Adjustments

A week ago, my family made our annual pilgrimage to South Padre Island. At risk of ruining a good thing by letting too many people know about it, I highly recommend visiting South Padre the week after Labor Day. My son, Ben, let the rest of us in on it a year ago and I believe it’s going to become a regular thing.

After Labor Day, the island is almost void of tourists because everyone’s kids are back in school. The service in the half-empty restaurants is top-notch and the gift shops have everything on sale. But I diverge….

This year, Paula and I went with two of our adult children and their significant others. On the first morning at the beach, I woke to the smell of fresh coffee and I trudged into the kitchen where Donny, my daughter’s pal was brewing up the good stuff.

Donny had an old-fashioned coffee percolator sitting on the stove and offered me a cup of its bounty. Now, I’ll admit that everything tastes better on vacation, but that coffee was easily as good was anything my old mother used to make while I was still renting a room from my parents the year after high school.

The next Autumn, I started school at the University of Texas, and fresh coffee was one of the early casualties of my tight budget. When I graduated from UT and began my first job, my secretary kept a Mr. Coffee dripping on the counter between our offices. It was ok coffee and, most important, it was convenient, but it was not nearly as good as the brew my mom had made.

Over the years, I’ve frequented lots of coffee shops in search of good java and, to my shame, I must admit I’ve even consumed a lot of gas station coffee simply because it was convenient. None of that mud came close to my mother’s coffee until I tasted Donny’s percolator brew. I later learned he had even invested time and practice to perfect his ratio of ground coffee beans to water.

I did some quick mental mathematics and realized Donny’s perfectly percolated potable was costing less than a buck a mug. On our trip back home, I paid about two bucks a cup for the ever-convenient gas station swill and I read an article stating that those fru-fru coffees in coffee shops now cost up to twenty bucks a cup.

That made me wake up in the middle of the night wondering about the gradual downward adjustments in quality we’ve blindly accepted in the name of convenience and expedience. What else besides coffee are we cheating ourselves on? Have we gone so far as to accept less-than-accurate worldviews because it’s more convenient to go along with the crowd than think for ourselves?

Think I’m crazy? Shoot me an email and we can meet to talk about it. Yep, I’ll even buy you a cup of coffee (so long as it’s not that fru-fru crap).

A meeting of great minds who think alike