It was 1958 or 9, and I was 12 or 13. My sister (7 yrs older) was in college in NYC. She had a Moka pot, and I loved the coffee. And she put a lot of effort into my development, so I'd be "ready" for college & life. When she took me to a coffee house in the Village & I tasted real espresso, I was hooked. I couldn't get espresso where we lived (Atlantic City), but when I went to college myself in '64, there was a coffee shop on campus & more a few miles away in Cambridge (MA).

Her other efforts met with failure - the books she favored were awful, the clothes were stuffy, and the beat generation was already dying out. But the love of coffee stuck, and jeans turned out to be timeless (unlike herringbone and whipcord twill). So I won big!

I was about 10 and my family was packing up to move cross country (a long way in the USA). There wasn't anything much to eat in the house on packing day and the neighbor had brought over one of those stove-top coffee pots like you see on the old cowboy westerns. Mom let me have some (small) coffee with milk and a little sugar in it. Was a cold day, house was open with the movers going in and out all day. Coffee was good.

I grew up in a religion that forbade drinking coffee, so I knew from an early age it was something...ummm...special. It was seen as serious moral delinquency. The result, of course, is now I have a totally romantic, obsessively depraved fixation with coffee.

as a teenager, when I first discovered coffee flavored Haagen Dazs.