Most Favored Mug

There’s something comforting about using the same coffee mug every day. It’s a ritual that is sacred upon waking. It gets the flem out of my throat. But what is it about having the same mug that is so important?

My current coffee mug is my Dukakis ’88 election mug that I… ahem, liberated from my (Great) Aunt Nancy. I thought it was freakin’ hilarious It’s actually quite small–people in the late eighties tended to have smaller cup sizes and smaller food portions. I can call that from the Hardee’s (you would call it Carl’s Jr. or Roy Rogers) Rise-and-Shine Biscuit mugs that Aunt Nancy also had that are exactly the same size. (By the way, the cinnamon raisin biscuits were amazing and a rare treat growing up.)

So it’s actually rather inconvenient to use, but then again, I just carry my giant insulated carafe upstairs now to refill it. I’m already developing a history with this mug. It replaced the Secretary of State mug I bought at a yard sale in back in my hometown on the one of the rare times I returned home. However, that has been exiled back to the cabinet, because it never gained my love. The seal embossed on it was cool, but hard to see.

Even that was a replacement for my other two mugs that I got from an Army-Navy surplus store in downtown Galveston, Texas when I was on one of my contracts back when I was travelling. These are what military men would frequently get whenever they changed assignments or finished a tour. My dad has a whole box full of them since you changed tours every two years or less, so they weren’t particularly sentimental to him. Nowadays, they give out challenge coins which are shiny, cool, and much easier to carry with you between deployments.

I loved those damn mugs. As you can see from the picture above, they usually come with a name embossed, which didn’t really help me, so I had to search for a while through the pile of them before I found two that weren’t personalized. One was the Army’s helicopter training squadron out in New Mexico, which had a cool seal of an eagle stringing a bow. Being a teacher, I found that particularly nice. When that broke, I used the other, which had the more generic US Pacific Command. Then that broke and I lost that part of my history forever.

And perhaps that is the key–it’s a connection to something in the past that you think about fondly. In the case of my military mugs, it was both being a Navy brat and being a travelling consultant. The Epic University mug (that you see in the same picture) was used as a coffee mug back in my days starting working for hospitals, because it reminded me of fond memories travelling to Madison, Wisconsin during a blizzard to learn medical software. But that original one I got broke–I picked this replacement up on a later contract, so it didn’t have that same mystic connection.

Am I the only one? Tell me about your most favored mug or tell me why that’s silly in the comments below!