Chock Full of Nuts

I saw a great Meme today. It said:

Have you ever drank an iced coffee so strong for a brief moment you actually had hope.

I sent it to my sisters, who are all coffee addicts, and we laughed.

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There was such a truth to that statement. There is something about a full cup of coffee that gives me hope. The way the steam rises from the cup. The way the caffeine keeps the headache at bay. The way it inspires me to be a better person.

I’m pretty sure everyone in my family feels that way. I come from a family of coffee addicts. There’s almost always a full pot going at my parents house. They drink it in the morning, during lunch, after dinner. At Emory they had free coffee for the people getting infusions and their guests. During a challenging time I know those free cups were something my mother looked forward to. It made her feel like the hospital cared about the people sitting there.

Sometimes my parents gift us coffee. Not the way most people do. When most people give coffee as gifts they usually give a fancy, single origin whole bean. Something definitely shade grown and 100% Fair Trade.

Not my parents.

When they give coffee as a gift it’s because they found some on sale and don’t want want us to have to spend money on it for the next year and a half. It’s always in a huge tub and of highly questionable quality.

Recently, however, my parents hit the coffee sale lottery.

Apparently Ingles was recently running a deal on Chock Full of Nuts. I know this because as I left my parent’s house on Sunday, they handed me with an extra large tub of it. The also gifted one to my sister Valerie, and I’m sure Rachel and Anneclaire have ones on their way to them in the mail. I was happy to have it, because as everyone knows, Chock Full of Nuts is the Cadillac of cheap, mass produced coffee. It's like an 18% tip. Not quite right, but also something you can't complain about. If you work somewhere and your office provides you with Chock Full of Nuts, you know that your employer cares about you slightly more than they have to. They’re not willing to get you Starbucks, but they aren’t going to subject you to that WalMart shit either. It’s the most we can hope for in our capitalistic society.

So as I took off the yellow plastic stop, pealed back that foiled freshness seal, and dumped the contents of the container in the glass jar that holds my coffee, I thought for a moment of the beauty of what my parents had given me. If coffee gives me hope, my parents were going to be providing that hope for the foreseeable future.

And at a cheap price to boot.

What better parenting could a 41 year old man ask for.