simple coffee - one milk no sugar, thanks - is quite a remarkable act celebrating human ingenuity (or insanity).

My ancestors would look at the cup sitting in front of me and be quite amazed. Think: It's heated by an electric kettle (that uses no flame), boiled with beans plucked from thousands of miles away, and fills a Styrofoam cup made from petrochemicals extracted and carefully refined from oil fields hundreds of meters below the surface of the earth in a country thousands of kilometers away.

That I am drinking this beverage on a flight back from Calgary, at 36-thousand feet at 832 km/hr above the earth only makes this little coffee that much more remarkable.

A hot beverage traveling over an entire nation in 4 hours without so much as a ripple.

Spring, In the Beaver Valley

Apple Blossoms at Springbrooke farm. Just one of the many now in full bloom in the Bruce Country orchards.

Flying down Palmerston

I lock my door, flip my leg over the seat, grip the rubber on the handlebars and pedal south. This is the start to one of my greatest of all pleasures. Biking to work. It's spring. That means the streets are clear of snow, ice and misery. I no longer have to take the subway to work, that horrid conveyor belt of canned labour en masse. I cross Bloor Street and swoop down the top of Palmerson Street, a wide boulevard draped with tall maples and lined with monster homes and cast iron lampposts. The air is warm, finally, and it smells like dirt and flowers. There are the old men in their grey slacks spraying the concrete with a hose to remove every speck of dirt, the old ladies scooping out the first dandelions from the emerald lawns. Each house is different, steep roofs or flat-topped mansion with turrets. Some are old and faded with cracked paint, others are undergoing renovations with new wings, railings. As I speed past them, I think of everyone who might live in them and how I would like to live in every single one someday.

Pass the streetcar tracks over College Street and the homes are narrow, smaller here in the old Italian neighbourhood where the grandmas and grandpas sit on their front porches and stare. The lawns are now brick, concrete, festooned with funny fountains and monuments in praise of Jesus. Of course there are birds chirping. The maples have dropped their flowers in a gold circle below the silver trunks. Two kids are on their way to school.

This ride to work, down Palmerston, is angled downward enough so I can take my hands off the handlebars for a while and just coast. I let gravity take over for a few moments. I stick my arms out and slalom down down down as if I was commuting to work in my own little plane.