Tea and Time Machines

I suppose a girl should never drink anything for purely nostalgic reasons. Perhaps a more cautious woman wouldn’t have drunk it, but I suppose if I’ve established anything here, it’s that I am not a more cautious woman.


Let me explain.


So, the Gingerbread Cottage has been in a bit of a state for the last, well, seven months or so. When I moved in, I managed to unpack all but about three boxes, which is a lot better than I did in South Central. I arranged the furniture and made my shine and hung artwork and such. I mean, the place was never completely put together, but at the beginning, I got it to the point where it was all clean and organized except three or so boxes in the dining room. Not too shabby. But then, you know, things got shot to hell near the end of first semester and I could barely keep up with work, let alone my house, so the Gingerbread Cottage started to look like it was about one dead cat carcass away from being featured on that show Hoarders.


So now that it’s the summer and I have a bit of time off, I’ve been on a mission to get the place under control. It’s been slow going, but going nonetheless. So I tackled the kitchen first, and as I was cleaning the counter, I noticed that this little late-1960s-floral-print tea tin that I have was leaving a rust ring. You know, because it was starting to rust at the bottom. So, time to get rid of it. But before sticking it in the recycling bin, I opened it up to make sure I left nothing inside.


And when I opened it up, it hit me: a burst of vanilla. The scent of the vanilla tea that I used to drink when I lived Over There. And there was still some left in tin—about two cups worth.


Now, living Over There was rough—unexpectedly rough in multitude of ways that, if I started to list them, would end up filling up the pages of a book rather than a few lines on a blog. But I was broke there—even more broke-ass broke than I am now—and the town was cold and aggressive in a completely foreign way. I’ve lived in some pretty rough places, but Over There was just a hard, brutal place that continually found new and surprising ways to reveal its brutality. So some days Trudie and I would get home from work feeling absolutely shredded, or we’d get home after a night out jumpy and manic after some new crazy encounter. But we were trapped Over There—we had contracts to fulfill—but we just couldn’t figure out a way to fit in to the culture.


So when things got crazy and it seemed like there was no way out…we’d make tea. Vanilla tea. Because it was pleasant and civilized. And it was something we could control. Outside the boarding house, the town was full of people gunning for fights and always way to concerned with other people’s business. But Trudie and I could always brew a pot of tea, and we could eat Welsh cakes with butter and honey while the whole bedsit filled with the scent of vanilla. It was a small thing, but it was the only way we knew to take a life that seemed so dangerous and overwhelming and carve out a tiny space that was manageable and domestic and secure. And for those tiny moments, brewing the tea really worked.


So when I was leaving Over There to return to A Town Near You, I bought half a kilo of that same vanilla tea and took it home with me. And sure enough, when the culture shock of the return (or my temporary separation from Mr. Fox) seemed overwhelming, I’d drink the tea with milk and sugar and think about sitting in the little bedsit on the top of The Hill, the field with the one swaybacked horse we could see from out window, the sounds of the sea…and it worked. I’d have a moment of escape from my worries and fears, perhaps because I left them temporarily. I could sit and smell the vanilla and go back into specific moments Over There.


Then when there got to be only a little bit of tea left, I stopped drinking it, but if I felt stressed or trapped and didn’t know what to do, I’d open the tea tin and smell the vanilla for a little while. The further I got separated from Over There, the less this worked to relax me, so I suppose it makes sense that I forgot that I had any left. I mean, it was years ago.


But when I discovered it the other night…well, I really wanted that little space where the world was small and manageable and safe. So I resolved to drink it, without looking on the InterWebz to see if anything crazy happens to tea after multiple years. There were enough for two cups, so I’d drink one that night and one when I woke up the next morning—a little ritual. So if all went well, perhaps there would be 8-12 hours of feeling calm and protected and at-home.


And as I sat on the couch that night and drank that first cup, I felt myself getting spirited away into the past. And for all the chaos that happened Over There, I remembered that I also had one of the best days of my life Over There. One of the best, if not the very best. And I don’t know how it happened, but I was actually transported. It wasn’t so much that I was thinking about it, but more like I was actually reliving that day, with all the physical sensations, the spectrum of emotions, the conversations we had, the food we ate. And I was gone for hours.


It’s a bit silly, because to this day I cannot pinpoint why it was the best day of my life. Nothing major happened. But on that one day, everything was impossibly perfect. My boss and his wife took Trudie and I on a day trip to a little town that was almost entirely made up of used book stores. There were old books everywhere in this town—even half of a collapsed Norman castle was stuffed with impossibly high bookshelves overflowing with old and strange works. And we explored the town—sometimes breaking up, only to run into each other accidentally while searching through boxes of old postcards or photographs, flipping through the pictures of gorgeous, full-color art books, reading each other advice from vintage lifestyle advice manuals.


And after exploring for a while, we headed up to the top of the bluff that overlooked the town and also served as a border between Over There and The Other Country. And it was a clear, sunny summer day, but the wind was just a little too brisk to be really comfortable, putting me on just enough of an edge to remind me that I’m alive. And we watched handgliders launch off the bluff, and we saw a herd of these strange, shrunken little horses with huge hooves running around, and it hit me—I’m in a place where there are actually wild horses that run around, un-owned, undomesticated. It was so gorgeous. And I can still see every little detail, hear the sound of the herd running. Every last little thing, I remember.


