L 166 M

When my mother wakes up, she first opens the eyelids of her conscious to remember for a second what she had been dreaming about. During that second, through the inward eye all the colourful, happy and sad movements, objects and feelings slip down among the claws of her memories, never to be brought back to life if only by their very reoccurrence in it. I know that because she told me. Next she opens her eyes for real and staggers downstairs into the kitchen to prepare coffee. She sets out the cups, the spoons, the sugar and the milk onto a plate and sits down to wait for the coffee to be ready.

A few years ago she used to smoke a cigarette while waiting, nowadays she just sits observing. The white eight sided cups on similar saucers bore her to death, she prefers the ones that we, her sons sometimes get as presents. She particularly likes the one that has a giraffe on it. The body of the giraffe swells out in relief from the white porcelain of the cup, bowing its head down to its feet so that the neck forms the handle of the cup. The animal smiles cutely at a point constantly changing in time, but also in space, since that thing the giraffe is looking at is not on the cup. The other cup Mum likes a lot is green. My brother got it for one of his birthdays, or maybe for Christmas from a girlfriend of his. That girl like all the others my brother went out with was thin with short black hair, she wore glasses and didn't live have a telephone, also her father was dead or just divorced from her mother, anyway, he didn't live with his daughter. The funny thing about the cup is that when you drink your coffee, it has to be an American type of coffee with lots of water and milk, you find a small frog on the bottom of the cup. One would expect that somebody who drinks from it gets scared, but nobody ever got frightened, everybody would just smile and say it's funny. Similar cups with crocodiles, mice or snakes exists, also elephants and other exotic animals are represented in relief on cups like the one with the giraffe on.

Coffee cups that are not sold in sets sometimes can be precious to their users for they usually carry emotions, souvenirs of the one that made a present of it to us. Cups with names and proverbs written on are of this type along with the ones described in the previous paragraph. When one drinks coffee, milk, fruit juice or just plain water from such cups, one doesn't appreciate really the quality of the beverage. A benevolent feeling of the emotion that is related to the cup overwhelms the drinker. Memory opens its gate, the letters of the name of the person that gave us the cup lights up on top of it and the personality of the giver of the cup flies out of it, encircles us, the time we passed with him or her sends out its smells, lights and sounds and for a few minutes we step into another world. When one finishes drinking and puts the cup down all this world is sucked back into it, making the cup a recepient for that portion of our past life.

The specially designed coffee cups differ in many ways from the coffee cups that are sold in sets. While we only use funny cups occasionally, normal cups are used customarily. For instance when the coffee is ready, my mother pours it out into the eight sided ones to bring it upstairs and drink it with my father. She doesn't use the cups she likes, because she's too tired to care or that they haven't been washed since the night before, but also because the morning coffee is a ritual in their lives. They drink the coffee together discussing the day's duties, they perform that every day, except maybe for the weekends and having different cups would in a way disturb the mental route that connects them and which allows them to communicate silently. This silent connection is then with them all day. Drinking from similar cups establishes a kind of relationship among the drinkers, should they be a couple like my parents or a party of six or more. It is like in a restaurant, all the persons eating at the separate tables belong to a small community, which doesn't break up when one of the members pays his bill and leaves, since if you meet him later that day, you would recognise him, maybe even say hello to him, though you might not remember where you've seen him.

The use of coffee sets allows us to concentrate on coffee itself. One feels the warmth spreading out in the body, the caffeine making the heart beat faster, the flow of blood quickening, energy being produced to surplus, the mind setting down to creative work. Instead of watching the show of the past, one concentrates on near future, on the day to come or a specific task. To reach this effect of coffee people use simple cups, plain one colour ones, or sets with little decoration.

The difference between coffee sets and cups with individual design is washed away when we consider the fact that the similar coffee cups evoke different feelings in different families. A plain white set of coffee cups can have a socialist-realist feeling when used in a family living in a big block-of-flats, which would be totally other than it would have in the home of a family living in an all glass and metal house equipped with the latest high tech. It would have yet a different feeling when used in a flat rented by five students, not only because of the factor of environment, but also because of the differences of attitude towards life. The time factor is also crucial, with age everything changes character. Drinking from a brand new cup would put forth the fastening effect of coffee, while an old cup with its radiation of patina would help on bringing out the relaxing part of coffee. Other factors of the design of a coffee cup, such as material, colour or shape also influence a lot the state of mind of the user. Drinking from a porcelain cup makes coffee drinking a short holiday in the day, while having coffee from an ugly plastic glass can transform a nice custom into a boring necessity. The most important of all to the design are the motives, the drawings, the pictures that are represented on the cups and which are directly related to the mixture of emotions the cup arouses in the innocent drinker. The picture of a cyclist for instead would create an active feeling, while that of a gun will pump up the adrenaline level of most coffee thirsty person till aggressively, as for a flower, a peaceful mood is most likely to invade the brain cells.

As we have seen so far, the effect of coffee and drinking coffee is made up of a complex set of impressions and experiences that on their own only account for half of what we experience whiledrinking coffee. This part of the effect is constant with every cup at every single occasion. Personality is responsible for the other half of the coffee experience. Our basic dispositions are in a way reinforced by coffee. When my mother wakes, she is tired and angry at us, for not waking up in time, or she just feels fine, for on nice mornings everybody is only happy. Drinking coffee chases away tiredness from her and only remain anger, happiness, or whatever her mood is, to mix with the feeling of coffee, thus resulting in either melancholic or aggressive anger, either in silent or violent happiness.

Sometimes we are not conscious of the change of feeling we undergo, though every slight change has its outside source, should it be a needle or a house, a whisper or an ear-breaking noise. Everything is related to everything. The morning quarrel a shoemaker has with his wife might ruin years of the life of those that will wear the shoes he would make that day, for his bad mood will be reflected on all the things he'd do until he doesn't have a real nice coffee and forgets about the domestic raw. Having different cups at home enables us to, as I should say, influence our moments at least at fifty percent. One should be having cups for weekday mornings and weekend mornings, for afternoon parties, just as one should be able to say hello or goodbye, for if one wants to influence himself, he can.