Coffee and a book

I need so little to be happy – coffee and a book and some solitude!! And the most appropriate term that comes to my mind for this concoction is –food for the spirits. There is food for the body, food for thought but I now understand that the most desired and the most ignored and the least obvious and the least available one, is the food for your spirits. Speaking of the trio – coffee, book and solitude- each one of them in is easy within your palm’s reach but to get but a combination-all three at the same time is not that easy.
My love for coffee has crossed the ‘just simple love’ boundaries to become an addiction now and that aroma anywhere just pulls me in that direction with unseen strings. Well, caffeine is not a good thing to fall for but when are good things worth falling for in life? Had Adam not tasted the apple, would we all be there? Speaking of books I am not a very literary person but I love books because they make me lose myself in a different world – the world of characters sketched by the author- unseen yet so palpable and real. And for that reason I read just fiction – no educational, no factual books. Though I read my story at night but I am so deep into the book I am reading that at times during the day I find myself wondering what would X have done in this situation. Movies don’t have that effect on me, unless its too engrossing-my mind is still wandering away while my eyes watch the screen. Movies don’t have the power of tying down my brain. So, I am not a TV person. Speaking of solitude, the more mechanical and lined-up life gets – do 1, do 2, do 3 …do 100, I feel a need to gather my thoughts together, to reconnect with myself and as life runs fast, as years add in -the count no more able to fit in the rungs of fingers – I feel that need even more-to reconnect with myself, to isolate and insulate.
So at bedtime, every night after do 100 is done, I try to snatch those some minutes to get lost in someone else’s story – someone unreal, whom I can empathize with , or criticize if I want to. But before my turn, its my son’s bedtime stories and by the time he is done, my eyelids are heavy with sleep. And if his dad is reading to him, the duo are too distracting with their whys and becauses or whys and I-don’t-knows, leaving me unable to concentrate and drift away. And sometimes if the kiddo is already out and snoring, hubby unable to sleep because of the light, will toss and turn in bed till I switch off the lamp and I am too lazy and worn out to go to another room, so I just give up.Sometimes it gets upsetting not being able to pin down that window of time, for myself.Weird as it may seem but at times, I have lied down in the empty soaking tub of our attached bath with my book – not turning on the water because I don’t want to be careful not to wet the pages and I don’t want to wake the sleeping with running water.
And then this day arrived- one day that I realized what I need-last Saturday, I was out to the library to return some books when the aroma of the Starbucks beckoned me and normally I would have just picked up the coffee on my way back home, but that day it occurred to me and I sat in the corner chair with the coffee and a piece of cake and the newspaper- and I was in lovc with the newspaper, the same paper I would have shrugged and tossed away at home –looked so impressive and interesting and all the news so relevant. Within moments I was refreshed from within, feeling light and I walked to the library almost weightless, walking on air, with my coffee and there again I flipped through some magazines. And by the time I was ready to go home, it was a happier me, a different me, with uplifted spirits. And though all this lasted for not more than an hour, I had what I wanted from my weekend and I drove back- elated, content, ready to give and be available.