Mountains and Islands

Do you have a favorite Christmas memory? I revisit mine every Christmas morning, and each time, it reminds me what great parents I had, a childhood charmed. As it turns out, or at least as I turned out (not so terrible, if I don't say so myself), modest indulgence of one's children doesn't ruin them. I was a one-big-thing kind of kid. Many of my friends produced annual litanies of Christmas wants, long lists for Santa well beyond the believing years. My style was to hold out for a single, impossible gift. "What do you want for Christmas this year?" Mom would ask. "All I want is _______________." When I was seven it was a horse, of course. "Where are we going to keep him?" Mom asked. "In the garage?" My second-grade brain imagined that as not such a bad place for a horse to live, and dad would no longer have to mow the lawn and we never parked the cars in there anyway and I'd take care of him, I promised. Each Christmas the

I work at a bank. When I relayed this tidbit to my buddy Rich, he asked, "Couldn't you find something more ethical? Wasn't the mafia hiring in your area?" Yes, banks are evil. But repugnance comes in degrees, morality in shades of gray. My bank, the one from which I now collect an arguably honorable paycheck, is better than most; it accepted no TARP bailout money and enjoys pretty high ratings for customer service. I can live with that. But if somebody makes me an offer I can't refuse...  Most days, it's busy enough. I'm either helping customers with financial transactions, reading up on riveting new banking regulations and internal bank policies and procedures, filing, counting, organizing, sanitizing my hands for handling all that filthy money. But there are occasional lulls, during which a mind like mine is wont to wander. Today, on one such occasion, I was struck with snippets of self-amusing, cliché-riddled bank humor. Hi. I'm Penny. Wanna meet

Ron called the other day to say he'd roasted the last of our coffee for this year and it's already sold. "That's great," I said. "It has an oriental flavor," he said. "What does?" "Our coffee. That's what they said." "That's what who said?" "The people who roasted it. That's how they think we should market it." "So, our coffee tastes like shoyu and mono sodium glutamate?" At this, he lost it, cracking up, laughing so hard I had to hold the phone away from my ear. Picture red cheeks, tears of hilarity. Ron collected himself with a signature, exaggerated sign, and said, "Good one, sweetie. I think they though it was kind of floral, like jasmine or something." Our coffee is mellow and naturally sweet, but otherwise, it tastes like coffee. Really good coffee. Exceptional coffee. No bitterness. No bite. Smooth. Not jasmine or lotus or cherry blossom. Not salty, or sweet and sour.