Connections: Coffee Klatsch
Did you know that Starbucks sells souvenir mugs featuring images of different cities, countries, and states around the world — from Arizona to Ireland to Tokyo? Shush. Don’t tell my husband. He’s got a mug bug.
It was an exhibit of Dominy furniture at Clinton Academy that set off his addiction: He must have bought a half-dozen of the attractive commemorative Dominy mugs, keeping some and giving others away. I agreed that they made nice gifts, but I had no idea they would open a floodgate.
Truth be told, back before I realized this would become a problem, I once aided and abetted my husband in buying a half-dozen mugs with the word “Noank” and a sailboat imprinted on them in bright blue. They seemed appropriate, because we once kept a boat at the Connecticut port, but we really didn’t need them: Our kitchen cupboard was already perfectly well equipped with antique and vintage tea cups, coffee cups, and your basic mug-mugs, not to mention various other ceramic mementoes of faraway places, such as egg cups and candy dishes.
The Noank mugs all remain intact, as do some appealing Spode mugs in various shades and patterns, and together these ought to have been perfectly adequate to the needs of not just us but any potential guests. But when it comes to mugs, apparently, too much is never enough.
Somewhere between the Noank mugs and the Dominy mugs, Chris acquired a souvenir mug from Chez Christophe, a roadside Acadian restaurant in rural Nova Scotia where we had a good meal. Also among Chris’s souvenir-mug collection are two of the heavy cafeteria type from the Frank Lloyd Wright houses we visited in Buffalo; a determined Wright fan, he came home more recently with two tall, sturdy ones from the Gordon house in Silverton, Ore.
It’s probably a good thing we don’t travel too much these days, because the cupboard couldn’t bear it. We have officially run out of shelf space. Also crammed in are four mugs from family members — one with a drawing by one of the granddaughters and one, which we somehow acquired by mistake, bearing a drawing by somebody else’s granddaughter. There are custom photo-mugs showing the smiling mugs (ha, ha) of the Nova Scotia branch of the family, plus three more souvenir mugs from Shelburne, N.S., with flags (Canadian and Empire Loyalist) emblazoned on them. Who but Chris would have bought the “Oh, Canada” mug with the words of the national anthem on it? He claims it wasn’t him, but I don’t believe him. Then there’s a mug honoring the retirement, some years ago, of the Rev. Robert Stuart from the Amagansett Presbyterian Church.
Need I go on?
Yes, I will go on! My own favorite mugs are two purchased by my daughter at Home, James many Christmases ago: one with a leaping salmon on it, another with a trout. They match not my green Spode dinnerware, by my eldest son’s brown-and-cream Spode. And let’s not forget the two space-hogging ceramic cups with matching saucers that are so huge they are better for soup than hot drinks.
I hatched a plan last week to offload some of this overflowing collection by surreptitiously carrying mugs down to the Star office. But when I looked inside the cupboard in the Star’s kitchen, I was confronted by another situation: It held two or three dozen assorted mugs and cups, along with such peculiar things as coffee beans in a jar labeled “chocolate bits” and a bottle of wheat germ that has been there since the 1980s, I believe.
Hoping to pin Chris down about why he collects mugs — and perhaps to press him to cease and desist — I confronted him when he arrived home from Sag Harbor the other day carrying two more.
“They are nice reminders of good places,” he said.
Then, because the two Sag Harbor additions to his collection came from Canio’s Books and the new Harbor Books, his voice took on a righteous tone. “I believe in supporting independent booksellers,” he said. Thinking further, he added, “If BookHampton had a mug I’d certainly get one.”
Shush. For our kitchen cupboard’s sake, I hope no one at BookHampton is reading this.