I have just enough sugar left in the jar for Karina's morning Postum (which is what we call a cebada in English, given that the Postum brand has eclipsed other brands of barley-based coffee substitutes), so I dispense with the teaspoon as measurer and simply dump whatever's left into her cup before measuring out the toasted powder, then adding milk, little by little as I stir, so that the dry ingredients are evenly absorbed into the solution. My assumption is that over so many years of meting out ingredients, my judgment has been trained to recognize closely enough what constitutes a teaspoon's worth, and that given the inherent and inescapably inexact nature of such a crude volumetric method, it won’t matter much to the taste of the completed beverage whether it contains exactly 18,136 grains of sugar, as one intrepid online mathematician has calculated (using the weight, diameter, density, and packing efficiency of sugar), or the more nicely rounded but therefore less believable 20,000 grains, as others estimate, always with the qualifier “about” appended. Note that nobody (nobody who’s posted online) has bothered to count the grains of sugar in a teaspoon, and who can blame them? I mean, besides the tedium of such a futile exercise, there's the inevitability of missing something or losing count and guessing or having to go back to the beginning and start again.
So let's start again. You didn't think that I was actually now dumping the rest of the sugar in Karina's cup and adding the barley and milk and stirring gently to ensure a proper mixture, did you? You understood that my choice of present verb tense was a stylistic one, right? But did you perceive that it was determined by the pattern I've established over many essays in the past years, where every piece begins "I have just," usually followed by a verb, which gently allows us to exist in both past and present (the catalytic event is nestled in the recent past, but the writing happens in the present), but in this case, where I've intentionally goofed into another idiomatic expression, following "I have just" with the determiner "enough," we lose the pastness of the witnessed event and are stuck both experiencing and writing now?
Now this doesn't entirely preclude the possibility of some cosmic alignment where in the exact moment you read "I have just enough sugar..." etc. I am, somewhere else on the planet, simultaneously contemplating the enoughness of the sugar jar's dregs and deciding to simply dump them in the cup, and then spooning out the burnt brown powder, then gradually pouring the milk while stirring to achieve optimum creaminess. I mean, maybe. Who knows? If you've got my number (as you likely do, given the audience for my essays), shoot me a message when this happens, and I'll let you know.
You surely already know that in the more general sense, things like this are cyclical: we settle into patterns and routines, sleeping and waking, going about our daily business, working and playing, eating and drinking for tomorrow we die... So, sure, if you're reading this essay with your morning coffee in a time zone near mine, I very well might be meting out the ingredients again, even if the sugar jar's not almost empty yet. I do it many, perhaps even most, days. It's nothing special. One more insignificant example of "love's austere and lonely offices," as Robert Hayden revealed.
In any case, I'm not averse to the idea, which I've discovered here and there, especially in Brian Doyle's essays (hey, this is a Pat Madden Essay Daily Advent Calendar essay; writing about Brian Doyle is in my contract), that the act of reading revives the things written, happens them again. As in:
I am not just reporting this, or trying to recreate the moment, or telling you this story to escort us both toward a cool theme or conclusion near the end of the page. Nope: I want the moment again, fresh and wild and hilarious. I want it so bad I can taste the stony chalky desperate of it. I don’t want to remember it; I want it again right now before this sentence ends. If I write it I’ll have it again.
And, a bit later, though if we believe what we’re saying here, then "later" becomes meaningless:
While I am bruised I am not yet broken, aged but not yet dead, and my shaggy brain still works, and I can type fast and try to make sentences that sing and roar and snarl and sob and insist that everything that ever happened is still happening and will happen again.
As he wrote just a few years before his shaggy brain was overrun with cancer, leaving him very much dead, very much recoverable only in what he wrote, or what others wrote about him.
In this crude, most-obvious of universes, we do decay, we do die, we drain our cup of roast barley mixture, we use up the last of our ingredients. But we who read reside elsewhere: here, again, we find me judging the grains left in the bottom of the container to be about a teaspoon's worth, spilling them into a ceramic cup, spooning the cebada, pouring the milk, the gentle stirring, all happening sporadically forever, in spite of the inevitable.
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Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.
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