Taylor and Ng

It's morning. The coffee is brewing. Everyone is still sleeping in our small house that I've come to love despite my tendency to see its maintenance issues and deficiencies.

A poppy - bright red-orange - bloomed in the garden by the front door. It looks like our transplanted lilacs are doing well and will bloom next year in their season.

I work hard these days, concerned with making money, succeeding, laying groundwork for my next career move. I don't think that move will entail writing for publication, at least not for the foreseeable future. Considering I can't see beyond the next few hours in my life, that is subject to change. This cloudy and wet morning I am fatalistic.

I like to have my coffee in a Taylor and Ng mug from the late 1970's. It's off-white with a blue stylized graphic of a frog in a garden nabbing two caddis flies on its tongue. One fly, in turn, sticks its tongue out at the frog. The other is encircled in a blue sphere of protection, like an emblem. When you look closely you realize that emblem "fly" is actually a fairy - or an angel - a tiny woman with wings. At the extreme circumference of the mug, the frog's tongue whips in a semi-circle of grass fronds, encircling the emblem. It turns from a tongue to grass in the wind. Below, in a rounded storybook script, also in blue, reads the legend "La Grenouille".

Everyone used to have these mugs. I also had "La Baleine". In college, my girlfriend had the one with the elephant orgy on it. Everywhere you went in the 1980s, you'd find someone with a ten-year-old Taylor and Ng mug with these graphics, along with vinyl LPs in milk crates and leggy spider plants in macrame plant hangers. Peppermint tea assuaged our guilt at not studying for our finals. "Les Chats" needed cleaning. One of us needed to get up and flip Rubber Soul, or put on Joan Armatrading. These mugs are survivors.

I guess my point would be that we all had taken these mugs from home, from our parent's houses, from the cupboard above the toaster, the toaster that never quite worked right.

Funny how little I've looked at this mug in twenty-seven years. The first thing ever served from it was Lipton cup-a-soup. I remember that. I didn't drink coffee back then.

Here is my transitional object. I've brewed a good pot of coffee this morning. Time to wake up the household.