an americano by any other name…

I love coffee… I love its smell… I love its taste… I love the almost-too-hot-to-hold mug in my hand with the coffee-scented steam wafting up my nose in the morning, and I love the slightly sweet and creamy, cold icy decaf in the afternoon. I’m quite aware that there was some basic conditioning that has brought me to my current state of desire for the brew. I grew up with the smell of Folgers percolating in the kitchen early every morning. My father was a carpenter when I was growing up and he had to leave the house before seven with his trusty thermos of coffee under his arm. That aroma of freshly brewed coffee is inherently home for me.

The positive reinforcement continued in college. The late eighties brought my art-school days and a steady consumption of coffee and TigerMilk protein bars. (Not a diet I would advocate for health, but good for maintaining a sleep-deprived state.) It didn’t hurt that I was living in Seattle at the time, and learning the intricacies of new complex flavor combinations derived from whole roasted beans from the new coffee shop in Pike Street Market Place, Starbucks. In 1987, although I was sipping my magic brew (code for doing shots of straight espresso) from the first Starbucks location, there were actually seventeen other locations… in the entire U.S. Just to give you a little perspective to that number. Last year when I found myself in Shanghai, China, I enjoyed coffee at three different Starbucks locations; the total number of Starbucks stores at that point in 2005 was 10,241. Boy, how times change. But I digress; this isn’t about the big bad corporate giant that threatens to take over the world, because if Starbucks is the Matrix, then I say, “Keep me plugged in!” Starbucks, especially when I was in art-school was just one more positive-reinforcement stepping stone to my love affair with coffee.

So many other happy times have the common thread of coffee running through them for me. I think of my early days in LA with late night coffee dates with friends at Borders or some fun eclectic Melrose coffee hangout enjoying mochas until two in the morning. There of course have been the random star sightings over coffee, like running into Fred Savage in Westwood, or the time we watched our friend run past Christian Slater five times while she was looking for him, or the time I brushed elbows with Matt Dillon on Larchmont. And in more recent years, there are the weekly coffee lunches with a friend that I remember with nostalgia, since proximity no longer allows it.

All these experiences show how coffee has been a major player in my life thus far. So at this point it should come as no surprise that I was searching for a blog title that would incorporate my coffee predilection. For a moment I considered something cutesy like “Jitters”, but I’m not really a cutesy kind of girl, and despite my love for the brew, I try and stay away from caffeine. I also pondered “the demitasse diaries”, “the java journal”, and the “the espresso epilogue” since I also love a good literary alliteration, but I can’t say that this blog has been, or ever will be very literary. (Also, refer back to the cutesy remark.) So instead of paying homage to my favorite drink in an overt way I instead chose “savor”, and with this small simple word I will incorporate in my mind all the wonderful ways it has applied to coffee for me.