That first cup of coffee

Just a brief note from Ashland, Oregon, where I am visiting the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Note: The B.C. smoke eventually blew away from Lynden, but here in Ashland, nearby wildfires are creating smoky air. Every evening at about 6:30 a "smoke committee" at the OSF has to determine if air quality permits the outdoor performance in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre. They have had to cancel several shows in the recent past. My sister-in-law and I have tickets for the performance there tonight of The Merry Wives of Windsor. If it gets cancelled I'll receive an email.

Anyway, today's episode is about my coffee dependency. When we checked in two days ago, there was a packet containing a coffee pod for use in the tiny automatic drip coffee maker in our room. I used it yesterday. This morning, I slept past the complimentary "Continental" breakfast offered by the hotel and, having no coffee in the room, decided to drive down the road to a Dutch Bros Coffee stand I noticed yesterday. My sister-in-law came along.

Walking to the car, I veered into a bush beside the sidewalk. Under the best of circumstances, I veer when I walk. It's a family trait. We don't walk a straight line. We zig-zag. My in-laws have all learned when walking with their spouses to expect him or her to bump into their arm every nine or ten paces before reeling off again to a distance of up to a yard away. For the most part, we avoid crashing into objects lining our path, but this morning, pre-coffee, I walked into a bush.

We got in the car and I backed out of the space, put the car in drive, and gently pressed the accelerator. No action. Eventually I realized I had the emergency brake on, loosed it, and we drove out of the parking lot onto Siskiyou Boulevard. I drove a little ways before my sister-in-law suggested I pull out of the bike lane into the lane of traffic. I did.

I made it through the process of pulling up to the coffee stand, ordering, paying for, and receiving coffee without undue mishap. I got a drip coffee with cream, my sister-in-law a white chocolate mocha. We drove back. Before getting out of the car, I fished in my wallet for the room key, which is a card, not a key. You wave it in front of the door handle and the lock clicks open, a green light flashes, and you can open the door.

We got up to the door and I waved my card around to no avail. I looked more closely at it to see if I was holding it in the right direction and saw that in fact I was waving my Kaiser Permanente insurance card at the door. My sister-in-law came to my rescue and opened the door. We came in and I was finally able to drink my coffee and return what passes for normalcy.