Gasconade County Republican

Confessions of a caffeine junky

Wednesday, 22 February 2012 08:36 Bob McKee

Caffeine is a drug, an addictive stimulant, that so far is legal and used by about 90 percent of Americans. I’m one of them. I’m an addict.

Caffeine is present in tea, chocolate, some medicines, various energy drinks and apparently almost all soft drinks, especially colas. But its primary source is coffee.
I get most of my caffeine fix from coffee, a little from ice tea and almost none from chocolate, energy drinks or soft drinks. It is not natural in energy drinks and soft drinks. It’s added, kind of like an afterthought. Eight ounces of brewed coffee contains about 108 milligrams of caffeine; coffee made by the modern and more popular drip method goes up to 145 milligrams per eight-ounce cup. Twenty ounces of ice tea usually comes in at around 50 milligrams of caffeine.
The American Medical Association considers 300 milligrams of caffeine, about two cups, the upper limit of a safe daily caffeine dose. But the AMA also acknowledges that 20 to 30 percent of the people who drink coffee may ingest as much as 600 milligrams of caffeine a day. I fall into that latter category. Maybe I fall into a category all my own.
A normal, blurry-eyed morning starts with me making 10 cups of coffee in a drip style coffee maker. When that first pot is gone we make another pot of at least eight cups, sometimes another 10 cups. What is left over, if there is any, is poured into a carafe for later consumption during the day, or as a starter the next morning. At noon, I usually switch to ice tea (three or four glasses) while the woman of the house cracks open another can of diet soda, the kind that contains caffeine.
I don’t drink coffee in the evening anymore, not because it keeps me awake. It’s all those middle-of-the-night trips to the bathroom which I suppose you could say keeps me awake anyway. But some studies have shown that caffeine (in moderate does I’m sure) may battle Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, and maybe even some types of cancer. If so, I should be a picture of good health.
Growing up, every adult I knew drank coffee with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Except my mother but then she always popped the cap on one of those little bottles of Coca Cola first thing in the morning. Us kids, however, could not have coffee anytime because it might stunt our growth and make caveman hair grow on our chests. My very first cup of coffee came when I was 10 or 11, camped on a gravel bar with my dad and an uncle. It didn’t taste as good as it smelled that morning boiling on the camp fire in an old “gutless” coffee pot, but that’s how one of my evil habits got started.
If I hadn’t had that first cup of coffee on a cold, foggy July morning beside the White River in southwest Missouri I probably would be six feet, four inches tall today instead of a stubby five-foot-10. The caveman chest hair never really materialized, by the way, which was a good thing for my sister and our female cousins.
I had spent that night on an comfy army surplus cot wrapped snugly in an army surplus sleeping bag that obviously had been summer issue for troops serving in the South Pacific. It was nothing more than a thin blanket sewn inside an equally thin layer of canvass. My uncle, who served in the South Pacific until he was badly wounded on Guadalcanal, was fond of army surplus items for some reason. The surplus sleeping bag was not one of his best investments.
While my dad and uncle tended trot lines all night and kept themselves warm with a jug of Old Granddad, I entered the first stages of hypothermia. By daylight, it was so foggy that I couldn’t see the foot of the cot I was lying on, and the Balinese sleeping bag was drenched through from heavy dew and water-laden fog. I was wet, cold and almost miserable but dad had kept the fire going all night and I did have dry clothes for “an emergency.” In my mind, I was in a state of emergency.
Once in dry clothes and standing by the fire, my uncle handed me a cup of coffee to “warm your innards.” I would have preferred the same brown liquid that warmed his and dad’s innards during their frequent johnboat sorties to the trot lines but I thought better of pushing my luck. Having a cup of coffee with the grown-ups was enough to make me feel like a big boy. Alone with my dad and uncle in their old wooden johnboat later that day, I was allowed a couple sips of cold Schlitz beer. By the time the weekend was over, I was ready to give up childish things. I figured I was well on my way to manhood, little realizing how much farther the trip was.
That was the last fishing trip and gravel bar camp out on that section of the White River. The next year, Bull Shoals dam was completed and the new lake that backed up behind it covered that gravel bar under 15 feet of water. I can’t remember if I ever thanked my dad and uncle for that weekend. I hope I did.