13 Nov--Tea, pt.1

It has been just over a month since Jamie tasted coffee. Some weeks ago, on his birthday, he decided to fix a cup of English Breakfast tea. He had not intended to abstain from coffee outright, but the idea (and subsequent taste) of tea reminded him of something.

When the kettle had boiled, he poured the water over his teabag and quickly lost track of his thoughts. When the mind wanders, the body reverts to automation, like a mechanical arm on Toyota's assembly line, doing only what is programmed. His hands set the kettle back on its base, opened the refrigerator, grabbed the one-litre carton of skim milk, and carefully added it to the tea. But he was conscious of nothing. Jamie's eyes went cotton, and his face relaxed. In his cup, the milk, the water, and the tea twisted against themselves and each other until there was no difference.

Jamie drank tea toward the end of his one-year stay in Ireland, a habit he picked up from his closest Irish friend, Aidan. "Earl Grey, heavy on the cow," he would say in a turn of phrase that was characteristic of his quick-wit and effortless vigilance. Jamie was often struck by how easily he peppered his speech with metaphor. Once, at the pub, Aidan took a drink, tilted his head back and said, "Jaysus, I feel like an ant in a beehive." Jamie was speechless. Or at Aidan's flat, catching bubbles in his kitchen, when he suddenly stopped and let the soapy things drift with the words, "One day you reach a point where you just have to accept that you're never going to be an astronaut."

And when Jamie left--"Oh the price of leaving, the cost of coming home."

When He flew from Ireland to chase a girl around Western France, he was still drinking tea. Indeed, it gave him more satisfaction (and attention) than the object of his flight. The French, he soon learned, never surrender; they simply draw you deeper into their den. He worked very hard to become so very lost, and in the dark of his own tent on the shore of Isle de Ray he found illumination in words written about tea: "Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things."