Black Coffee and Fruit Loops

Following is an excerpt from a short story I wrote many years ago. People sometimes mistake my decidedly conservative politics and strong views on many issues as something they're not. I bet some of those people would be surprised to know I wrote something like this. Shame on them for believing the stereotypes.

Black Coffee and Fruit Loops

How can I know what my father knew? I am another generation far removed from the mesquite-strewn hills of the Sonoran desert. As children my father forbade us to drink coffee—bitter, black and scalding. He drinks it now to remind him of his “sense of history.” Black coffee was his childhood drink and it was everyone’s childhood drink among the Mexican families who subsisted on those hills. Fruit Loops was all I knew as a child and today I very rarely drink coffee. I have a history of my own now, albeit incomplete until I know the acrid taste of his childhood coffee. Then I will know what he knew.

***

The cat watched us languidly from his imperial perch atop the leather armrest. My sister and I lay sprawled, asleep, near the Christmas tree on the tendidito* my father made. Because we were young, it was only ten minutes ago that we were lying on either side of my father, whipping his head toward us by the chin, competing for his attention. This was the time when I believed the too fantastic stories of his childhood heroics.

***

Twenty years later my father drinks his coffee with cream and as he stirs, I imagine he sees my sister and me in the two eddies spreading from the sides of the spoon. His coffee is not so bitter now. I sit next to him, pour myself a cup and ask him to tell me the real stories of his childhood.

*Blankets piled on the floor.