On the way back, my boss took us for a pint at a little tavern that had continually been a tavern since the 1500s. The ceilings were so low that even I had to duck my head while entering to avoid knocking myself out on the huge timber beam. And afterwards, the boss pulled his car off the road at the site of an abandoned tin mine, which was stark and beautiful and apocalyptic. And we spent the longest time frolicking about the abandoned mine, taking photographs of each other and speculating on the kinds of performances that could happen there, awed at the possibilities for art in that landscape.


And we ended the night having dinner and pints at a pub right on the harbor, and The Boss started planning to take me to this little village where a guy hand-makes traditional clogs, and everything was just so pleasant, so easy and uncomplicated and nice. And no one yelled or got aggressive—or even passive-aggressive—and no one was stressed out or angry or crabby. And it struck me that this is what, say, family vacations are supposed to be like, and for a while I pretended that Trudie and I were sisters and The Boss and his wife were out parents. And just the feeling of that day, the sights and the sensations, I had the realization partway through, “Oh my god, I think this is the best day ever.” And it was. Probably not remarkable for anyone else there, but I’d still say it was probably the best day I’ve ever had.


And I don’t remember when I finished the tea, or exactly how long I was gone, but it was a long, long time. And it wasn’t sleep, it wasn’t remembering—it was time travel.


So the next morning with the early light making the Gingerbread Cottage glow, I brewed the last of the tea, wondering what would happen—if I’d go back to the books and the bluff and the wild horses and the tin mine. And I was sleepy as I curled up on the couch and drank it, and I noticed the same thing happening, the sense of being spirited away.


And I found myself in a non-descript boarding house just off the promenade, the first morning I woke up in Mr. Fox’s bedroom. Snuggled up in his warm bed, still too fuzzy with sleep to open my eyes all the way, I saw him standing next to the bed, watching me sleep, two cups of tea in his hands. My heart leap into my throat when I saw the expression on his face, this peaceful little half-smile, as if he would have been happy watching for much longer. I felt self-conscious and embarrassed and pleased at the same time, trying to simultaneously tame my unruly hair and sit up while keeping, you know, all of my bits covered. He told me to drink my tea—made with milk and two sugars, exactly the way I like it, which he remembered after the first time I told him—and try to wake up. It was just after dawn and we had only had a few hours of actual sleep, but we wanted to go swimming in the sea before our 8am rehearsal. So he went through his CDs to choose a song for me to wake up to, deciding on The Vines “The Winning Days”, which he determined was “perfect for this morning.”


So we drank our tea and got into our swimsuits and headed down to the sea. I remember the feel of the cold morning air, the strength of the wind. It was not a good morning for swimming. But we had decided it would be perfect, and it was in its way. The sea was brutally choppy, and it was the kind of cold that makes your skin positively brittle. But we were genuinely laughing as we shook with the cold, as we were knocked down by the relentless waves and bruised by the stones the current pelted at us.


And once we were frozen through by the icy water, we laughed our way back up the stone beach, giddy with the sleep deprivation but more so with the intimacy, and as we climbed over the wall onto the promenade, we ran into the only other people out that morning—an old couple—probably in their seventies—out for their morning constitutional. Upon seeing us laughing and dripping wet in only our bathing suits and shoes while they had on scarves and tweedy fall jackets, they too started to laugh. And they made nice small talk with us for a bit, and I remember knowing in that moment—you know, the way you just know things—that they were so delighted because they were thinking of themselves when they were young and courting, that they were remembering the feeling of being young and reckless and in love.


And I remember it all exactly, as if it were still happening, like an endless virtual reality loop: the smell of the sea that morning, the feel of the little pebbles that got stuck in my bathing suit, the hazy quality of the early morning sunlight shining through Mr. Fox’s bedroom window.


Now I’ve always been open about my freakish memory, the way I can remember transcripts of conversations, the exact intonation of specific words, the tiny details of gesture and location and spatial relationships. But the thing is, for the specific moments, I have a pretty freakish sense memory, too. The weather, the smells, the textures of the surfaces—and of course, my visceral responses to the emotional content—it all still lives within my body. To the degree where if I concentrate on a specific event, I’m actually there, living it all over again.


Hobo mystic Jeb “Tin Cup” Clemens, the last time I saw him, gave me the wide-eyed warning about my memory: “Watch out! It’s a curse! A curse, I tells ya!” And I know he’s right. But I also don’t know what I can do about it. Curses are stubborn like that. I mean, I can’t will myself to forget—remembering is just what my brain does. And I know it makes things problematic on a number of levels, one of which is the danger that I might end up just slipping into the past permanently, entranced like Dorothy and the gang in the poppy field. And it’s really tempting sometimes, to just slip back into some beautiful moment in the past and live it over and over and over, rather than confront an unpleasant present. But then again, everyone needs some way to feel secure sometimes in the face of uncertainty. And memory is better than a lot of the other options.


And I suppose it’s strange that the other day, I’d end up back Over There, where it was pretty much the most chaotic place possible. But in that kind of environment I suppose the little moments of security were so rare that the feeling became crazily magnified. But Over There, then—as opposed to here, now—there were certainties that I could always rely on. I knew that I was going out each night, and I knew who I was going with. I knew that we’d start out at the pub with the best American soul jukebox. I knew who would be holding my hand under the table each night, and I knew that no matter where I went, I’d hear the sound of the sea.


And I knew that whatever happened, Trudie would always be there with vanilla tea.