Notes and tea

I'll put the Thursday on, wash the tea,
since our names are completely ordinary--
- from "Identification" by Wislawa Szymborska

There's water in the kettle, the tea bag waits in the cup. The book I'm reading has tea in it, has teaism and Okakura Kakuzo in it, has Basho and Sei Shonagon in it. My eyes automatically dart toward my bookshelf, where my copy of Shonagon's Pillow Book is, and I remember the lists my teacher in poetry class once asked us to make. Lists like "things that make your heart beat fast", or "things that make you sad". I don't remember the items in mine. My recall of details has become feeble, and clutching at memory's hems requires much effort, most of the time.

"And then one comes across the letters of a man one used to love.

Last year's paper fan. A night with a clear moon."

- from the Pillow Book

But, tea. Tea pots, tea cups. I have lingered over store displays a few times, trailing my fingers along the tea pots' thin, graceful necks, inspecting the cups' ears, admiring the artwork. They are the daintiest things, but I've never bought any. Maybe I didn't feel I'll have use for them, maybe I felt that it was too early in my "tea stage" to buy them. My knowledge of tea is confined to Lipton, Starbucks, and the instances it has come up in the English novels and Zen stories I've read. And, of course, there's the memory of poring over Proust's In Search of Lost Time and being profoundly affected by his tea-and-petites-madeleines passage.

photo from dinahfried.com

But I will buy a set, one of these days. It's on my list, definitely. Something that has little flowers on their faces. In white and blue, perhaps.

Meanwhile, the kettle sings.

"Come along inside...

We'll see if tea and buns can make the world a better place."

- from The Wind in The Willows