Dear journal,
Growing up, my grandparents had a carved wooden sign hanging in their kitchen that read, “Coffee Time.” It was always there, easy to notice because it was one of the only things in the room with words on it. No one ever explained the sign or treated it as especially important. It was simply part of the kitchen, as familiar as the wooden cabinets, the table, and the coffee pot.
My brother and I spent nearly every Saturday night at our grandparents’ house. On Sunday mornings, Grandpa was usually awake before the rest of us. He would drive to the gas station to buy the Sunday paper, and, if I could get dressed in time, he would take me with him.
Once we arrived, he would give me some change to play an arcade game while he talked with the other regulars. I do not remember much about what they discussed. It was probably the ordinary material of small-town conversation: weather, work, church, local news, and people everyone knew. Grandpa would stand among the other men while I concentrated on making a few quarters last as long as possible.
Then we would return to the house.
Grandpa sat at the end of the kitchen table, usually already dressed for church and wearing a clip-on tie. He was ready long before everyone else. The Sunday paper would be nearby, and there would be coffee.
I started drinking coffee in my teens, partly with Grandpa and partly with the older men at church. Coffee became one of the small ways I was permitted into their world. I could sit at the table, hold a cup, and listen. There was no ceremony to it, but it felt like a modest step toward adulthood.
On Sunday mornings, before everyone left for church, Grandpa and I would sometimes sit together at the kitchen table and have a cup. I do not remember profound conversations or particular pieces of wisdom offered across the table. Mostly, we were simply together, waiting for the day to begin.
That is what makes the memory important now.
At the time, those mornings did not seem rare. They belonged to a dependable rhythm: Saturday night at my grandparents’ house, the early trip for the newspaper, Grandpa at the end of the table in his clip-on tie, coffee before church, and the promise of Sunday lunch afterward. Because the routine repeated itself, it seemed permanent.
Then I grew older.
My brother and I stopped spending every Saturday night at our grandparents’ house. Other commitments took over, and the old pattern gradually loosened. There was no final Saturday night that we recognized as the last. No one announced that the Sunday-morning coffee was ending. The moments simply became less frequent until they were no longer happening.
Grandpa died in 2002.
Our family continued gathering at Grandma’s house for Sunday lunch. In the years after his death, the meal became one of the primary ways our family remained connected. At first, Grandma still prepared most of the food herself. Over time, however, she cooked less and needed more help.
My brother began arriving earlier on Sunday mornings to take on more of the work. Before the cooking began, he and Grandma would sit together and drink coffee. Then they would move into their familiar arrangement: Grandma directing and my brother acting. She knew what needed to be prepared and how it ought to be done. He supplied the labor.
It was their time together.
While they drank coffee and began lunch, I was usually still at church. I was married then and generally arrived when it was time to eat. I came for the meal but missed much of what happened before it. At the time, I thought I was arriving for the important part. The food was ready, the family was gathering, and everyone was taking a place at the table.
I understand now that the preparation was also part of the meal.
The quiet cup of coffee before the work began mattered. So did Grandma’s instructions, my brother’s movement between the stove and the counter, and the gradual filling of the kitchen. They shared a Sunday-morning ritual that resembled the one Grandpa and I had once shared, although none of us would have thought to describe it that way at the time.
Family traditions do not always survive by remaining unchanged. Sometimes they move from one person to another, adjusting themselves to new circumstances. The same kitchen, the same table, and the same coffee can hold several different relationships over the course of a family’s life.
Years later, Grandma stopped driving. By then, I was divorced, and the circumstances of my own life had changed. She needed more help, and I had more room to provide it.
After work, I would go to her house and pick her up. We might go grocery shopping, have dinner, stop for ice cream, or take care of whatever else she needed. Sometimes the destination mattered, but often the outing itself was the point. It gave her somewhere to go and gave us time together outside the narrowing boundaries of her home.
Because I usually came directly from work, she often had a pot of coffee ready for me.
Before we went anywhere, we would sit down and have a cup.
Those afternoons and evenings became our own version of coffee time. They were different from the Sunday mornings I remembered with Grandpa and different from the mornings she shared with my brother. There was no newspaper waiting and no church service ahead of us. Instead, there were grocery lists, restaurant decisions, errands, and conversations about whatever had happened since the last time I had seen her.
