Wednesday, November 28, 2012

48 Spoons

"I have measured out my life in coffee spoons."

That deceptively simple and seemingly banal observation, as any English undergrad worth a battered Penguin paperback should know, is from T.S. Eliot's celebrated 1915 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." That line sprang into my undercaffeinated mind a few moments ago as I spooned a mountain of Folgers Crystals into a styrofoam cup of boiling water. And that coffee is so good on a cold, late-November morning. A life measured out in coffee spoons isn't necessarily a bad life.