Coffee Sign/Hotel Massini Lobby Lobby of Massini Suites, Montevideo

    This coffee is cheap, but not the best. You buy a dollar token at the hotel reception desk, drop the token in the coffee machine’s  slot, slide your cup in position, choose your poison, push a button, and wait as a small drizzle of coffee fills your paper cup almost to the top. The machine knows when to cut off so coffee doesn’t go on the floor. Things introduce themselves all the time. You go about your business, not thinking about much, or looking for anything, and then something comes your way like a present arranged by a benevolent cosmic force that knows you will be delighted. This bold colored sign by the coffee machine is such a present. ” Drink Coffee,” the sign exclaims, “you can sleep when you’re dead.” While we are waiting for our expiration date, coffee makes the waiting tolerable. This sign takes me back to the fifties when even the thought of traveling to Uruguay was no where in my mind. Uruguay was just a country on old stamps in my dad’s collection in a box in the garage. When you sleep in your childhood crib, you don’t have a clue where fate and your feet will take you. If i had known where I was going, when i was in school, I would have paid more attention.