The coffee created a pause between the workday I was leaving and the time we were about to spend together. It gave us a few minutes to settle into one another’s company before we got into the car and went wherever the evening required.
My brother and I inherited different coffee hours. I had the early Sunday mornings with Grandpa and the after-work cups with Grandma. My brother had the years of arriving early, sitting with her before lunch, and then working under her direction in the kitchen. Each of us received a different part of the same family ritual.
Grandma died last December.
As the family began sorting through her belongings, I did not know who would eventually receive the “Coffee Time” sign. I knew it mattered to other people, too, and I was prepared for the possibility that it might belong in someone else’s home. Still, the sign meant enough to me that I began searching online for another one. If the original did not come to me, I wanted to find the same sign—or at least one close enough to preserve its place in my memory.
During that search, I discovered another carved wooden sign made by the same brand. This one read, “Mugs.” It matched the style of the sign from my grandparents’ kitchen so closely that the two looked as though they had been made to hang together.
My father eventually asked that the original “Coffee Time” sign be set aside, knowing what it meant to my brother and me. It was not especially valuable, and most people would probably not consider it an heirloom. It was simply a wooden kitchen decoration that had hung in the same place for most of our lives.
Yet it had presided over years of Sunday mornings, family lunches, quiet conversations, and cups of coffee shared across generations.
For several months, it sat in a box.
There is a strange difficulty in deciding what to do with the ordinary objects left behind by people we have loved. We keep them because they matter, but much of their meaning came from their place within a life that no longer exists. Removed from that setting, a familiar household object can become an artifact—carefully preserved but separated from the ordinary use that once gave it meaning.
I did not want the few things I have from my grandparents’ lives to remain packed away as evidence of a world that had ended. I wanted them to take on new lives within my own home. The “Coffee Time” sign had spent decades hanging above cups, meals, and conversations. Its proper place was not in storage.
It needed to return to a kitchen.
Once summer school ended, I finally had time to clean, sort, and reconsider the space in my home. Over the years, I had accumulated coffee mugs from places my brother and I had visited. Some came from restaurants, museums, churches, motels, schools, and sporting events. Others were connected to family jokes, particular trips, or different periods in our lives.
The mugs did not match because the experiences they represented did not match. Each one marked a different destination, meal, interest, or passing moment. Taken together, however, they formed a record of the places we had been and the time we had spent together.
The “Mugs” sign I had found while searching for the original “Coffee Time” sign gave me the beginning of an idea. Because the two signs were made by the same brand, they belonged together visually. One came from my grandparents’ kitchen. The other had been found while I was preparing myself for the possibility that the first might go to someone else.
With my brother’s help, I began putting together a place for the signs and the mugs. We mounted wooden boards, added hooks, worked around the available wall space, and arranged cups that had previously been scattered through cabinets and shelves.
The finished display is crowded and somewhat irregular. Some of the mugs hang at angles. Some are more attractive than others. A few would mean almost nothing to anyone outside our family. It is not a carefully curated collection, and I would not want it to be.
It is a wall of places, people, and moments.
At its center is the original “Coffee Time” sign from my grandparents’ kitchen, now paired with the matching “Mugs” sign. Beneath them hang cups from the life my brother and I have continued building together.
Putting the display together with him seemed appropriate. The two of us shared those Saturday nights at our grandparents’ house. We both grew into coffee drinkers within the routines of that family. We each spent different seasons sitting with Grandma, and we collected many of the mugs while traveling together after those childhood routines had ended.
The project gave our separate memories a common place.
We no longer have Grandpa sitting at the end of the table in his clip-on tie. There are no more early drives to the gas station for the Sunday paper, no arcade game while he talks with the regulars, and no cup of coffee before everyone leaves for church.
Grandma is no longer waiting with a pot ready for me after work. She is no longer sitting with my brother before Sunday lunch, giving instructions while he moves through the kitchen.
We cannot return to those mornings or afternoons. We cannot recover the Saturday nights when we were children or the Sundays when the whole family still gathered around her table.
But my brother and I still have each other.
We still travel. We still collect mugs. We still sit down over coffee. The ritual has changed, as family rituals always do, but it has not disappeared.
The sign has moved from their kitchen into mine. After months in a box, it is once again hanging above coffee cups, naming an ordinary practice that has outlived the people who first taught it to us.
It is still coffee time.
Always,
Dave
