Knowing his pref­er­ence for how he likes his cof­fee¹, I jok­ing­ly told him he should get a Wayne Gretzky on the way to Timmies this morn­ing. Until today, he had nev­er even heard of Tim Hortons, and must have thought that all Canadian prod­ucts are named after Canadian heroes. “What’s that?” he asked me. “Nine cream and nine sug­ar, like Gretzky’s jer­sey num­ber; 99”, I told him.

“That sounds good”.

So I walked up to the counter, made my order, and looked at him. He gave me a nod, so I turned to the girl behind the counter again, and said, “Extra large cof­fee. Nine cream, nine sug­ar”.

In a com­plete­ly dead­pan face, she asked, “Are you seri­ous?”.

“Yep.”

And this is prob­a­bly the great­est thing I’ve ever expe­ri­enced.

1. The pre­vi­ous day, I asked him how many cream and sug­ar he takes. Expecting a quan­ti­ta­tive mea­sure, he just told me, “A lot”. [↩]