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Bud Grossmann's
Words of the Week
for the Week of
June 26, 2005
Published as Family History
in a Gramma Letter dated September 24, 1996.
© 1996 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Coffee Cups, 1979
© 1979 by Bud Grossmann
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A CAN WITH A HOLE IN IT
Tuesday, September 24, 1996
Dear Gramma,
Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since I last saw my wife discharge a firearm. I thought of that just now, because I was making a pot of coffee.
Coffee, in our family, is an occasional treat—not part of the daily breakfast routine. We buy a two-pound bag of good Columbian beans and they last us the better part of a year. I don’t think of Frances and guns every single time I grind beans—but today I did.
Fran is at work, the kids are in school, the day is fresh. I made a little pot, and I made it strong. The brown brew that gurgled into the carafe was almost opaque. Sunlight, streaming through our kitchen window, struggled to penetrate the potent perfusion.
I put a splash of milk in a good-sized mug and spooned some sugar into it. When the coffeemaker stopped speaking to me, I emptied the pot, stirred, and sipped. Aaaah! Dee-licious! The aroma, the taste, the momentary fog on my eyeglasses! Caffeine buzzed into my brain and swept my thoughts across the miles and the years.
In my mind, I am in your Wisconsin farmhouse kitchen. I see your stovetop coffee pot of dulled aluminum, with a glass perk window in the lid. I see Grampa at the table, filling his cup—a chipped, plain white china mug—to within a half inch of the top. Then he adds milk from a pitcher until it sloshes over the brim and into his saucer. He begins to shovel from the sugar bowl—in the days before his diabetes diagnosis, he would add three teaspoons of sugar to his cup.
Butternut Coffee was your brand, more than any other. You must have gone through tons of the stuff. The cans were everywhere. Three-pounders, mostly, but one-pounders, too. They held pencils on your desk, machine parts in the shed, rat poison in the barn. We scooped chicken feed with a Butternut can. The dogs drank water from one and ate table scraps from another. The cans were everywhere.
When Frances first visited you and your farm, she had just turned twenty. She had seen and done a lot in her two decades of life, but she had never—she mentioned to me—fired a gun. She’d like to, she said. We borrowed Grampa’s Winchester .22, took a Butternut Coffee can for a target, and went up behind the barn.
It was January. It was cold. We wouldn’t stay out for long. I set the can on a rotted log at the edge of the stand of locust trees. Fran and I took shelter from the wind by going just inside the barn, by the oats bin. I explained how to hold the rifle, how to line up the front and rear sights, and the importance of squeezing the trigger. “Try for the top loop of the B in ‘Butternut,’” I suggested.
Steadying the rifle on a set of stacked cucumber crates, my bride took aim and fired. I peered out at the can—about fifty feet away—and could see no damage. “Honey, I think you missed it entirely,” I said. “But let me go check.”
Fran pointed the rifle aside, and I trudged through the snow to examine the target. “Oh my gosh! Look at this!” I brought the can to show her—she had placed the bullet so precisely through the top loop of the Butternut B that the hole was all but invisible. The loop was pierced, but the letter itself was untouched. “Incredible!” I said. “Let’s see if you can do it again. I’ll put the can back, and you can try for the bottom loop.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m done. Let’s go back inside the house and get warm.” And so we did. And Frances’s record of a bull’s eye for every single shot she’s ever fired still stands, to this very day.
♦
Well, Gram, my coffee’s getting cold. I think I’ll say goodbye.
Love,
Buddy
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