G. Frink's

Triple espresso, black and leaded, please.

No sugar or other abominations, thank you.

Yes. I'm addicted.

The addiction may lengthen my life, according to findings published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, or by the lights of those studies, at least do me no harm.

After watching two sets of deeply beloved grandparents miserably endure decaffeinated coffee, I decided to drink it the way I like it, and the way they liked it, and die when undenatured coffee kills me. If it does.

Only perchance, then, does strong coffee bring me Alzheimer's prevention and IQ preservation, some protection against the Frink family vulnerability to diabetes, a little insurance against liver cancer and perhaps other benefits.

My coffee obstinacy is one of the reasons my sons Jack and George Rankin are fond of muttering darkly, "Dad's never going to change," although I have given coffeeless life one dreary, sleepy go after another at their behest.

I succeeded each time, always feeling as though I had betrayed my grandparents. You see, my grandparents gained nothing at all from their misery. The New England Journal of Medicine reported years ago that the coronary heart disease and/or stroke their misery was prescribed to curtail was unaffected by their sacrifice. In a widely-cited, October 11, 1990, article the NEJM reported:

These findings do not support the hypothesis that coffee or caffeine consumption increases the risk of coronary heart disease or stroke.

The sense of betrayal and associated memories are really what turned me back to the pleasures of the dark brew as soon as I bumped into new evidence that my espresso stream might be good for me. Not the science.

Recollections how much my Grandfather George Frink enjoyed making a fine pot of boiled coffee over a hunting camp fire would come flooding back. Like a waking dream song I would see the joy my Grandfather B.L. Hinnant took in his marvel of a glass-pot percolator and feel again the satisfaction grandmothers Elvy Frink and Ruth Hinnant found in a fresh-made afternoon cup of coffee.

They drank coffee and we talked, the way Southern writers and their kin have talked for generations, creating together what I eventually understood as a family intellectual life.

The memories of our conversations amid the smells of their coffee were always with me, yet I was slow to understand how preparing and drinking coffee is for me a celebration of the best nurturing, sustaining aspects of my birth family.

Unintentionally, my sons led me to this understanding and so in this one thing they are exactly right about me.

Dad is not going to change away from the celebration of family which attends his daily brewing of coffee.