In Runic Memorium

Let me make it clear I am in a dark mood that I am dramatizing for affect. Do not prepare yourself for deep sorrow.

To many of you the cause of my mourning will seem trivial. Some of you I am sure will relate.  Here goes!

Let's start this on a high note.  This week I finished my watercolor of "Robin in Nest." And irony of irony, I complete it in the same week Robin Hoffman comes and visits my journalism class. (Robin is the Senior Executive Producer of the ABC affiliate in town and students love her.) 

And, hey, my announcing students got to chat with two of the main anchors in town, Jim Benemann and Adele Arakawa and were duly impressed.

 

 

  

 

 

So those are the highlights. And I'm sorry, but they may not help balance the events of the past few days at home.

Want to know how to make a Viking cry?

(Peggy gets mad at me whenever I drop my Norwegian heritage into the conversation. Perhaps that's because she knows I'm really more Irish than Norwegian.)

But today I feel totally justfied in my heritage dropping.  The only official "right of passage" I remember going through with my Norwegian father? Oh it was a proud but cruel and grueling event.

I am ten years old and he is taking me Deep Sea fishing out of Oceanside, California.  We have to be on the pier at FOUR AM in the morning. That's so we can have pancakes, and eggs at the little dive at the end of the pier before boarding the boat.  

Now at home I'd have washed all that down with a glass of milk? But unbeknownst to me, this is "right of passage" day. Dad speaks to the waitress for me.

"He'll have a CUP OF COFFEE."

"Huh?"

"Cream and sugar son?," the waitress says.

Dad answers for me.

"He'll take it black."

So anyway coffee has been my only admitted addiction in life.

So imagine my dismay today when I head down the stairs, grind up some Colombian, pour the water into the 20 year old Braun....and...?

 

 

It bit the dust, it's a gonner, it is off to meet the big coffee pot in the sky, it has percolated its last crushed bean. Oh, the pain. Oh, the suffering. What will I drink this morning? 

Maybe if it had happened later in the day, but in the morning before first light.  AND....get this...IN THE SAME WEEK...IN FACT JUST A DAY AFTER the main lever on the toaster popped off.

 

Go ahead and laugh at my grief if you must.  But I feel confident that there are some among you, of real or dubious Scandanavian descent, who will relate to my lament.

And please, should I visit you today, please be kind and respectful enough to utter, "Paul, can I get you a cup of coffee?"

You'll be rewarded in Valhalla.