Other worlds

You see, I don't feel human in the morning until I've got at least a couple of cups of coffee flowing through my system.

For most of the year I drink the coffee we think of as "regular" and in other parts of the world is referred to as "American coffee." My preference is Community Coffee between roast, but I'll buy and brew whatever's on sale if I'm pinching pennies like we are now.

On winter mornings especially, I love to linger over hot cups of coffee. I take comfort from both the literal warmth of the mug and the liquid in it and also the pleasant jolt to my neurons as I transition from sleep to alertness.

But in the summer, this summer especially for some reason, I've abandoned my American coffee in favor of Cuban coffee--essentially a very sweet espresso. I first got hooked on Cuban coffee when I lived in Miami and where you could buy this stout brew served in plastic thimbles on any street. Virtually every block in Little Havana, and just about anywhere else in Dade County, had at least one walk up window where you could plunk down a quarter, get a dose along with a paper cone of water and be on your way within a minute.

To me, in hot weather those tiny cups of Cuban coffee seem like the way to go. They get the job done without further warming you up on an already steamy day.

I have a cheap stovetop espresso maker that I've used off and on for many years to make my own version of Cuban coffee. These devices rely on rubberized gaskets to keep them properly pressurized, and with age and repeated use, those gaskets eventually wear out and need to be replaced.

My old espresso maker is officially ready for a new gasket as it's started that telltale steaming and drooling from the sides no matter how tightly I try to screw the top to the base. But finding a gasket in Suburbingham has turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected.

In Miami, where almost everyone had an espresso maker or two at home, replacement gaskets were readily available. In New Orleans, I could buy gaskets at Harry's Ace, a cluttered and amazing place that always felt to me that it was half hardware store, half junkyard and totally magical. In pre-Wal-Mart New Orleans, this unimposing building on Magazine Street was jammed floor to ceiling with a cluttered and claustrophobia-inducing hodgepodge of goods of every description. If you lived Uptown, Harry's always had what you needed, even if it wasn't always exactly what you were looking for.

One of the many stops on my failed gasket hunt was a large Mexican supermarket on Highway 31, not too far away from my house. My gringo mind reasoned that Cubans and Mexicans are both Hispanic, and since any Cuban grocery would carry a full line of cheap espresso makers and replacement parts, a Mexican grocery store would be likely to as well. It turns out this isn't the case at all--the market had no espresso makers and certainly no gaskets and only a couple of dusty cans of Cafe Bustelo on the shelf.

I've shopped at this market several times recently and it's an interesting place to visit. To its customers this is both a supermarket and a cultural touchstone, and it seems like everyone here knows everyone else.

I usually see people carefully studying the photocopied notices taped to the store windows. Boisterously loud music from a Spanish radio station blares over the store intercom interrupted periodically by an even more enthusiatic announcer. I didn't know there was a Spanish radio station here--maybe it's coming via satellite.

It's a big enough place, a bit smaller than today's average chain grocery store, but not by much, and it's way bigger than a lot of grocery stores in New Orleans.

In all my visits to this store, I've never seen another Anglo customer. Usually the cashier conducts the entire transaction in Spanish, even with me.

I'm always surprised at how many of the items on the shelves, especially the sweets, are unfamiliar to me, even though I've been to Mexico any number of times and think of myself as someone who has "been around". I'm also surprised the Mexican-American population in Birmingham is large enough to support a place like this. Our Hispanic population is quite small compared to cities in Texas or California or many other places in the Deep South.

The meat counter there is a wonder and there is bin after bin of fresh and dried peppers, many with names I've not heard of.

Their breads and pastries are made on site and their little loaves of bread, bolillo, I think they're called, are only 75 cents and completely delicious. They dump the loaves in a big bin at the front of the store when they come out of the oven and you can sometimes smell the bread baking from the parking lot outside.

I go there when I need to get a fix of Teri's delicious stuffed poblanos. This place has the best and cheapest poblano peppers in town, but only if you get there on the right day. Some days their poblano peppers are big, beautiful, waxy and shining a deep emerald green. They look, feel and smell as if they had come out of the field only moments ago. On other days they look tired and dessicated, with their rumpled green skins turning to black.

I was last there on a "tired poblano" day and I approached the young man working the produce section. "Poblanos fresh?" I asked him.

"Moro," he answered.

Thinking he didn't understand me, I tried adding a word from my very limited vocabulary of pigeon Spanish.

"Poblanos fresco?"

"Moro," he repeated.

I was stumped. I was pretty sure that moro didn't mean "I'll run to the back and get you some," since the stock clerk made no move in that direction. Likewise, I didn't think he was saying "leave me alone, you moron and come back when you can speak the language here," since he seemed polite and not irritated by the obviously dull witted person confronting him.

Gradually it dawned on me that he was saying "tomorrow--come back tomorrow and we'll have fresh poblanos in stock."

"Ah, manana," I said and we both smiled a little sheepishly as the circuit of communication was completed.

Another of my visits on a Friday afternoon was a revelation. The parking lot was packed and there was a long line of men at the cashier's window at the front of the store. I realized that for most of these people, Friday meant payday, and that cashier's window was the closest thing they had to a bank. They needed to cash their checks and to send money back home, and I guess this is how it is done. How different from the way I conduct my business.

This market isn't far from my house and it is on one of the main commercial drags in Suburbingham, but its customers live in a world apart from Auburn/Alabama football and the other abiding concerns of the bulk of the population.

In New Orleans, Teri and I would often cross the Mississippi River to the West Bank where a large Vietnamese population resides. We'd eat at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant and marvel at the oddities in the Vietnamese grocery stores and other shops at the all-Vietnamese strip mall. Just like the Mexican grocery here, we were usually the only non-hyphenated Americans around and the only ones speaking English. Even though we were only minutes from home, we felt like tourists in a new country.

Today we all seem so interconnected and nothing seems foreign or distant. Today I sent some pictures to my new friend Armelle in Paris, and I was "friended" on Facebook by my buddy Tuan in Hanoi. You're connected to me right now through this site even, though you could literally be almost anywhere on the planet.

Yet as connected as we are to one another, we simultaneously live in our own worlds, and physical proximity is often not the point of demarkation. We may be bonded by any number of factors including location, nationality, culture, relative wealth, education, profession, faith or family ties, but I'm abolutely convinced each of us creates and lives within the bounds of our very own unique mental cosmos. We're all connected, but we're all the sole residents of our own planets.

And some of the worlds we inhabit can appear very strange to a foreigner just passing through.

Oh, I eventually found my gasket. On-line.