Coffee and Clean Underwear

Every night before I go to bed I set up my Mr. Coffee-maker so that when I stumble down the stairs in the morning I can flip the switch and know that hot coffee is just minutes away! It’s the only way to face the day. Prior to my first sip of hot coffee, I have jumped out of bed, stripped off my PJs and felt in my top drawer for a pair of clean underwear. As I slip them on in semi-awake rote, I smell the sun and breezes or snow and bluster of the outdoors, because my underwear has never seen the inside of my largely-never-used clothes dryer.

OK. So I’ve got on my clean underwear and then I take my first sip of hot coffee which moves through my throat and down through my core, spreading its caffeine-infused heat like a warm blanket for innards. I don’t have words for the joy of this. It’s beyond the words humans have invented to describe a very good thing. Which is why I am foolish for trying to describe how and why coffee and clean underwear in the early morning make me feel like the world is a great place when the rest of the day usually slowly erodes this initial feeling of happiness!

But because I am human, and can never allow simple pleasures to remain simple, I started wondering if my sheer joy at having clean underwear and hot coffee first thing every morning is a deeply-embedded babyhood memory of morning joy when my mother picked me up, replaced my dripping diaper with a clean, dry one, and put her breast against my cheek so I could start my day with warm mother’s milk coursing through my tiny, helpless body.

But for this hypothesis to be true, I needed to consult experts in childhood memory stuff. Could a baby remember the wonderful feeling of clean underwear and hot liquid flowing in its body first thing each morning? Turns out the experts don’t know for sure. How surprising. Maybe we do have vague memories of primal feelings at an early age. . . or maybe not.

So I have decided to believe my own non-scientific hypothesis. Somewhere in the deepest folds of my brain, there resides the pure, delirious joy of clean underwear and warm liquid flowing throughout my body awakening it to a new day.