First Coffee

‘Two dark coffees with cream please’, I ordered at Gelato Vero coffeehouse
after staggering in that chilly early morning in mid-December many years ago.


My daughter born just hours before in the hospital up the hill. She’s so pink
and luminous underneath that little longshoreman’s knit cap and I can’t help


but smile thinking of her birth as I write this down now. I recall the young
barista pouring our coffees, one for me the other for my wife whom I left


dozing, recovering, after the birth and three or four days of sharp back pain,
that hard labor a man can never know. She introduced herself as ‘Helen’


while she poured the coffees—this gave me goosebumps then – Helen my
three hour old daughter Keighty’s middle name and my great Aunt Helen


her maverick, mischief making, story-telling, psychic namesake who loved
to feed the black crows table scraps after dinner on her Wisconsin farm


and to spin outlandish yarns about the too earnest Lutheran minister and
his lofty sermons down in the village church.


Oh my dear daughter, Keighty Helen, can you see how I glow as my grin
devours the distance between us these two plus decades later, now that we’ve


come full circle, and sit here in the morning light, together contentedly, quietly
familiar, sharing these two round and true, steaming cups of such dark rich coffee.