The dried tendrils of Earl Grey tea were traitorously "plink plinking" into the filter of the small cast-iron Japanese teapot that my youngest daughter had proudly given me for Christmas. She had her first job, hostessing at Applebees, and was eager to prove her membership in the semi-grownup world by finding and purchasing the perfect gift of her own accord and with her own earnings. Built into that small teapot was another message: I get you, and you get me, and this teapot proves it.
On this particular Tuesday I was angry at the tea. The sight of the canister on the pantry shelf brought with it promises of the sort I wanted to hear. The water boiled eagerly in the water kettle and gave off a youthful whistle when it was ready. The tea, however, revealed its true self in the meantime; one can't just scoop loose Earl Grey -- it resists the intrusion of a spoon, stubbornly sitting, refusing to part. Sand you could scoop with a spoon. Sugar you could scoop with a spoon. Flour, popcorn kernels, butter, blueberries -- damned near anything in the world will avail itself to the scoopage of a spoon. But the Earl Grey fights back. You can defeat it -- you can muscle your way through it, but in so doing you employ blunt force and break the promises held in the perfection of the tea, and thereby you also destroy, strand by strand, the peace of mind that lay sifted and ready in the canister to begin with.
Unable to tolerate the idea of punishing the tea I was left grasping for alternative methods. Smallish ice-tongs came to mind, maybe a fork would be less intrusive, less harmful to the tea, like a pitchfork to hay. But no, these, too, seemed wrong. Why was the tea fighting me? Why did I care? It's just tea. Loose, dried plant leaves with neither conscience nor soul. And yet there it lay, like so many things in my life, offering promise and conflict woven together like a warm, itchy woolen blanket.
I decided the only honorable way to encourage the tea out and into the filter of this quiet, confident little teapot was to tilt the canister and help the tea out with a fingertip. That's when the traitorous sounds of cold, dry sleet "plink plinking" on the roof of my car came forth, not sounding like tea at all. I'm not sure what tea leaves are supposed to sound like, but they do not sound like sleet and they do not make me think of car rides through winter storms. My father always drove -- he was an amazingly good driver, knew every trick, every nuance of the car. Owning a car in the 1940s and 1950s was just different, I think, and forced you, the owner, to open a dialog with the car by which you both managed your way, awkwardly at times, through life. Like most relationships, these were fraught with good times and bad, tough lessons learned, and a hard respect forged in the end. Driving through the sleet meant that Dad was in control, he and the car were talking to each other, the world felt even safer than normal, because the one man you knew could tame this was at the helm. Along the way words would come your way, teaching you gently about this relationship. "You always want to gear up early in snow or sleet. Higher gear means less power, less power means you're less inclined to lose traction." You didn't respond to these as they came other than to nod, maybe let a meager "Uh-huh" pass to let him know that you had heard him. Human sponge. Listen to Dad, as Dad had listened to his father before him.
But this was tea, and I didn't want the tea to remind me of sleet or resistance or to bring to the forefront anything that may have been wrong with my life at that moment, on that day. The tea was supposed to hold my hand, stroke my hair, and say "There, there" to me softly while I sit on the couch and stare out the window. And those people walking by, right outside my window, I know they don't have issues with tea, or sleet, or life, or just being happy with the littlest of things. No, those, I just know, are reserved for me. No one else knows that the tea can be traitorous. They walk by my window and here I am, fighting the moral conflict of the ages in plain sight right in front of them, and they don't even know.
