Home Country By Slim Randles

“Ahhh! Cof­fee!” said our res­i­dent cow­boy, Steve, rais­ing his cup at the phi­los­o­phy counter. “Let’s raise our cups to whichever Brazil­ian came up with this stuff.”

Very slowly, Herb Collins stood with his cup of cof­fee there in the midst of cul­ture and edu­ca­tion at the Mule Barn truck stop.

“Actu­ally, Steve,” Herb said, in his most pro­fes­so­r­ial tone, “his name was Kaldi. He lived in Ethiopia.”

And here Herb grinned fiendlishly at Steve. “And he was a sheepherder!”

“No way, Herb!”

“The truth, cow­boy, noth­ing but the truth. In fact, it wasn’t so much as Kaldi doing any­thing, it was his sheep. You see…” (and he turned to face the tables and booths to find he held a rapt audi­ence) “… ol’ Kaldi had noticed his sheep munch­ing these red berries and going kinda hyper all over the place, look­ing for a lion to whip or some­thing. Well, Kaldi knew that hyper sheep were too busy run­ning around eat­ing the plants flat to the ground to be putting on any mut­ton, so he decided to inves­ti­gate. He chewed some of these berries him­self and beat the sheep back to the ol’ Mut­ton Man­sion. He made a cou­ple of laps around the house and said ‘Man, I just can’t live with­out my coffee!’

“Now that was about 1000 A.D., you know. The word got out, and peo­ple started up their drip machines, and morn­ing stopped being such a dirty word. Of course, as with any­thing good, there are always party poop­ers who want it stopped. And so it came to pass with cof­fee. Six hun­dred years after Kaldi’s sheep, a bunch of Chris­tians (obvi­ously on decaf) peti­tioned Pope Clement VIII to ban cof­fee, believ­ing any­thing that made morn­ings pleas­ant must be the devil’s drink. Being a fair-minded guy, the Pope didn’t want to do that with­out giv­ing it a try first, so he had some car­di­nal whip up a batch and he sucked it down. Well, he gave the drink his bless­ing, said it was an offi­cial Chris­t­ian bev­er­age, had a mug made with ‘Clem’ on it, and hung it over the sink.

“Here’s to cof­fee!” Herb said to the audi­ence, “The choice of sheep­herders everywhere!”

Where does he get these things?

————-

Brought to you by the national award-winning book “A Cowboy’s Guide to Grow­ing Up Right.” Read a free sam­ple at www.slimrandles.com.

Posted by Guest 1 Columnist on Nov 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.