GRANDMA READ COFFEE GROUNDS

 My paternal grandmother, Gena, read coffee grounds. This is a method of fortune telling, called cafeomancy, and it's been around a long, long time.

Grandma was born in 1883 and died in 1967, the year I graduated, and was the most loving person I've ever known. I had heard that she could read coffee grounds, but never saw her do it, and never talked with her about it. Her son, my father, was a Methodist minister and so never boasted about her fortune telling talent. I heard a little about it from my mother and from two of my older sisters.

When a person finished a cup of coffee, Grandma had them turn the cup over on the saucer and turn it around three times. Then she looked into the cup and told their fortune. (With kids, she would read their cocoa grounds.) The trouble was that she would occasionally see bad things and was so often right that friends started taking it seriously. This scared Grandma so she quit doing it.

She read my sister Eunice's cocoa cup once and told her she would cry that day. Eunice didn't believe it, because being at Grandma's was her "happy place" and she would never cry there. But later Grandpa George sent her to the store, as he did several times a day, paying her a nickel every time so she could save up the 60¢ it took to buy a book. Eunice thought she could make it to the store and back before using the toilet, but made it back only to the front porch, and she did cry, and she blamed the cocoa.

My sister Linda understood that Grandma had some "powers." She told a story about Grandma having a vision of where police should look for a fugitive, and they did find him there. Linda writes, "I don't know, I never really knew how much of it to believe or take seriously. It's fun to think about, though."

I agree. It is fun to think about.

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