Breakfast and a cup of tea

It’s eight-fifteen in the morning.

I’m sitting in the bedroom typing this morning because the other people here have overrun the kitchen for their breakfast, and the aromas emanating therefrom of frying meat and coffee, though wonderful are exclusionary; my Southron manners won’t let me intrude.  I, on the other hand, am sitting here working because last night, when I emptied the last of our milk jug into the mocha Kathryn and I finished our day with, did not immediately hoof it down to the corner store to replace it.  “Down” means “uphill in the dark.”

It’s not worth it putting off this third morning’s writing that long, taking that much longer to begin the day’s expeditions.  So I got dressed enough to be civil if I got caught by strangers in the hall to scarper to the bathroom, decided not to put on socks, shoes, and a sweater and strike out for the store.  Instead, I have tucked my bare calves and frozen feet under the blanket and sheet, leaned back into this white Ikea folding chair, and started work.  The chair fits me enough so that when I lean back into this posture, I’m almost hanging from the back slat by my shoulder blades.  It’s not all that comfortable, but neither is it all that uncomfortable. either.  I’m not going to invest in an actually comfortable chair till I have a more permanent perch.  However, as I say that, I have a mental image from a sepia-ed out photo in an Oklahoma museum of Will Rogers sitting on the running board of a 1930-something sedan working on a portable typewriter in his lap.  His addiction to the printed word was greater than mine, apparently.

I have discovered a new mealtime relationship.  A couple of days ago at lunch, or anyway a sit-down in the early afternoon, I noticed of the peas and penne pasta on my plate that a small pea had insinuated itself into the muzzle of a penne.  Why was that fascinating?  I have no idea,  But I swallowed the mouthful I was working on, washed it down with a slug of water, laid down my fork and began working with the pasta and the peas.  I have learned that a typical penne about an inch long will accommodate three small, probably early, possibly dwarf, peas.  I checked my results by stuffing, loading(?) another pasta.  I heard laughter and looked up to realize Kathryn was laughing at me.  I guess I -did- look foolish.  But I don’t care; I revel in my woman’s laughter.  Though the taste didn’t affect my palate differently, nor was the delivery from plate to teeth more efficient, I wondered how many other daily actives began that simply.

We didn’t start with ceramic or glass or wooden bowls.  We didn’t start with a hot cup of coffee or tea.  We didn’t start with rare prime rib on a carving platter with an aproned, white-hatted chef slicing off thin, rich, red shavings of gory glory.  All those unconscious actions and sensations and manipulations of humanity’s daily universe trace back to individual, accidental discoveries, each of which branched uncounted times into other parts of today.  Salt, pepper, Tabasco sauce.  Crushed, cracked, fermented and bottled.  Where do you start the process of hybridizing and planting coffee trees (shrubs), selecting horrible-tasting red fruits, roasting them, crushing and grinding them, then boiling water and pouring it over them?  How did that get transformed into a multimillion dollar worldwide custom, then industry with so many variations?  Think about the myriad ways it is prepared, the different ways it is served, the different rituals, or absence of, with which it is associated.  It warms the hands and souls of cowmen unwinding around a buffalo chip fire; it comforts men on both sides of a battle on land or sea hunkered behind earthworks or steel bulkheads; it is a stimulant to students and middle managers; it is a symbol of hospitality, the preparation of which is both stylized and observed.

That’s just the coffee.

Oatmeal?  Really?  Picking a specific grass, training it over centuries, harvesting it in specific fields, drying it, flattening it on stone or wood or steel rollers? 

What about grits?  Yeah, hominy grits.  Who ever figured that one out?  Cultivating maize from a knee-high grass to a six- or eight-foot stalk of yellow fruit that’s dried then soaked in a caustic solution that’ll peel the flesh from human bone, rinsed, dried again, ground, packaged, shelved, bought, boiled yet again, and mixed, almost without thought with butter, white sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, maple syrup, salt, pepper, cheese, and shrimp.  All different, all spectacularly pleasing, comforting, thrilling to the discriminating tongue or universally rejected by infants in high chairs being cosseted by their mothers.  Grits.  American Southern staple, Northern humor.  

This morning, without coffee, I am drinking tea.  Since my preferred variety is lapsang souchong, perhaps that should be capitalized as “Tea.” Kathryn is drinking a “Yorkshire tea”made of leaves from Africa.  Definitely a lower-case “tea,”  not because of its origin, but because of its insipid flavor. Opening Kathryn’s box of tea, then the paper wrapper, and bringing that special bag to the nose one inhales the scent of a struggling grass in a dry pasture.  Not a green, lush, blooming field, but one that you can see through to the dusty surface with broken limestone rock between the  scrawny ground cover.  She takes her tea straight, sometimes with lemon or honey, sometimes both.  She doesn’t like it to steep very long.  Actually, her process is to roll open the top of the waste bin, return to the counter to pour the boiling water over the bag, then to carry the cup to the bin, pluck the bag from its bath, and drop it into said bin. To really punch up the flavor sometimes she’ll slice in a ginger root, raw, straight off the shelf.  I’ve never noticed her to add cream or milk.  When we lived in our tiny house in the middle of forty-four acres of Missouri forest, we bought raw milk from an Amish dairyman who herded Guernsey cows.  That milk was so rich it was almost a dessert in itself; in coffee, ambrosial.

