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“He/she makes a great cup of coffee.” Coffee making is not the province of any race, creed, or color. As I said, coffee is democratic.
    Once I went with a group of young people to the mountains on a weekend hike. The first morning, they awoke to find me happily boiling coffee over the campfire in a regular pot. When my mixture threatened to spill over, I poured in cold spring water to settle the grounds. They were astonished, then skeptical, but they finally gave in. The aroma got to them, you see, the smell. They had never had coffee that hadn’t been perked, brewed, or dripped from some high-tech device. What I gave them was strong—too strong, really. But they drank it, and they pronounced it the best they’d ever had.
    I doubt that it was. Coffee always tastes better outdoors. Besides, it was the only coffee around.
    I may not remember my first cup of coffee, but I do remember my last. It was only a few minutes ago. I am sensitive to the fact of an emptying pot, and I am eager to be the first to pour from a fresh one. I find it to be an honorable vice, a pleasurable friend, and a solace in times when I’m alone and in need of contemplation. I also find it to be one of the few things I can share with people without being afraid of giving offense. Unless I smoke, of course.
    I hope I shall always feel the way I do about coffee, and I hope the Meddlers leave it alone and spend their time finding things wrong with broccoli and tofu. I’m not sure why coffee is, only that it is, and that it’s one of the few constants in life that can always be counted on.

THE BOOK THAT SCARRY BUILT:
BEING IN PART A DISCOURSE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ROLE OF CHILDREN IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
    “When the first baby laughed for the first time,
    the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about,
    and that was the beginning of fairies.”
    —J.M. Barrie

    I hate Richard Scarry. More precisely, I hate Richard Scarry’s books. They are, I am convinced, born of an insidious intent: to drive parental readers insane with insipid inanity and irritating irrelevancy. Scarry doubtlessly takes a devious pleasure in concocting them and populating them with hundreds—thousands, it sometimes seems—of idiotic, vacuous characters engaged in a bedlam of moronic activities while wearing stupid smiles on their wide, lunatic faces. Their design, clearly, is to irk and vex a reader to the point of utter distraction. What I learned, though, is that, for a parent, they’re as unavoidable as dirty diapers, and they’re just as obnoxious.
    You see, I once had this vision. As I anticipated the birth of our two children, I could see myself comfortably seated in an overstuffed chair, my offspring warmly wrapped in woolen nightclothes on my lap, snug, fuzzy slippers on their little feet, their eyes all aglow with fascination as I narrated tales of Mother Goose, Aesop, or—joy of joys!—Winnie the Pooh to them from heavy, leather-bound tomes lovingly removed from the oaken bookshelves of their rooms. Then, my vision continued, when they grew older—say three or four—we would graduate to children’s versions of the classical myths, to stories of Odysseus, Pegasus, and Jason and the Argonauts. I even located a volume of stories from Shakespeare for children to save for them when they were ready. Well, that was my vision.
    Some years later, the average evening found me fixed between three-year-old Wesley and two-year-old Virginia, not on a comfortable chair, but on our broken-down old divan, covered with stains from childhood messiness, the only piece of furniture we owned that was large enough to accommodate all three of us and the mandatory presence of their collection of dolls, stuffed animals, blankets, and other companioning paraphernalia brought along to that period of time Virginia indelibly named, “Weadbook!”
    Neither child is snugly wrapped in traditional nightclothes. Wesley sports an oversized tee-shirt emblazoned