Cro-Magnon Coffee

I had a Cro-Magnon experience in my kitchen today.
It was late afternoon when I hit the coffee wall, that place in every caffeine addict's day when the morning's bucket of coffee erodes from the nerve endings and all remaining brain cells are swamped by secretions from the glands of laziness.
"Go ahead, flop on the couch and sleep," whispered the imp of the perverse, but I knew that I shouldn't, that there were novels to write and firewood to stack and peach cobbler to cobble.
So, in the spirit of modern problem solving, I elected to consume more drugs. I poured the slush from four abandoned mugs into my ducky cup, popped the concoction into the microwave, selected a minute's worth of radiation, and opened a women's clothing catalog.
When the time's-up bell dinged, I retrieved my afternoon fix from the bowels of the machinery and tested its temperature with my right index finger. It was very hot. While standing there with my finger in my mouth, staring at the contraption that had produced lava in less time that it took to appraise fully the fit of an underwire bra, I was transported back through the decades to Mrs. Merdinger's demonstration of how the Cro-Magnon folks discovered cooked food.
Mrs. Merdinger was my third, fourth, and fifth grade teacher. She was built close to the ground and wore stockings rolled down into dark brown doughnuts at mid-calf. She and her husband fattened hogs with the corn they grew north of town. She had actually seen New York City during the Depression as lead soprano in a women's choir. A person wanted to be about ten paces away when Mrs. Merdinger hit the high note in "In the layund of the freeeeeeeeee." I don't remember ever knowing her first name.
Mrs Merdinger was a brave person, who, fifty years ago, in the course of digging farm kids out of the cultural dirt, began teaching evolutionary theory in the fundamentalist hickwaters of Western Nebraska. She was normally a proper and reserved person, but when she addressed the subject of how blind luck and natural selection had driven us humanoids from way back there to clear up here, she became a silent film actress, the Faye Wray of the Sandhills. I was privileged to witness three performances of her Cave Woman Discovers Pork Roast act.
According to Mrs. Merdinger's theory of the evolution of cuisine, a cave-dwelling woman from the Cro-Magnon region of present-day France is out walking her pet pig on a mountainside one day about twenty thousand years ago. (Mrs. Merdinger climbs a pretend Alp in front of the blackboard, pausing now and then to stroke the invisible hog at her side.) The cave woman and her pet get caught in a sudden, ferocious storm. (Mrs. Merdinger cowers behind her desk, beckoning to her faithful porker to join her.) Devastating lightning, wind, and rain ensue. (Mrs. Merdinger is on top of her desk, making broad zig-zag sweeps with her arms, little fluttery rain motions with her fingers, her hair buffeted by gale force winds from the forced-air heater.)
The pig gets struck by lightning. (Mrs. Merdinger is thrashing and twitching on the floor.) A general conflagration results from the storm. (Mrs. Merdinger is behind the map stand, shielding her face from the heat.) The fire passes. (Mrs. Merdinger peeks out from behind the maps.) Cave woman discovers that Porky is inanimate. (A tragic wringing of hands accompanied by silent sobbing.)
A ray of hope shines in the forest. (Mrs. Merdinger approaches the spot where the invisible pig lays on the classroom floor, and tries to nudge it to life with an index finger.) A recently roasted pig is hot to the touch. (Mrs. Merdinger puts her finger in her mouth to cool it off.) Mmmmmm, pet pig tastes good after being hit by lightning and burned in a forest fire. (Mrs. Merdinger looks at the sky, looks all around at the remains of the stone-age barbeque, then repeatedly pokes the pig and puts her finger in her mouth.)
Pork roast has been invented. In the final act of this drama, Mrs. Merdinger, as brand-new Cro-Magnon carnivore, looks at the sky and tests the wind while leading another pig up the same classroom mountainside. She smiles, whistles, and carries a stubby little finger-length stick about the same length as the spoon which I now use to test the temperature of microwaved coffee.