The Coffee Cup

The coffee cup is old and has chips and a crack in it. It was a gift from my buddy Tim Stouffer in 1980 when he visited us in Germany, while returning from a trip to Russia. I think he bought it in a train station somewhere. Tim passed away a little over a year ago, and I’ve thought about whether I should continue using the mug, or put it on a shelf somewhere. 

Actually, he gave a mug to me and another one to Cathy, both with our names on them. Cathy’s broke or disappeared during a move decades ago.

I distinctly remember when Tim gave us the mugs. We were stationed in Würzburg  at the time and picked him up early one morning at the local train station. After spending a couple of weeks in the old USSR on an exchange program, he was strung out from the train trip to come visit us – Moscow to Leningrad to Helsinki to Copenhagen to Frankfurt to Würzburg . He’d spent a couple of days on the train and on the drive to our place told us of smoking and drinking his way through Sweden on the train with some Finns.  

When we arrived home, we made coffee and had a German breakfast of Brötchen, Käse, and Wurst (bread, cheese and sausages). I think it was then that Tim pulled out the coffee mugs and gave them to us as a present to use that morning. I believe he’d bought them in Frankfurt, or Copenhagen. I can’t remember for sure, but I know it was somewhere he’d had a layover for a couple of hours and was doing some mindless shopping while waiting for his train.  He saw one of our names on a mug and then looked for the other and once he found it, bought them both. 

We had a good time with Tim during that visit, and the many subsequent trips he made to Germany to visit us over the next decade. Sometimes when I had to work the next morning, I’d go to bed while Tim and Cath would stay up all night drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes*. On more than a few occasions, I’d wake up at 5AM to get to my unit’s morning physical training/run and they’d still be in the kitchen drinking coffee and solving the world’s problems. 

 

After we returned to the States for good in ‘89, there were many trips and visits back and forth over the years in both directions. Chicago, Virginia, Maryland, DC, Maine, Alabama, Ohio, and many places across Illinois. Holidays, vacations, visits, football games, weddings, funerals, parties … life.

I look at the coffee mug now and think of Tim and all of those times. Although still serviceable, the cup is showing its age.  There are some chips on the top rim and a crack that runs about half the height of the cup.  A part of me says I should retire the mug and place it on a shelf somewhere in the office or another room to preserve it. 

Then I think about the pleasure I receive when using the mug in the morning. The couple of minutes I look at the mug and smile, thinking about Tim and our times together.  That living joy is worth so much more than preserving the mug on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust.  I can even hear Tim in the back of my head chiding me – “Max, you are overthinking this. Use the mug.” For now, it’s a pretty easy choice to keep using it.

I know one day the mug will break or crack in half, maybe spilling coffee all over, and I’ll end up throwing it away. I may briefly curse myself for not having retired it. That’s all OK. Life, like the Max Mug is fragile and I think we should find joy wherever and however we can. 

Addendum:

• * Both Cathy and Tim quit smoking decades ago. 
• After drafting this blog, something kept niggling me in the back of my brain. Then I remembered. This cup was a perfect example of “Wabi Sabi”, a Japanese aesthetic that reveres the “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”  I wrote a blog about the concept a few years ago, after spending a year looking into it. You can read it here: : https://mnhallblog.wordpress.com/2021/08/18/wabi-sabi/