Saint Keurig

She is the patron saint of efficiency, streamlined design, good taste and caffeine. Her name languished in obscurity for centuries, but she has recently become everyone’s favorite saint. And she has changed my life.

Coffee has been a part of my life since I became conscious, but my mother did not drink coffee. This is surprising, since she was the product of several generations of Swedish farmers; Swedes are famous for the mass quantities of coffee they can consume. My grandparents were a case in point. Grandpa would leave for the potato warehouse in the still, dark hours of the morning with a thermos of coffee that held eight cups of coffee or so, returning for breakfast with an empty thermos at 7:00. Grandpa and Grandma would share a percolated pot of coffee for breakfast (two or three cups each), then he would head off for the fields with full thermos, to be refilled again at lunch. They drank coffee at dinner—they probably drank coffee in their sleep. And they both lived into their eighties; when I visited the hospital room in which my grandfather eventually died, I was quite sure that the IV contained coffee. They drank real coffee—none of that pussy decaffeinated stuff (which I don’t think had been invented yet). This was coffee that would put hair on your chest (or at least on Grandpa’s—I don’t want to think about hair on Grandma’s chest). Most of my early memories of their house are olfactory—bread baking, meat frying or roasting, and always coffee percolating.

So no one knew what the hell was up with my mother. Her fellow family members thought of her as some sort of mutant when it came to the coffee issue. My aunts Elaine and Gloria, Mom’s older and younger sister, carried on the coffee inhaling tradition with gusto. I have few memories of either one of them without a coffee mug in her hand. My mother didn’t even drink tea. She drank a lot of water, fruit juice, and was in the vanguard of drinking the first diet sodas as they came out in the sixties. “Tab” was the first—if she was avoiding coffee and tea in order to avoid caffeine, she blew it with Tab. She also blew the unwritten law that human beings should not ingest things that are 99% unnatural elements.

I don’t remember when I first started drinking coffee; my Dad drank it (made by my mother, of course), so I’m sure it was during my high school years. I do, however, remember when I started drinking gallons of it, as a good half-Swede should. It was the year after high school, the year before I went away to college. I spent a year at the little Bible school my father was president of, in order to gradually move into the mode of being away from home before going away to college two thousand miles the next fall. Bible school was easy and boring, but it introduced me to the routine of being somewhat on my own and living at least a pseudo-academic life while also working thirty to thirty-five hours per week at the local supermarket where I had worked part-time during my last two years of high school. One day I decided to keep track of my coffee consumption, which I suspected was on the rise—that day from waking to sleeping, I consumed twenty-four Styrofoam cups of coffee. And that was a normal day. Ted, the manager of the supermarket, served as my coffee-consumption role model. In the years that I worked for Ted, I never saw him eat a bite of food—all he did was drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. The Styrofoam cups of coffee cost ten cents each from the machine in the break room—I’ll bet Ted spent three dollars per day at least. Ted was a no-nonsense guy and didn’t have the time to doctor up his black coffee with cream and/or sugar. I behaved similarly and have ever since.

On spring sabbatical more than six years ago my life was changed forever, because I discovered one of the greatest, nay miraculous, inventions ever conceived by the human mind—the miracle of Keurig. I was in residence at an ecumenical Institute for four months; the common space in the Institute’s central building, just three doors down from my little apartment, as well as the gathering area in the basement of the library just fifteen feet away from my office door had one of these eight wonders of the world. I carried many valuable things out of that sabbatical, but none were more life-changing than the Keurig machine. I told Jeanne when I returned about the magic of Keurig so many times that she got me a single-cup red one for Christmas.

Jesus said in the gospels that we should not keep our light hidden under a bushel, and I let Keurig light shine all over campus when classes started the next fall. Prior to the first philosophy department meeting of the semester, I told the chair that we needed to get rid of the twelve cup Black and Decker coffee maker in the department office and get a Keurig machine. “Sounds like a good idea,” she said. “I’ll bring it up for discussion at the department meeting.” Bad idea—I thought I had taught her better. As the outgoing department chair, it was my duty to provide the new chair with various tricks of the trade I had learned in my four years running the department. The most important of these tricks was that the chair should bring matters to the department for discussion and vote as infrequently as possible. If something can be done without getting department input, do it. Trying to get twenty plus philosophers to agree on what day it is, let alone on something important, is an exercise in futility. If I had still been chair, I would have said to our administrative assistant Gail “order a Keurig machine and ten different flavors of Keurig cups for the department,” everyone would have Ooohed and Aaahed at it, Gail or I would have given a brief class on Keurig use and etiquette, and everything would have been done. But NO . . . the whole freaking department had to discuss and vote on it.

At the September meeting I made my Keurig machine pitch, half the department thought it was a great idea and wondered why the item hadn’t already been purchased. But then the other half, the folks who want to discuss and debate just to hear the mellifluous tones of their own voices, took over.

“I read online that Keurig cups have carcinogens in them.”

“Shouldn’t we be buying coffee locally to help the Rhode Island economy?”

“I heard that there’s something in the cups that is dangerous for pregnant women.”

That’s when I lost it. Looking around the room of seventeen or eighteen guys and two women, one of whom was in her sixties and the other in her forties, I asked “WHO THE HELL IS GETTING PREGNANT?” But the debate continued until after a half hour I moved to table the motion. Because I knew how to get around this.

The October department meeting was scheduled at the same time as the monthly Faculty Senate meeting. Three members of the philosophy department were members of the Senate and needed to be there for an early discussion and vote, promising to get to the department meeting no more than a half hour late. These three were also Keurig opponents. I talked the chair into delaying the usual announcements and minutes approval, moving directly to taking the Keurig motion off the table. No conversation ensued, we took a vote and unanimously approved the purchase of a Keurig machine and all necessary accoutrements in five minutes. Signed, sealed and delivered before the missing colleagues returned from the Senate. They have never forgiven me (but they do use the Keurig machine).

When a year later I was asked to direct the Development of Western Civilization, I did things my way. My first executive decision was to retire the ancient industrial four-pot coffee maker and get a Keurig machine for the fifty or so faculty teaching in the program in a given semester. This started a trend—in short order, Keurig machines could be found in the Provost’s office, the Center for Teaching Excellence, the Liberal Arts Honors Program office, and every department worth the name on campus. After two years of using the philosophy department Keurig machine, the theology department upstairs even got their own.

Now that my four years as program director have ended and I’m on sabbatical again, I occasionally wonder what, if anything, my directorship will be remembered for. Guiding the program through the first years of a new and improved version? Moving into a fabulous new humanities building designed specifically with the needs of this program in mind? My complete disregard for Robert’s Rules of Order when running faculty meetings? My starting every faculty meeting by saying “Here’s what we are not talking about today”? None of the above. Thanks to the wisdom and guidance of her blessedness Saint Keurig, I will be forever remembered as the director who got the Keurig machine.