Reading Tea Leaves in an Arabic Coffee Demie Tasse

I was reading a book of Armenian poetry. Unexpectedly my mind left the page and my olfactory senses were filled with the aroma of Arabic coffee, ground with Cardamom.  Nothing in what I was reading could have taken me back to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, to our balcony overlooking a busy street of Beirut, and to the aroma of Arabic coffee.

I shut my eyes and I could almost hear my mom’s slippers on the Terra Cotta floor tiles leading to our balcony. And there was my father, waiting for his evening coffee!

… It was a flashback, and it took me by surprise. I was on a high mountain in Arizona, surrounded by desert, with no sea, lake, river or any body of water nearby. And yet, my mind, somehow triggered by a few lines of romantic Armenian poetry, had decided to fly back and away.

I shut my eyes again hoping to see my parents one more time, alas in vain. But at that very moment, I recalled that my mother had a set of coffee pots and that I had kept them as souvenir from her. She used to boil coffee in these small, handmade copper pots with wooden handles. I recall them as being made in Armenia.

So, I rushed to the kitchen and looked for these pots I have kept on a high shelve but have never used them for 50 years.

There they were, next to a few demie tasses my mother had!

With a lot of emotions, I filled the smallest of these pots with water to boil. Then two small spoonfuls of ground coffee and a spoonful of sugar. A few minutes later the aroma of boiling coffee filled my moment and I forgot about the desert. I was near the Mediterranean again.

Here is the capture of this seemingly simple moment that in the cloud of Arabic coffee aroma erased 50 years of my life, albeit for a short moment. 

I sipped on this elixir slowly trying to recall the last time I made Arabic coffee. Then, in a gesture so common to all those who drink coffee around the Mediterranean, I turned the empty demie tasse upside down. It was/is a ceremony that follows the coffee drinking: each person turns the demie tasse upside down letting the coffee grounds slowly slide down the inside of the cup drawing unpredictable shapes. Then, someone in the group will be designated to “read the cup”.

… It is perhaps as old as humanity the belief that there is a message in various forms around us. Ancient priests of Greece and Rome used to open the entrails of freshly slaughtered goats and sheep to predict the outcome of wars; Druids saw messages in boiling liquids; and it is said that many of Nostradamus’s visions and predictions were made following what he saw in crystal balls and clouds in the skies.  In Western cultures, the modern term for such ceremonial behaviors are best defined as “reading tea leaves”. I personally have never seen anyone read tea leaves….

So, here are some of the shapes the coffee grounds made in my cup. I did not try to read them; I had already traveled in time, even if retrospectively.

However, if I were to read the shapes, I am much inclined to see a man on the right talking to a woman. After a few minutes of careful looking, I can see ardent eyes on the man’s face and a quiet smile on the timid woman’s face….

But the best was yet to come. Instinctively I also turned the small copper coffee pot upside down, and to my surprise it was made in the Soviet Union! Not surprising as Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and I recall my mother using these coffee pots more than 50 years ago.

Well, Soviet or Armenian, it was my mother’s coffee pot and the coffee I made had an aroma almost as good as the ones she offered to my father, on that balcony overlooking a busy street in Beirut….

August 7, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015