Lord
of the Coffee; The Hobbean
An Unexpected TeaParty
In a hole in a mound of ground coffee, there lived a half-caff. Not weak, diluted, instant coffee, filled with chicory and evapourated milk, nor yet some posh, trendy, yuppie-watering hole coffee, like those dime-a-dozen chintzy tearooms serve, with board games under the tables and jukebox-karaoke on Tuesday nights, filled with underaged customers and overpriced gourmet pastries: it was a half-caff café, and that means good coffee.
It had a perfectly round door like a coffee can lid painted brown, with a wide thick coffee-stained welcome-mat stretched before it, and it was always open. Through a tunnel-like hall and down past the comfortable parlour, one finds a cozy kitchen with many polished cupboards, filled with mugs and cups of all sizes, and spoons, and saucers. There also one finds perhaps a bowl of cookies being mixed, a tray of fresh-baked scones just come out of the oven, and pies cooling on the sill. And always, near the fire, a great tureen of the finest coffee one ever tasted, in or out of the Shire.
This café-hole belonged to a very well-to-do half-caff, and his name was TeaBaggins. The TeaBagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of the Hillsbrothers for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, rich, and boring, but undeniably the brewers of the best coffee around. Hungry and predictable, that's what a TeaBaggins was; one never had to ask a question of a TeaBaggins, the answer would always be the same: "Are you going to eat that? Shame to let it go to waste... munch "
This is a story about how a TeaBaggins had an adventure and found himself doing, saying, and drinking things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbour's respect, but he gained-- well, you shall see whether he gained anything in the end, beyond a few extra pounds and several stamps in his passport.
By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, before the doors were unlocked and the 'open' sign turned around, when Bilbean TeaBaggins was sitting in front of his café after breakfast drinking an enormous cup of fresh coffee, with lots of thick, heavy cream and sweetening, just the way that half-caffs love their coffee-- Gandgulp came by. Gandgulp! If you have half as much about him than as I have, than I have heard twice as much as you! Teabags and poptarts sprouted up all over the place wherever he went, in the most extraordinary fashion. I think he should have those holes in his pockets sewn shut soon.
But Gandgulp had not been to the café on the Hill for many years, and the half-caffs had almost forgotten what he looked like. All that the oblivious Bilbean saw that morning was an old man with a staff and a travelmug. He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf and long white beard under a magnificent milk-mustache.
"Good coffee!" said Bilbean, and he meant it. He was on his third cup, and everything was right and good in the world as far as he was concerned (you shouldn't catch him before his first cup, though, if you want to avoid getting your head bit off).
Gandgulp looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows. "What do you mean?" he said. "Do you offer me good coffee, or do you mean that the coffee is good whether I taste it or not, or do you think the coffee is good, or are you telling your coffee to be good?"
"Er..." Bilbean looked confused for a moment, but he sipped from his cup and shrugged. "All of the above... maybe... let me think about it for a minute. If you have a cup about you, sit down and have a fill. There's no hurry, and we have the whole day ahead of us to come down from the caffeine. Biscotti?" Bilbean offered a plate to the wizard, then took up his mug and blew the foam off the top, which lifted lightly into the air like a cloud and splattered all over the face of Bilbean's most annoying relative, Oafo Snackville-TeaBaggins, who was spying on Bilbean by peeking through the hedgerow.
"Good aim!" said Gandgulp. "But I have no time to blow foam and swill beans this morning. I am looking for someone to share an Adventure that I am arranging, and it's difficult to find any patsies... that is, brave and hearty souls who hunger for more than dollymadisons and cocoa-espressos!"
"I should think it would be difficult-- in these parts! We are a plain quiet folk who have no use for anything more adventurous than a new flavour of vanilla syrup! Sobering, uncomfortable things! Make you late for your coffee-break!" Bilbean began to regret having starting this conversation. He decided to try to make the old man go away. "Are you looking for really good coffee? There's even better to be had than what I have. Just about anyone else has better coffee than I." He lifted his cup to his nose, sniffed, and made a face. "Eww! You don't want any of this, anyway." And he picked up his morning papers, determined to pretend that Gandgulp was no longer there. Inside the hole, a teakettle began to whistle. He ignored it.
But Gandgulp did not move. He leaned against his stick and watched Bilbean, until the half-caff become very uncomfortable under his bushy gaze. How on earth did he manage to get his contact lenses in past those brows? Bilbean wondered.
"What a lot of things you use coffee for!" Gandgulp said at last. "Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that your coffee won't be good till I take off!"
"Not at all, not at all," lied Bilbean. "My dear sir-- I don't believe I know your name?"
"Yes, yes, my dear sir," laughed the old man. "And I do know your name, Mr. Bilbean TeaBaggins. And you do know my name, though you don't remember that I belong to it. I am Gandgulp, and Gandgulp means I believe I will have a cup of your good coffee."
"Gandgulp! Great goulash! Not the wandering Wiseacre that gave the Old Tookus a pair of magic diamond-studded teacages that never got clogged? Not the fellow who used to serve such marvelous no-bake cookies and hot chocolate? Not the man that used to drink an entire pot of frenchroast and recite 'The Iliad' backward while standing in a trough of suet?"
Gandgulp shook his head, setting his long beard to waggling. "No, that wasn't me. I'm the other Gandgulp, the one that takes half-caffs on Adventures whether they like it or not. I think you'll like it, not at first maybe, and not perhaps at the last, and probably somewhere in the middle you will question my parentage, but eventually you might get a thing or two out of it that you won't regret finding."
Bilbean stood up so quickly he spilled coffee down his apron. "Sorry! I don't want any adventures, thank you! Not today! Ooh! Hot coffee! Um, please come back for tea sometime-- anytime you like! How about during the next planetary conjunction? I must run now, I have Kaluha in my socks!" Bilbean looked down at his feet, bare and covered with furry hair, standing in a pool of coffee. "Oh! I don't have any socks on! I must go put some on at once! Good bye!" With that, the half-caff turned and scuttled inside his round brown door, and shut it as quickly as he dared, tearing down the open sign and eating it.
"What on earth did I ask him to tea for!" Bilbean said to himself. He often talked to himself, especially when he had drank too much coffee. Now jittery and distraught by the strange old man, he headed into the kitchen, rescuing the teakettle before it boiled away. A nice strong cup of coffee was just what he needed to completely overload his nerves so that his synapses fused behind his eyeballs like a great gelatinous bundtcake.
Gandgulp in the meantime was still standing outside the door, and laughing long but quietly. He often laughed to himself, especially when he had drank too much coffee. After a while he stepped up, and with the sharp end of his staff scratched a strange sign on the half-caff's beautiful brown front-door, which read to all eyes that could see: "If you can read this, you're standing too close." Then he strode away, humming the jingle for OscarMeyer wieners under his breath.