happy tea

Hers would be just like the one on Valencia Street. Because the city needed it – a place where single origin coffees and teas could be sipped, where revolutionary minds could be muddled and spiced, where blood-red roses in jam jars could mirror the tattoos of the clientele. Do you belong to the order of the root beer rooibos tea slurpers? Do you play chess on your laptop against the computer, or against your ex who now lives in Ashland? Which table are you drawn to: the porcelain rounder beneath the replica light bulbs, with those excellent push-button switches and single-loop carbon filaments?  Or will you sit by the window, with three ghostly guests, and read Sartre, or A Passage to India, with a double-decker sea green tea pot all set about with fever trees?

Hers would also incorporate jute. Lots of twine. Vintage wallpaper. The snow would fly but so would the paper flock of Japanese cranes under a chicken wire skylight. Salt would be tracked in, swept out, and tracked in again with black mascara stains. Nothing is waterproof these days. Hers was also prone to disorder. Mustaches uncombed, pomade globs unmassaged into the locks of straw-blonde employees, arm hairs unkempt and threatening to garnish the happy tea, a flavor she blended by gloved hand.

Music was another matter entirely. Too old and it was cliché. Too new and it evoked a crowd that clashed with the theme of an ambiguous ‘then’. Hers would play a combination of obscure and oldies but goodies. Subtle, like the cucumbers in the community water jug save but two that rested on her eyes before dawn. Refreshing, refined, and fully retrofitted from a time when shower caps were floral and fabric, when bread was implicitly homemade and soups not warmed by an electric kettle. Hers cheated, sometimes, out of sight.

Hers had a lavatory inside an old elevator shaft. Pull the chain and open the flue, let out the unwanted, lure in the blackbirds. Replace underwear – she preferred knickers –to original position in the honesty of natural light. Return refuse to proper place in iron waste basket. Partake of organic hand soap and wipe hands on pants in the spirit of eco-friendship. Hers wasted not, and wanted only in secret.