“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” ― C.S. Lewis
It was very cold this morning, but the sun was making it through the clouds a tiny bit, so I decided to go for a walk. I didn’t dress too warmly as I wanted to feel the cold in addition to seeing the sun.
I decided to walk to Starbucks. I haven’t been to Starbucks in a long time – since I upped my coffee game their coffee simply isn’t that good. Especially since I don’t drink fancy sugary milky concoctions – I only order a cup of black brewed coffee (I like coffee, why put other shit in it?). With fresh beans, my grinder, and my Aeropress I can make far, far, better coffee at home for much, much less cost.
However, I have never considered Starbucks to be a place to buy coffee. It’s an office rental place – you simply pay by buying overpriced drink items. I never understand people that drive through Starbucks, or pick up an order… make it yourself!
Viewed as an office or meeting place I realize I have a lot of really fond memories of various Starbucks. There was the one in Mesquite where I would stretch out a coffee for two hours listening to the various Saturday Morning Confessions while I would write and wait for my son Lee’s double art lessons. Some significant and meaningful aspects of my life were born in that Starbucks a long, long time ago. I wrote something about it during the previous century – I’ll have to look through my stuff, find where I put it.
Then there is the Plano Starbucks that I met with my writing group, every Wednesday for over a decade. I could calculate how much coffee I drank there, in hundreds of gallons, but I won’t.
So today, nothing dramatic. I walked there with my library book, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Murakami. It’s a popular book so I won’t be able to renew it – that means I only have three weeks to get through its prodigious pages, but thirty pages a day will be more than fast enough. I’m loving the book, so this won’t be hard.
After one large brew and thirty four pages I decided to hike home. Crossing Beltline I went by Gong Cha, one of the many Asian Boba Tea spots in my ‘hood – and considered if this might be another possible future destination. Unfortunately, most of their offerings have way, way too much sugar in them for my health… so I need to stick to American style black coffee.
In an empty parking spot was an abandoned mostly-drank Boba Tea. Its festive bright pink lid and specked black tapioca balls peeking through the clouds of milk tea looked festive on the cold morning, so I snapped a picture of it.
Oh, I found what I wrote… I think it was the first time I had ever been to Starbucks – I actually bought an iced tea with a gift certificate that Candy gave me. I bought the tea because I was intimidated with the coffee menu (this was a long, long time ago).
Here’s what I wrote – it’s silly- but it brings back good memories.
Saturday, August 29, 1998
Coffee foams
….. Coffee foams comes in a foam cup seashells hidden in the foam, spirals like an ear like time time flies Tea cold, iced, cubed the tea of the day is reddish, fruity cold and refreshing. Fresh tea is hot from the pot and steams hissing onto the cubes. The tea is iced, but the day is not the day is hot and sweaty
Round Green Tables
time flies blue eyes “I seldom talk to anyone anymore other than children and rednecks”
South American Beans Roasted, toasted, ground and boiled and percolate the suspension of disbelief
Once, I quit drinking coffee It made my stomach hurt
I feel something, sometimes as a burning worm in my stomach, my gut a monster of strain
After a period of time he decided to choose a different coffee shop, one that was not quite as mysterious. He knew he would miss his waitress, but there would be another in the new shop and he didn’t want to get to the point that his harmless crush would seem creepy.
—-Bill Chance, A Ring in a Cup of Tea
Mojo Coffee, Magazine Street, New Orleans, Louisiana (click to enlarge)
I don’t usually use writing prompts – but I was suffering from a moment of writer’s block and picked one out of a list. It said “A man finds a ring in a cup of tea.” OK
Sunday Snippet
A Ring in a Cup of Tea
There was a ring in his teacup. He looked around the coffee shop. At every table there were people doing what people do in a coffee shop on a Saturday morning. One middle aged man reading a newspaper… a few couples discussing the upcoming day… more than a few people confessing their sins of Friday night. What there didn’t seem to be was anybody that would have slipped a ring into his teacup.
He looked at the waitress. It was the same woman that he had bought tea from many times before. She was young and attractive in a coffee shop waitress sort of way. A world-weary smile that looked like it belonged on someone older than her. Slim, despite being around pastries and calorie-stuffed sugar-loaded specialty coffee drinks all the time. Short hair that bobbed a little when she turned her head. Odd glasses with heavy frames with a line of rhinestones on the side – glasses that have been out of style for fifty years – so out of style they looked cool in a hipster post-modern coffee shop on a Saturday morning.
Could it have been an accident? The waitress had brought the cup empty and he had picked a teabag out of the big wooden box that she presented to him – taking his time as long as he dared in order to enjoy the waitress bending over slightly in front of him. She then unpeeled the bag and said, “Good choice,” like she always did, even though he knew nothing of tea and picked the bag at random. She then had filled the cup with clear hot water, setting down the pot and leaving before the leaves had a chance to turn the water semi-opaque.
If the ring was in the cup she would have seen it. He might have, except he wasn’t looking at the cup.
He picked up the sugar spoon and fished the ring out of the hot tea, setting it on the table for a second to cool. He picked it up, still a little warm and examined the plain gold band. A fan of fantasy fiction he almost expected to see glowing writing in an elvish hand around the circumference – but it was an ordinary , plain, non-magical ring. No special power there.
He held it up to his eye and waved it around a bit – not enough to be obviously nuts – but he hoped that if it belonged to someone, had slipped off a finger into his cup, unseen, they would see him brandishing it and would say something.
“Excuse me, is that my ring?” they would say.
“It must be, it isn’t mine,” he would reply with a bright chuckle, “It must have slipped off your finger and fallen into my tea.”
“Well, then, sorry, let me pay for a fresh cup,” would be their slightly embarrassed reply.
But there was only silence.
He didn’t know whether to drink his tea or not. After looking carefully at the ring, he decided it was clean enough and gold isn’t going to wear off into hot water so he drained his cup anyway. Then he carefully slipped the ring into his pocket and stood up to leave. He looked around, put his coat on, expecting someone to come up to him and explain the joke of them slipping the ring into his tea.
But there was only silence.
At that point he couldn’t think of anything to do except to go home. He thought of leaving the ring in his cup, but that was crazy. At his place he rolled it up in a ball of socks (bright purple ones – a present from an old girlfriend – so ugly that he never wore them – but the woman brought back fond memories so he kept the pair) in his underwear drawer.
The next day, and every day for a week he stopped by the coffee shop and checked the bulletin board carefully – checking for a notice of someone looking for a lost ring.
But he found nothing.
After two weeks he decided to choose a different coffee shop, one that was not quite as mysterious. He knew he would miss his waitress, but there would be another in the new shop and he didn’t want to get to the point that his harmless crush would seem creepy.
He lived for many, many years and when he died his nieces and nephews were given the task of going through his things. He was a man of simple tastes and it wasn’t an overwhelming job. For some reason, though, his favorite niece decided to unroll the balled-up purple socks, so out of place, and found the ring inside.
The family talked for days about this discovery.
“I’ll bet he proposed marriage and she jilted him, wouldn’t even take the ring.”
“No, we would know about that. He probably just loaned some money and the ring was collateral and the loan was never paid back.”
“Maybe it was his mother’s?”
“No, it is too plain for her.”
They speculated over and over again. Every explanation for the ring was offered up and rejected.
Except nobody could possibly even imagine that it simply showed up in a cup of tea.
“Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.
“Is there any tea on this spaceship?” he asked.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Photographs from the teacup races at Turner House in Oak Cliff, during the 2014 Tweed Ride festivities.
“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
― Gary Snyder
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis
“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Bill Chance 