After that, I ate my chocolate cobbler in silence.

This past Sunday, my youngest nephew, Wynn, who by the way is a few months shy of three and has already rightfully earned the nickname of “Chunk,” turned to me and asked for coffee.

“What…did you…say?” I implored of him.

“Coffee,” he responded, and then with a nod of the head as if recognizing that he’d forgotten the magic word, added, “pease?”

It’s always precious when the little ones remember that fading concept known as “manners.” But, precious aside, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. I went in search of his mother.

She wasn’t a bit thrown off by what I felt had been a rather strange request coming from a toddler.

Oh yes, she said, he loves it. Drink a cup a day, if I’d let him.

Surely you don’t, I said.

“Nah,” she replied, “I don’t have the time to make it in the morning.”

Oh, well, thank god for that.

“How did he even get started with coffee?” I continued.

“I have no idea,” she said.

My guess, though, if I had to give one, would involve a caffeine-addicted mother, a squalling baby, and a free pacifier.  We’ve all been the victim of pacifier-popping. In my family, it’s worse than pills. We were our own Valley of the Dolls, and, I mean, let’s be honest, we were also beautiful babies. I’m sure one afternoon, she found herself with a screaming kid and cup of joe, and before you know it, the pacifier is dipped in the cup and ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom, another barista is born.

“No idea. Huh,” I repeated.

I then went to the kitchen for an extra-large helping of Nana’s famous chocolate cobbler and waddled on back to the dining room, where, not more than five minutes later, my other nephew (step-nephew, actually), Isaac, a mature four-year-old if ever there was one, came and stood gracefully in the doorway connecting the dining room and the kitchen and announced that he would like to “make a pot of coffee.”

If only someone had had a camera to take a picture of my face at that moment.

His father said, “Isaac, now let’s wait a minute. We’re not all on dessert.”

Was that a slam to me? I eat fast, I’m sorry.

I looked at Isaac and said, “Do you even know how to spell your name, yet?”

“Yes, I do, and in cursive.” And with that, he slid into the shadow of the refrigerator. (It’s on account of where the refrigerator sits in relation to the door).

Am I missing something, here? Have children been drawn to the lure of coffee since time immemorial and I just didn’t know? I personally have never cared for it.

It’s not my kind of bitter.

Plus, it seems so unhealthy a habit, but then again, our first milk was hardly from our mothers. More likely, it came from the teat of Lipton. When we were weaned off our bottles, chances are they were full of sweet tea.

Besides, and you can trust me on this, it’s more than a little unsettling to have a four-year-old ask if you “want decaf or regular.”

Of course, only Marsha and I had anything really “anti-coffee” to say about this trend, whether it’s global or intra-family. Neither one of us drinks it.

Not so for the others in my immediate family. Several make a pot a day just for the smell of it; it signals morning. The rest of them would construct gated communities in their own cups of coffee—for crying out loud, it’s an ancient form of currency. That’s why I qualified it with the adjective “gated.”

Apparently, there is such a thing as a coffee connoisseur. And a coffee snob.

Amanda, for instance—more the connoisseur than the snob. But then you have people like Dodie who mainstreams her java tastes to whatever Starbucks says works for that week. Except during Christmas. She doesn’t care for their flavor-making experiments during the holidays.

I hadn’t realized the dominating pull of coffee for table conversation, though. People may not know what to do about the current Gulf Oil Crisis, or if they still like Obama, but god knows, they’ve got something to say about the quality of black gold.

And we got stuck on that for awhile, despite the fact that I’d been trying desperately to steer the point back to my original concern: children who drink coffee.  But that seemed such a minor issue to the rest of the family.

So what if they drink coffee. It keeps them quiet, I was told.

And oddly enough, it did. They didn’t get hyper; they didn’t burst into an all-consuming ball of energy and run themselves into butter like Samba. They sat, in the den, in individual recliners and watched Handy Manny. (Though, to be honest, Wynn did pitch a fit when he was given his coffee in his sippy cup; he refused to drink it unless it was put in a “real cup.” Consequently, he got one, with its own little saucer).

I was, I’ll admit, amazed that that was the result. I expected, barely two sips in, for them to become Satan’s little helpers, running and screaming, as they were wont to do, often enough, without coffee.

Which begged the real question: What on earth are they eating and drinking the rest of time that would allow coffee, of all things, to calm them down?

No one had an answer to that.

As a matter of fact the only person who said anything at all was Nana, who after a few thoughtful seconds, said, “So when did Isaac learn to make coffee?”

After that, I ate my chocolate cobbler in silence.

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