The Red Cardinal Cup

Thanks to everyone who helped me celebrate my 41st birthday! I enjoyed all of the cards, phone calls and much more! Just wanted to share a story about one of the gifts I received.

I make the coffee in our family, so I was pleasantly surprised to wake up birthday morning (similar to the term “Christmas morning”) to find a card propped up on top of the coffee maker by a retro, Fire King, red cardinal cup. I laughed out loud as I hadn’t thought about a red cardinal cup in months and prior to that, I hadn’t thought about a red cardinal cup in years. Here’s the story.

A few months back, we were thinking of replacing our deck with either a new one or a screened-in porch. We hadn’t settled on the decision so we thought we would start by at least getting some estimates to see how much money we would need to save up. I happened to be at Sam’s Club one day when they were promoting free estimates for decks so I made an appointment for the following Saturday morning. Promptly at 9:30 a.m., a shiny green truck pulls up in our driveway. As the truck door opened, I’m pretty sure the cigarette smoke billowed out along with the driver. A schmoozey older man greeted us with handshakes and a yellow-toothed smile. We walked him to the backyard where we described, in general, what we wanted and explained that we were only looking for estimates. He spent about 5 minutes doing measurements and then asked if we could go inside to talk. We said sure, thinking he just wanted to draft up the estimate on a table or something. Little did we know that we would basically be sitting through what we later termed the “time share deck hard sell”. I am not kidding. This guy not only wanted us to “sign on the dotted line today” or “he could not guarantee the price” but he also asked for a cup of coffee. I reluctantly pulled a mug off of the shelf and filled it with joe and the 4 spoons of sugar he wanted. We finally got this “deck pusher” out of our house and laughed about it for days.

I later told Doc. B. that I had not been using the coffee mug that he used. I told her about how it reminded me of the red cardinal cup from when I was in my 20’s. I used to go up to Northern Michigan and stay at a friend’s parents’ weekend house so we could all go boating. At night we would have bon fires and hang out with the neighbors. Then the next morning we would all have coffee and breakfast together. The coffee mugs all had pictures of birds on them. You know, the blue bird mug, the orange oriole mug, the yellow finch mug, etc… For some reason, no one would drink out of the red cardinal cup. I later found out that one of the neighbors had some kind of gum disease, pyorrhea, and that they always gave that cup to him! I have no idea if he ever realized that he was always given that mug. In any case, I now have my own red cardinal cup and I’ve had coffee from it three mornings in a row. Thanks Doc. B.!