Dear Me Letter: Tallcupacoffee

Dear Me,

There are times when I get up in the morning that my wit’s dull so I slap it around a little on an Arkansas Whetstone and it hones it up sharp enough to wet the paper with some ink.

 And to add a little edge, i pour myself a cup of coffee in what I call my Truckdriver’s Mug that I got after supper with sister Carol and her husband, Jim, at a catfish place called Grampa’s in North Little Rock. The look on Grandpa’s face when I asked to buy it said, ‘What kinda cornstalk are you cut from to want a piddly cup like this?” I don’t know if he’d have understood if I’d told him.

When I drink coffee out of that mug, I’m not just drinking coffee. I’m drinking the family driving down the old Hot Springs Highway back when roads were so skinny there wasn’t room enough for a white line to go down the middle.

I can hear the sound of dirt and gravel under the tires as we pulled off the road and parked by a couple of Mack trucks to grab a sandwich in the diner. Inside, a couple of Paul Bunyon rednecks would be at the counter chewing the fat over a cup of coffee in one of those fat friendly mugs. One had arms thick as a good sized Arkansas pine and the other one lanky like a teenage sapling. I was a shy 12-year old so just looked. The thought never entered my mind that I could talk to them. They were too big. But friendly big. Daddy would say “They’re good ol’ boys.”

And they talked with the twang of a homemade “GITtar” tuned with white lightning in a full moonshine summer’s night. I looked on them as kind of heroes. Any Arkansas traveler who could muscle around a truck that big should come out the other end with a medal of some kind.

By the way, stamped in the bottom of my mug is the name Victor. Word has it Victor owned one of the first diners in Pope County back when truckdrivers started trucking. He got fed up listening to his wife yelling about all the broken cups. So in the middle of the night he went down to Ferris Gulley, scooped out some clay, and went back to the woodshed behind the diner and made, as he put it, “a cup that would bounce off the hardest head this side of the Ozarks, or any other side for that matter.”

All I can say is this tough little mug sure holds a tall cupacoffee!