Coffee

Coffee

Over there is an island, next to it another island,  across the strait is another island and just to the right of that another. Swivel to the left, which I hate to do because my right side is being toasted so perfectly by the sun as I lie on the bow of our boat with my IPad, and you can see off in the distance a range of mountains on the mainland.

But of course, that's not the mainland, that's just another island. The big Island. Puerto Rico. But I can't call it Puerto Rico, because where we are right now, off the coast of Cayo Luis Peña, it's also Puerto Rico. All these islands are Puerto Rico. The big one, the little one, the Cayo and the Roque, all Puerto Rico. But the really big one across over there, where the ferry comes from four times a day, whose red light on the bow we can see bouncing closer and closer to us each night, before it passes us by to steam into Dewey Harbor around the corner, that island is plain Puerto Rico, that the locals here just call "the Island."

To me, they're all islands. Beautiful pieces of rock surrounded by blue blue blue water. And for ten days or so every couple of years we get to wake up in the morning, grab a cup of hot coffee, sit out here on the bow and drink our coffee the way we're supposed to drink our coffee, the way all humans ought to get to drink their coffee.

The thing is, coffee tastes pretty much like coffee, no matter where you drink it, but out here it sounds so much better. For one thing, it's loud, but all the noises are ocean and rock and wave and wind. The four of us all have Irpads or Kindles, and everyone has an IPhone, but they never ring. A text or two every few days, sometimes in the middle of the night when the cell service snaps on for some unexpected reason. So the blessing is silence. Coffee tastes like silence plus that breaker crashing onto that Cay or maybe it's a Roque but they all look like islands to me, but aren't, or so they say.