I recently performed my first magic trick by brewing coffee into thin air. Despite its obvious success (not a drop in the mug!), it was not accepted with great applause by my wife. Her patience with me was like a magic trick itself: now you see it, now you don’t.
They say a good magician never reveals the secret to his tricks. Since I’m not a good magician or any kind of magician, I don’t mind telling you this illusion was a simple one: I pressed brew on the single-cup side of our coffee maker and walked away without placing the ever-important single cup beneath the drip spout … and presto chango! When I returned five minutes later, I experienced a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture moment at the irregularity of my missing cup in the coffee maker, and I promise you it was no less mystifying as when David Copperfield zapped the Statue of Liberty into non-existence. I was confused. Did I already get my coffee? I swear I was brewing a cup. Then I noticed the steaming puddle of what I knew was about 10 oz of liquid, but appeared much larger than that, spreading across my new granite countertop, and the trick was revealed.
Way to go, Chris. That’s a new one for you, I thought. At least I couldn’t be accused of poor showmanship.
This week’s Happy Trails really ends there. Short and lacking, I know. Maybe even a bit pointless and certainly a mundane life-nuance that a better writer like Sun City’s TR Kerth could’ve probably spun 1,000 hilarious words around in his Whole Nine Yards column, but I have a good reason for keeping it short and simple this week: I couldn’t think of anything else to write!
It happens from time to time, and I suppose I could have yawned on for 1,000 words about how my wife and I cleaned up the spilled coffee and took extreme preventative measures to make sure the coffee didn’t stain the granite countertop, including smearing a flour then a baking soda paste over the surface to help draw out the moisture, which only succeeded at darkening the granite, but then I’d be culprit to another bad trick: bad writing disguised by long writing.
Unfortunately, writing isn’t always like coffee and good to the last drop.