But the lapsang souchong.  That’s a different matter altogether.  The plant itself (all teas are a variety of camellia) is grown in a really dark Chinese soil.  I think it must be fertilized with water buffalo dung, the tea has such a tang.  Then the dried brown leaves are roasted or smoked over either damp pine needles or slow glowing hardwood coals until they blacken.  At this point they are broken up and bagged.  When these pharmaceutically-measured blessed-of-heaven bags get to me their aromatics are so rich, so filling, it’s almost indescribable.  Its aroma is “down home.”  Do a thought experiment with me here.  Close your eyes.  Picture yourself at your granddaddy’s yellow-paint-peeling wooden house out in the middle of No-damn-where-at-all, Texas, out on the Llano Estacado (the yucca cactus “staked plains” of Coronado’s Conquistadores), where you can stand in the withered grass front yard and see clean into Oklahoma. It’s summer; oh, man, is it ever summer.  Out from under that one flowering quince tree, it’s hot, still, dry, dusty, eye-squinting summer.  It’s so dry it’s hard to swallow.  You here with me?  OK.  You have your hat on, right?  You absolutely have to have something to keep your head from burning.  OK.  Walk around back of the house fifty or sixty yards, and climb over the corral fence beside the barn, where you can lean agains the dry two-by-eight boards and breathe in the cool barn-shadowed air and the yellow-green hay still stacked in there for the stock.   Now walk out into the corral itself, keeping your eyes down, looking for a piece of that pigging string that got trampled into the mud during one of those thunderstorms that roll down from Kansas. 

On that mud dried after the horses had trampled it up, you can twist an ankle in a heartbeat and have to limp back to the house to have Grandmother Hardage tie it up so you can hobble a little easier.  Just the sound alone of that woman’s voice has kept better men than me alive.  Anyway, pull that piece of pigging string out of the surface, and cut off about six inches or a foot.  You -are- carrying that Barlow stock knife Granddad gave you, right?  OK.  Since you’re after a cup of tea here, you’re old enough to drive, otherwise you’d have to wait till somebody was headed into Canadian, about fifteen-sixteen miles, into town.  Once you’re in town, step out into the middle of concrete-slab Main Street in front of Nolen Hardware Store.  It’s hard not to conjure up John Wayne’s “High Noon” or Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns.  

Dad’s parents bought Nolen’s Hardware store when they moved into town, I think before World War I, because Dad went off to fly fighters in World War II.  Grandmother replied, when I asked why it was still Nolen’s, that they didn’t change the sign out front because, “Pat, them things cost money.”

 Press that length of rope (a pigging string is a short length of rope used to tie the feet of a calf so she’ll hold still enough to be branded) into the hot, sticky, dusty tar between the concrete slabs.  Be sure you’ve got your boots on, or your summer tennis shoes, ‘cause that tar’ll blister your bare feet - unless you’ve been running around barefoot since the day school got out back in June.  

When that string is down level with the top of the concrete, that’s far enough.  Pull it back out; don’t let it get on your clothes; Sally or Grandmother’ll be furious about having to wash it out.  “Sally” is the name my mother took for herself because her brothers called her “gas-Olyne” or “ker-Osene” when they were all kids.  Her name was Olyne (“oh-leen), and she was so adamant in her dislike of all that teasing, she even had my little brother and me call her that.  We didn’t dare call her “Mom” till we were out of high school and I guess we figured we were too big to get whippings any more, or something.

Got a grip on that raggedy dried-mud, tar-coated length of piggin’ string?  Then hold it up close to your nose, and take a really deep whiff of it.  Pull it all the way in.  Are your eyes still closed?

Can you get a sense how the dirt that washed all the way down to Granddad’s corral from the Dakotas was shoved there from Canada by the glaciers?  How someday it’ll probably wash into the Gulf of Mexico?  Can you feel the rains that flooded the Canadian River being baked away by that gawd-almighty Texas sun?  Does your gut thunder with the ground’s shuddering under the hooves of a million buffalo being hunted by the Comanche’s sinew-backed bows and flint-tipped spears and skinning knives?  Have you palmed one of those stone point that you pulled out of a creek bed?  Can you hear the bawling of innumerable longhorns on the long trail north to the Kansas City railheads?  Can you picture a Hereford cow with her calf standing knee-deep in the cottonwood shade of a creek?  Does the breeze under those cottonwoods dry the sweaty shirt on your back?  Can you taste how the cool water from the garden hose under the wooden front porch washes the dry dust off the back of your mouth in the summers?

Open your eyes.

That’s what’s in the aroma of a cup of lapsang souchong tea.

You don’t profane that with milk or honey or even brown sugar.  You take it straight up.

My two hours are up, or anyway they will be when I’m done editing this first effort.  I’m going to go take a shower and walk to the shop to get milk for a cup of coffee.  Now that I’ve finished this edit, it’s high noon under a leaden London sky.

And I finished that cup of tea two hours ago.  I also realized that the first time I read this aloud, I was just weeping at a couple of passages.  This time brought no tears.  I think I got more out of it the first time, but I don’t know how to get back there.  From now on I’m going to save my first draft and let the first and final drafts fight it out.

Which proves that Life is Full and Rich and Good.