How to See the Future and the Past

“The dark parts of your past are lit up now.”

These words, given to me during my first Armenian coffee ground reading, have been on my mind now that I’m editing my finished first draft. All of those memories are laid out in chapters along a golden thread I can see now that I didn’t see before. I’ve been thinking about the year ahead, the year in which you’ll hold my book in your hands. I’ve also thought about the immense amount of work I’ve done to get here, and the years before that of living out these stories, all of them seeds in the ground now starting to bloom.

When I served in Peace Corps, no workday could start with my Armenian coworkers without gathering together for the day’s first cup of coffee. Alvard, our colleague who maintained the office also made coffee for the team every morning. She asked each of us, “Surj uzum es?” Do you want coffee? And for each, “Ayo”, she put out one espresso cup onto the table. To measure the water, she filled an espresso cup at the office kitchen’s sink and poured that water into a jazzve, repeating for everyone who wanted a cup, followed by the same number of teaspoons filled with fine coffee grounds. The process was simple, and Alvard’s kind delivery of a morning cup seemed each morning to multiply my feeling of being at home.

The kindness of that ritual, that exchange, that human nourishment that comes with sustained kindness, it felt like the warm sun on a cool morning.

During one of my first mornings, I was introduced to the graceful Armenian art of reading coffee grounds. Lauded as the office expert, Alvard gifted me with my first ever reading. Here’s that scene from my upcoming book:

“Surj uzum es, Brent jan?” Alvard asked.

“Yes,” I said. “When are you drinking coffee? Sit with me?”

She laughed, seemingly delighted at the invitation knowing I was her last cup of coffee to pour. She put the jazzve back on the stove and sat down across me.

I pulled the coffee through my pursed lips, trying not to burn my tongue, the heat of it racing into my throat and down to my chest.

“Shnorhakalutsyun,” I said to Alvard.

She smiled and the gap between her two front teeth endeared me deeply to her. She said, “You’re welcome.”

There was a heaping tablespoon of coffee grounds in each cup of coffee, and at the end of sipping all of mine, my lips met the collection of fine grinds that had settled at the bottom.

I looked to Liana. “Can someone read my grounds?”

She looked up at me and laughed. “Ok,” she said. “Alvard can read coffee grounds.”

I’d heard that there was a tradition of reading coffee grounds, but I’d not seen anyone do it.

Liana turned to Alvard and said things in Armenian. Alvard visibly blushed, leaned back from the table smiling, and waved her palm at me. “Che, che, che.” She said, holding up a hand to reject the request.

“Please,” I said. “Very, very please?'”

Alvard laughed.

I smiled at her my best puppy dog smile.

“Lav, Brent jan,” she said, and then, she gestured for my cup and said, “Ari.” Come.

Across the table, I slid to her my saucer and my cup with its sludge of grounds settled at the bottom. She said, “Che, Brent jan.” She pushed it back. She lifted her own cup.

“Watch,” she said. She tilted her cup away from her, and the thick coffee creeped slowly out over the edge and onto the plate. I did the same with my cup.

She said something, and Liana translated. “That’s for the future, Brent jan.”

Then Alvard tilted her cup toward her, and more coffee slipped to the plate. I followed.

Liana translated again, “That is for the past.”

We waited for a few minutes for the grounds to dry. Then Alvard looked at me and gestured with her pinky finger as if it was diving into her cup. She spoke again. Liana translated, “Now your finger.”

“My finger?”

“Yes,” Liana said. “Swipe the bottom of the cup with your finger. Make a mark.”

I doubted I would swipe correctly, but I pressed my pinky into the thick, dry grounds at the bottom of my cup and smeared them.

“Lav,” Alvard said, and she took my small cup from my hands and looked down into. She moved it, examining it from a couple of angle, her eyes looking down past her nose into what was left of the drink she made me.

“I see a flower,” she said.

“A flower?” I looked at Liana not sure I was translating for myself correctly.

“Yes,” Liana said. “A flower.”

Alvard continued manipulating the angle of the cup. She spoke.

“The flower is in your past,” Liana translated. “It means you had fertile ground to grow in your past.”

“Oh, how nice.” I smiled. I thought of my childhood, me under the oak trees reading, that enduring memory of a time in which I felt so grounded while looking out into the world through books.

“And a moon with bright rays,” Liana translated.

“Look,” Alvard said. She tried to point at the sludge in the back of my cup where the past was laid out in bits of wet bean from some other part of the world.

Liana translated Alvard’s words again. “The dark parts of your past are lit up now.”

Writing has lit up my past, has lit up the memories I didn’t know were stored in the corners of my mind or in pictures or old emails or on the pages of old journals.

When I finally get to hand you this book, I hope we both get to stand in that light together and look back at the past and marvel at it.