Best Coffee part 4: The relativity of suffering

I stay up late on a Sunday night just so I can hear the silence. My bedroom window is the speaker through which Sports Club music, traffic noise, and drunken pedestrian shouts are broadcast into my sleep. But an hour or two each Sunday night is not enough, so I regularly try and escape the noise for a day or two.

One year my buddy James and I tried to find some quiet in the Mpumalanga mountain district, but the place we had booked to camp had lots of cars and kids and manicured lawns. So we rode out of town and found another place out in the woods which seemed deserted and unkempt.

It’s there that we met Fred, an old man living on his own in a beat-up caravan in the park, getting paid minimal wage but with the benefit of a front porch made up of the Sabie forests. It would make me sound good to say that we befriended the elderly guy because we could see he was lonely, but thats not the truth, not for me anyway. We first went over to speak to him because he was playing his music way too loudly. There was so much wrong with the picture, not excluding the choice of music, the distortion of the tiny speakers, and the contrast with the solemn Lowveld Panorama. We had to save the silence.

James is a guy with a big heart, so he wasn’t brutal about it, in fact the only thing he did was make small-talk and throw in how far we had come for some peace and quiet. A feint hint at best. The result was the music turned softer, but only to tell us some stories of his time as a soldier on the border, and how he had lost his wife. It was then that we decided to drop the music issue.

We invited him over to our campsite for a poitjie, which was a disaster story of it’s own. I tried in vain to rescue it from becoming chicken soup by transferring it from the cast-iron pot to the gas stove, but it didn’t seem to work. It did however give us time to hear more stories while I attempted to boil off the liquid. A few hours later and we had learned that Fred didn’t just lose a wife but was about to lose his back, with mega surgery coming soon which would either allow him to walk in the forests once again, or leave him paralyzed forever.

We ate the soup. He stared into the distance a lot. We tried to seem concerned. I was concerned, about my poitjie making skills. He pretended to like the poitjie. I pretended to know what he was going through, but I didn’t. I pushed limp and soggy chicken skin around my plate. He chewed on undercooked rice and smoked a lot. At least there was some silence.

The only way to make a happy ending out of bad stories about poitjie soup and broken lives is to have a really spectacular cup of coffee. Here’s the recipe: Double espresso’s made in the moka pot on the gas stove. Add milk chocolate to the upper chamber and let it melt while the pressure builds in the boiler. Stir the mixture as it bubbles into the upper chamber, keeping the chocolate from building bricks. Heat up ceramic mugs, and pour in 1/3 condensed milk. Pour the chocolate/espresso mixture into the milk in a smooth swirling motion.

That’s enough of a sugar/caffeine combination to perk a hippo. Which meant sleep did not come easily, but it did leave sufficient time to ponder the meaning of suffering in this world. I cant say I figured it out. Perhaps I would have done better had my heart not been echoing it’s palpitations in my sleeping bag. Perhaps I would have done better had Fred turned his darn music softer. Or perhaps it was meant to remain as much a mystery as the reason for my poitjie turning to soup.