This week I came face-to-face with a genuine dilemma. I had several meetings across town and for some reason I miscalculated and ended up with a 2-1/2 hour gap between meetings. I hate to waste time, but if I drove back to my office, I would simply have to return to my meeting later and with the cost of gas these days, one cannot be too cautious.

You know gas is getting high when it costs more to fill up the car than the car is actually worth. The most valuable thing in my car is in my gas tank.

I remedied the situation by stopping in a small coffee shop for cup of Joe. As far as I'm concerned, there is no bad time to have a cup of coffee, in spite of the price. I ordered my coffee and when the waitress brought it to me, I began to think about coffee. Why did God give us coffee?

Then my mind went back to my grandfather, whose great gift to me was a love of coffee. Nobody loved coffee more. I remember one of his favorite quotes, "You can always tell a man by the coffee drinks."

Anathema to my grandfather was the idea of instant coffee. No man, in his opinion, would ever drink anything of the kind. "If a man would drink instant coffee," my grandfather perked, "there's no telling what else he would do. Never trust a man who drinks instant coffee."

Making coffee was an art form to my grandfather. There was a right way and a wrong way to make coffee, and he always insisted on the right way. Of course, the right way was the way he made coffee.

In grandfather's kitchen was an old wood-burning cook stove. My grandmother cooked meals on this ancient apparatus for more than 50 years. Sure, she eventually got an electric stove but it was more for show than anything else.

On this old-fashioned stove, my grandfather brewed his famous mud broth. He never allowed my grandmother to make the brew; it was his job, which he took seriously.

Once for his birthday we all chipped in and bought him an electric coffee pot. I had never seen my grandfather so mad. When he saw what it was he would not even take it out of the box.

He had strong ideas about coffee and how it should be brewed and woe be to the person who contradicted his ideas.

Grandfather always kept a fire in the old wood cook stove and on the back of the stove he kept his coffee pot, a large 2-gallon pot