Keeping Company with Caffeine

Some times I need it and sometimes I don't.
I didn't drink coffee until about 14 years ago.
I carried a cup of Maxwell House upstairs to my mother more or less every morning for the six years that we lived in the "Brownstone" ( actually red brick, painted white) on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village. Her bedroom was on third floor and the kitchen was in the basement. As it swished around I remember thinking that it was ugly black water which I had no intention of ever drinking. I have to admit that it smelled delicious but I was never tempted to taste it..
My first encounter with caffeine was a relationship that I developed with Lipton Tea when I was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I ruined it with sugar and lemon but I got the caffeine that it promised.
I was still drinking tea, although I had classed up to English Breakfast, by the time that we bought our Kensington house in 1998. I even carpeted the stairs with leopard carpeting so that my spills would be disguised. Coffee was my mother's drink not mine.

 

More about caffeine in my next post.