A Cure for Blood Suckers

When I wake up, the first thing that I do is make a pot of coffee. I grind the beans and while the aroma is filling the house, I read or write or just stare into space.

I have coffee stations at the university, like the secretary, she makes a good pot of coffee, and my first refill is in her office. My second and sometimes third refill is my Cajun professor’s office. She makes the good strong Cajun coffee. The first time I drank her coffee it came with a warning, and I thought milk in coffee no way, so I took a sip and fell hopelessly in love with the coffee that she has delivered from her mother, who lives in New Orleans. In the winter when the other students, the really young ones, traipse over to the cafeteria, they bring me back a large coffee from Starbucks, and I am content. Coffee is my addiction and I have no plans to join a twelve-step program, nor go to rehab, nor any of the other ways that addictions are overcome.

The other day, Mr. Zelda and I were sitting outside on our tiny patio and he kept hitting mosquitoes, I asked him what was the problem and he said, “I’m getting ate alive out here.”
I looked at my legs, my arms, and in my personal space and while the mosquitoes were getting close, they didn’t get on me. Maybe scientists have it all wrong, the use of toxins for pesticides, maybe they need to look to the coffee bean. I mean an insect hasn’t bitten me all summer. Come to think of it, I don’t remember the last time, I had any kind of insect bite. Perhaps, the coffee is the key or it might be that I have so many other chemicals in my body from all the medicine that I take, the poor things overdoes after one suck of my blood. Nonetheless, the coffee thing might be a project to pursue.

From now on when we go outside, Mr. Zelda rubs a little cold coffee on his face and arms. He says the insects now leave him alone too. That could mean one of two things, coffee is toxic, or I make a terrible cup of Joe. Maybe all Buffy needed to do was drink my coffee.