Passing Observations: coffee cup stains

I wash my dishes by hand. Growing up, we didn’t have a dishwasher in the house. I have memories of my mom standing in front of the sink washing dishes with one foot resting up against the knee of the other leg, almost like a stork standing on one leg. I wash my dishes by hand mostly because it’s just me and there aren’t that many. I don’t want to wait the days it would take to fill up a dishwasher. I don’t stand on one leg.

One thing you notice when you have to handle coffee cups longer than the few seconds it takes to put them in and take them out of the dishwasher is the coffee stain on the inside of the cup - that is, if your cup has a white interior. I’m reminded of one of my best friends from the days of working in the lab at Big Ag Co. Freddie drank coffee all the time from the same cup and I think sometimes he barely rinsed it out. That coffee cup had what was a white interior even though you wouldn’t know it by looking. I know this to be true because every once in a while, he would bleach it out to remove the stain.

I have several coffee cups. Many of them are not white on the inside. All of this makes me wonder, why aren’t there more coffee cups with colorful insides? I miss my old friend Freddie. Also, support your local NPR station. They need it now more than ever. You might get lucky and get a coffee cup that is red on the inside.