Tea

To Americans, this isn’t a meal, it’s a drink. But Americans don’t drink it. Older ladies sometimes think they drink it, but what they raise to their lips is a cup of hottish water lightly colored with a briefly dipped teabag. Younger “tea” drinkers often sip an infusion of herbs and flavors.

I’ve been a tea drinker since high school, but my cup doesn’t hold what a Brit would consider “proper” tea, either. I drink good black tea properly brewed, but with sugar and lemon—“Russian” tea. So I’ll be the guy on the Challenge pulling the little yellow squeezy thing out of his food pack.

Within the last few years, my very fit, very slender, very coffee-drinking father has begun to drop by most afternoons at about the time I take my tea break. And he has begun to drink tea. Since he thinks that only sissies use milk, and only weak characters indulge their sweet tooth (teeth? tooths?), he takes it straight. But he has come to enjoy it quite as much as I do mine. We have a nice chat, I head back upstairs to work, and he watches out the window to see who’s walking up and down Main Street and, if possible, why.

There’s also iced tea, which is no longer necessarily a summer drink over here, and which is what a lot of folks, especially down south, mean when they say “tea.” Below the Mason-Dixon line, they drink it pre-sweetened with enough sugar to make your teeth buzz. My mom made wonderful iced tea, using a recipe she got from the mother of a girlhood friend. We still make it (but like good New Englanders, only in summer), and we sometimes use mint from a transplanted bed that traces back to the original that Mom’s friend’s mom had in her backyard in the 1930s and ’40s. This gives me great pleasure.

Our daughter (who normally is one of those herbal people) and I have over the years developed a tea-related ritual. When we come off the hills (assuming the hills are in our part of the world), we aren’t yet finished. The perfect success of the outing depends on our securing bottles of Snapple Peach Iced Tea and a bag of Cape Cod Potato Chips, and we’ll drive for miles to find a store that sells the right stuff.

I’m a fan of Alexander McCall-Smith’s Precious Ramotswe books, which are set in Botswana. In The Full Cupboard of Life, there is a chapter entitled: “Tea is Always the Solution,” an assertion closer to universal truth than most of what I hear from pulpits or podia.

Of course, everyone at the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency drinks Rooibos.