“I would like an iced single venti sugar-free vanilla six pump nonfat caramel sauce on the top and on the bottom, light ice with room, double cupped latte.”

I have never said that or anything close to that to a barista or to anyone else.

I don’t drink coffee.

Coffee is a big part of our world. For example, there are mystery stains. We see them and they cause us discomfort. Then there are coffee stains. They appear on everything from white shirts to important papers. They are familiar and don’t give us the willies.

I was taking a class when a classmate offered me a cup of coffee. I thanked her politely and declined her kind offer, adding that I wasn’t a coffee drinker.

“I know what you mean,” she responded. “I like everything about coffee except the taste.”

There are many facets to the coffee drinking habits of Americans. Coffee drinkers find comfort, familiarity, caffeine, and tradition is quaffing “Norwegian gasoline.”

Many folks are firm believers that perking coffee makes for a working brain.

One of the things that attracted me to coffee was the smell. My bedroom was just above the kitchen in our old farmhouse. I would wake up in the morning to those delightful smells of perking coffee and frying bacon wafting upward.

My first sampling of coffee occurred when I would dunk stale homemade doughnuts into my father’s cup of coffee. It softened the pastry enough to ingest. Bits of the sinker never left the mug, leaving doughnut-dunking dumplings in the bottom of my father’s cup. He never complained.

I wanted to become a coffee drinker. Coffee drinking appeared to a young lad to be one of those things that meant one had become an adult, like being able to stay up late enough to watch Johnny Carson.

I recall my first real sip of java. It was back when I was like Beaver of the Cleavers. My mother made coffee so strong that I had to shake the cup to get the coffee out. I remember saying a short prayer and taking a full snort of Mom’s battery acid. Bark fell from the trees. I didn’t sleep for a year. I didn’t blink for six months.

I wanted to be a coffee drinker. I tried it black. It was bitter. I tried it with cream. I tried it with sugar. I tried it with cream and sugar. I tried it with ketchup. I tried it with gravy. OK, I didn’t really try it with ketchup and gravy. I saved them for the lutefisk. I tried drinking coffee a number of different ways. I wasn’t enthused by any of them.

Do you remember your first cup of coffee? I doubt that it made you smile. It likely made you utter something that sounded like, “Wwwwhhhhhuuuuuu!”

My family drank coffee all day long. There was an endless supply of a bucket of mud, insomnia in a cup, brain juice, and jitter juice. The members of my family drank so much coffee that they could sleep with their eyes open. They didn’t sweat, they percolated. They wore the finish off the coffee table and the Thermos was on wheels. They thought CPR stood for “Coffee Provides Resuscitation.”

Our home had scalding coffee constantly simmering on the kitchen stove. The coffee tended to be robust.

Sometimes my mother made “egg coffee.” She put eggshells into the coffee. I was told that it was not the eggshell itself, but the thin layer of albumen inside the shell that clarified the coffee and made it sweeter.

A neighbor drank “sugar drop.” It was generally the last cup of coffee of the day. He held a sugar cube in his teeth and slurped the coffee through it.

Coffee was such an important part of the lives of those around me when I was a boy, that I was surprised that it was not the hot part of our grade school hot lunch program.

My neighbor Crandall complained about how coffee makes him nervous. I suggested he quit drinking it, but he said that if he didn’t have the shakes, he wouldn’t get any exercise at all. He doesn’t like drinking coffee in the morning because it keeps him awake all day.

I wanted to be a coffee drinker, but I wasn’t good at it. I didn’t find the coffee palatable and the beverage found me unworthy. An employer told me that he was glad I didn’t drink coffee. It would have taken too long to retrain me after a coffee break.

I became a tea drinker because I was a failed coffee drinker. I became a tea drinker by default.

Coffee just isn’t my cup of tea.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.