I want coffee. That’s the other quick alimentary change I made when we moved here: marmalade to jelly and tea to coffee. Lovely dark thick coffee. Energy-packing java. Muddy old Joe.

It was Joe who introduced me to it. The Americanization of Angel. Joe always called me Angel, when we were alone.

We first noticed one another in photography class. We had the same English and History classes that junior year, too, but it was in photo that we could give our humor free rein, so we had to contend with each other.  Joe was always the funny little Jewish guy. Master of exaggeration. High Pooh-Bah of hyperbole. And I got mileage from my accent and my British tendency to understatement. We made a natural comedy team. We fell in love.

Before him, I looked forward to my afternoon cuppa. I’d come home from my new school, and Mum and I would put together a homesick tea. We couldn’t find clotted cream, but we made do with sweetened cottage cheese. We had Chips Ahoy for biscuits. We could get better cucumbers and watercress than we had at home; we made lovely sandwiches.

Joe introduced me to coffee. Sometimes we’d splurge and go to Sausalito or San Francisco for espresso, but mostly we had bottomless cups at The Copper Penny or Lyons. We jokingly altered the phrase from “cuppa” to “cup o’” and we had it with cream and sugar. Actually, we had it with sugar and cream. Joe pointed out that if we added the sugar first, we added it to the coffee at its hottest, and it melted more readily. Ever since he mentioned that, I’ve noticed that everyone who has cream and sugar with coffee adds the cream first. I can’t figure it out. Why cool the coffee before trying to melt granulated sugar into it?

But that was Joe: always thinking differently. My little Shylock. Ooof! That swerve made me move my ankle. The Vicodin must be working, because now I can tell it hurts, and I don’t seem to mind it. That’s the thing about narcotics, even synthetic ones: they don’t take the pain away so much as make it not irritating. But the way Don jerked the wheel made my foot slip off the seat, putting weight on my damn ankle; I’m getting the interesting signal that I did some damage on Steep Ravine. And I made enough of a grunt that now both of them are asking how I’m doing. “I’m okay.” I speak softly. “I’ll make it. What was that?” and my husband tells me he wasn’t expecting an oncoming car around that turn he just took, while Joe reaches back and briefly caresses my upper right arm (oh no! too soft! 33 years! I have no skin tone!) with his left hand.

Joe and I had fun that last year and a half of high school. We were in love. Photography led to yearbook our senior year, which in turn led to photo assignments that took us off campus and into adventures of mutual exploration.

He was too short to be handsome, too Jewish-looking to be a hunk. But he was taller than I, and he was the class personality. He could have been president of our senior class, but he opted instead to be emcee of everything. If Woody Allen and Billy Crystal had a kid…