Of Bears and Penguins

One of those days...
Today was the best day that I've had in the past several, for a variety of reasons:
~ A great saxophone lesson with Moe.
~ Going to Russian club with Joanna -- I'm a sucker for languages. I love to learn, and the way that people communicate is fascinating to me. I learned a lot about Russian tonight, and had a lot of fun asking how to say different things! I'm quite glad that Jo let me tag along. Pravda!

~ But the absolute best moment of my entire day (and actually the best moment of the past 4 or 5 days) was seeing Scott. We had been trying to catch each other all day, so this evening when Sam told me that Scott was on the first floor, I ran downstairs. When I saw him at the end of the hall I ran pell-mell through a crowd of several people to get to him, and when I got there we threw our arms around each other. We just stood there as people moved around us, just holding each other and crying (well, I was doing most of the crying). There aren't enough words to describe how happy I was to see him, and just hold on to him and reassure myself that he was really there and okay. We smiled and cried and laughed, and stood there, in the center of the hallway, being thankful for each other.

A cup of Joe
I've had a lot of cups of coffee over the course of my life, and several of them are attached to my most favorite memories.
I must have been 10 or 11 when I had my first cup of coffee. My family was driving back to Dallas from Barnhart, Missouri, and my Grandma Alsup was with us (I think this must have been the same trip that we stopped at the Precious Moments headquarters in Carthage, Missouri -- but that's another story). Anyway, my Grandma and I shared a hotel room in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and when we got up in the morning Grandma made coffee. It was the coffee that is always in hotel rooms -- you know it's going to be bad, and it has some name like, "Company Best" or "Gourmet Goodness." Grandma made it, and just poured me a cup, as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do -- doesn't every 10-year old drink coffee. She didn't offer me cream or sugar, and if she had, I wouldn't have taken it -- our family adage is, "If you're going to drink coffee, drink it black."
Then there was the first time that I went to Starbucks in eighth grade -- coffee was a very "high-school band" thing to do. Two of my friends and I played in the high school bands our eighth grade year. Of course we were quite pleased the first time we went to Starbucks with the jazz band. Coffee was something that the big cool kids, like Clint and Ruth drank. Going to Starbucks was the equivalent of being welcomed into the band with open arms.
There was the coffee in Alaska, when the set-up crew went out to dinner and we had espresso from demitasse cups. There was the Hawaiian coffee that Anna and I drank as we talked about our freshman year at college and how good it was to be back home in Texas. There have been many cups of coffee (usually with a piece of cheesecake) between Clint and I, accompanied by conversations. There was the cup of coffee I had in Springfield with Joe, which was most assuredly the best memory I have of that weekend. And of course, there are the many pots of coffee that my parents and I have shared while shooting the breeze around our kitchen table.
Tonight some of us went to the Broadway Diner and over several refills, talked about rural Missouri with Lou, the cook, who also coaches high school football and wrestling at a Military Academy in Boonville. And I guess that's what I like most about a cup of coffee -- you can just sit there and shoot the breeze, about nothing in particular, with people that you've never met before. It is a comfortable thing to talk with someone over a cup of coffee. A pleasant, and a simple thing.