LAUREL COUNTY, Ky. — Mornings are made for waking to the smell of a hot pot of coffee waiting to dispense its magical elixir that enables us to stumble forward into a new day.

If only it was that simple.

The coffee pot I awake to now doesn’t even have a pot. It’s a space age contraption that glows in the dark and is designed to brew one cup of coffee at a time. My wife ordered the Keurig a few weeks ago and seems absolutely thrilled with the contraption because she is a coffee connoisseur.

She likes how she can pop one of those K-cups into the Keurig and get a cup of coffee in a variety of flavors in 30 seconds.

I, however, remain non plussed. I just want a hot, regular cup of coffee that doesn’t require the help of a mechanical engineer. I have no need for Jamocha Almond Ripple in my coffee or some other exotic flavor. Just two teaspoons of Coffee Mate and a like amount of sugar, please.

The Keurig certainly is a fine looking piece of machinery sitting on the counter top. Must have been expensive, I intoned to Mary. Naw, she said, just $40. I nodded in agreement, marveling how the aluminum-encased beauty with the built-in water filter cost about the same as a Mr. Coffee at Walmart.

It wasn’t until later she laid out the full details. The Keurig indeed was the amount she quoted, but it was $40 PER MONTH for four months on Easy Pay from QVC. Same difference, she said.

Times certainly have changed. My first coffee experience was a tablespoon of freeze-dried Taster’s Choice plopped into a cup of hot water. Talk about simple. Now, it’s delivered to me by an appliance that is so expensive it has to be financed.

OK, can it make a cup of regular coffee, no Hazelnut Banana Butter Spread, I asked. Sure, Mary said. She plopped a Donut Shop K-cup into the Keurig and watched excitedly as the machine came to life. Blue lights started flashing, little motors starting whirring and, 30 seconds later, out spat a perfect cup of coffee. She was so happy to show me the process.

I poured the cup into the huge travel mug that I take to work each day. It barely filled the bottom. I showed it to her, asking for more, so she plopped another cup into the Keurig. She mumbled something about a person not needing to drink that much coffee.

It was never a problem before when I could pour as much as I wanted from a huge pot that stayed hot for hours from our old Cuisinart coffee maker. That was another space-age contraption that would grind the coffee beans before it brewed them. It had more buttons than an airplane cockpit and it took me forever to learn how make coffee on my own. But it never begrudged me more than one cup of coffee at a time.

With each K-cup costing about 50 cents, I told Mary I didn’t want to pay a buck per day for my mug of coffee. Might as well wait in line at the McDonald’s drive thru, I explained. Plus, we’ve got to save money so we can make the Keurig payments. She didn’t care too much for my reasoning.

But, each morning, she dutifully pulls out the can of our usual coffee, installs a special filter into the Keurig and makes me a regular cup of coffee. It’s a pain to clean out the filter after one cup and brew another, and I can tell she gets aggravated. Perhaps I better screen my Coffee Mate for rat poison.

It would be so much easier in today’s society if I became a coffee connoisseur like everyone else, instead of man who likes cheap, freeze-dried Taster’s Choice in a plastic mug from a gas station.

I could pull up to Starbucks and order a triple venti sugar free, non fat, no foam, extra caramel, with whip caramel macchiato cup of coffee.

Then ask if I can finance it.



wsawyers@sentinel-echo.com