From coffee to coconuts

I was doing nothing in particular last night, enjoying a cup of coffee and some smokes, just letting rush hour traffic pass before I drive home. A van stops in front of me, and a bunch of high schoolers get out. They were exiting the van and finding themselves rushing the gauntlet between a 7-11 and a Starbucks. I hastily made a bet with myself, promising a round of beer should I guess correctly which of these two establishments would get the most traffic. Almost reflexively, I exclaimed that the winner would be the 7-11. Cheap beer and liquor always trumps expensive coffee.

Well, I lost. (Which also means that another side of me won, I guess) Almost everyone went to Starbucks and bought the biggest ass size of the most expensive cold beverage they had with all the extras. Well, a couple of them (they were about 10, in all) did go to the 7-11, and left with some bottled water.

What the heck happened here? High school kids prefer coffee to good old beer? This must be a mistake, maybe they were so wasted already that they needed a coffee to pick them up. That's probably the only reason I'd take in coffee when I was in 4th year high school. Always better to have your breath smell of coffee than of bile and vomit. But these kids looked fresh as a daisy, and yet, here they were, sipping coffees?

And expensive coffees, mind you. Back in the day, my daily allowance was exactly how much it cost to drink a couple of shots of tequila at the DC Diner. These kids spent on coffee what I shelled out for breakfast and lunch today. I'm beginning to hate the younger generation.

Who needs a drink?

*****

Maybe it's because they're not poor as I am. I bet their parents didn't drink beers back in high school too, which is why they went off to do well in college, bag a promising career after graduating, and assured themselves of a great future. I, on the other hand, came from a long line of good-for-nothing, alcohol guzzling forefathers. They had come from backward little islands in the Sulu sea, where getting an education meant living to be 18 years old without getting killed, hit on the head by a falling coconut, eaten by a shark or a giant turtle, or losing a limb as their neighbor (whose daughter they peeked at while showering) hacked them with a kris.

That all ended with my dad. He was the type who knew that there was a bigger world beyond the powdery white shores and pristine sapphire waters of his tiny little island. The island life wasn't for him, he thought. So he went out of his way to do well in school. He worked and studied from the first grade until he graduated from high school, earning cents and pennies from carrying groceries, hawking rice cakes, peddling soup and other odd jobs he could find around the marketplace just so he could buy books and pencils and shoes. While all his friends were off at the beach, torturing sea turtles, knocking down coconut crabs, hitching boat rides to other islands and climbing trees, he was burning his eyebrows reading textbooks with the help of his little oil lamp and bludgeoning his feet walking and running around the market all day.

It all paid off when he got a scholarship to study college in the big city. Of course, the shock to his system was difficult. Here where people spoke in a different dialect from his own, wore nice shoes, didn't have to wear the same shirt for a week, and didn't have to brew their own beers or roll their own cigarettes at home. He also discovered that while he was a friggin' genius in his little island, the standards of education was a heck of a lot higher in these here parts. He had to study twice as hard and long as everybody else, and yet also had to get some money for food and pomade and beers.

He managed it somehow, and through the years was able to crawl his way up beyond the poverty line. He raised a family and eventually became a part of the "barely sub-middle-class", which is where we kids found ourselves growing up as.

*****

Ironically, his children, myself in particular, dreams of living out my life in a tiny little island, surrounded by powdery white sand beaches and pristine sapphire waters. Pestering sea turtles, cooking coconut crabs in some coconut milk, and waiting for the coconut water to ferment into wine. I'm not too sure he's proud.