Starbucks

Four Years


city in clouds

I “celebrated” the official end of the first year of widowhood, mourning or whatever one chooses to call it with lunch. I took a sick day and met my BFF for lunch at our favorite Mongolian grill.

It was a girly thing. The kind I don’t do anymore as my few girlfriends are scattered all over North America making lunch and window shopping dates a  bit hard to arrange. And being girly, all manner of girly things were discussed once she took my emotional temp for the day.

“How are you doing?” she’s a home health care nurse. Temp taking is second nature to her.

“Surprisingly fine, ” I said, though in retrospect it probably shouldn’t have been. The power of suggestion is strong and stronger when emotions are amped to the stratosphere, as mine were because I was an active member on a message board for widowed folk at the time. People in the first year or so were constantly bombarded with messages that probably led their emotions more than it helped them sort emotions out.

Being a nurse, the talk turned to the sinus infection I suspected I had and she applauded me for making an appointment for after our lunch with my doctor. I had a habit of trying to ride them out because they would supposedly peak and resolve themselves with OTC care – mine never did but I chalk that up to a run down immune system, among other things. I seldom run to the doctor for sinus now that I have discovered a few home remedies that I wish I’d had in my arsenal back then.

We talked kids and her husband, who was not stellar at the time until she turned the table and brought up Rob.

At that point, Rob and I had known each other a bit over a month. We were email pals and IM buddies. It was nice and though I recognized that he and I were quite compatible and scarily alike in more and more ways, I wasn’t inclined to pursue him. Mostly because he’d indicated that he was going to wait out his first year of widowhood before attempting to date and in some part because another widow at the message board where he and I had met stalked him for a while despite his point-blank refusal of her attentions. I liked Rob and didn’t want him to lump me into the same category with her.*

“I had a short note from him this morning,” I said.

“And?”

“And what? We’re friends.” I said, and not for the first time. BFF suspected he had feelings for me from nearly the get-go.

“I like him and sure, I could go there, but it would have to be his idea. I won’t spoil our friendship by introducing romantic intentions. He’s too sweet and he wants to wait until after August to start dating. I respect that,” I said. “Besides, he lives in Canada and I live here. Logistically difficult at best.”

“He’s going to make a move, ” she said with that sage look of hers.

“I doubt it.”

I was home on the 24th too. Sinus infection. My new lease on work included taking sick days when I felt like crap and I did. I taught too many years with the idea that I had to drag myself in because I owed it to my students and employer, but as a 20 year veteran, I was finally over that. The only reward for dedication in education is nothing. Truly.

Dee was at preschool. She attended an all day Montessori school run by my school district and I was damn lucky to have gotten her a spot. Her teacher saw them for a few hours in the morning and a few in the afternoon. The rest of the time she was in the daycare that she’d been attending since she was seven weeks old. An awesome set-up that made the whole single mom thing far less of a hassle for me than it was for most.

After I’d dropped her off, I hit the Starbucks at the grocery near home. The young man had my drink started even as I walked in. He smiled and inquired after me, and I admitted I was playing a bit of hooky that day. He just laughed as I paid him. I stopped at the Chinese deli in the store for egg drop soup and rice. I lived off that because in spite of the removal of my gall bladder a couple of months earlier, I still couldn’t eat much. In fact, it’s only just recently that my ability to eat has started to return to normal.

Sipping chai and scanning my work email – because even sick there was work I could do and I could never completely shake my keener ways – I noted that my personal email had a new note from Rob.

It was long – even for him. And rambling. Even for him.

And it radiated with “I have something important to say”, so I began skimming until I hit a paragraph many paragraphs in that proved to be the big reveal.

He admitted having feelings for me that were more than friendly and proposed exploring them if I felt the same way.

That was four years ago today and though I write about this every year, it never loses its awesomeness. Nor its wonder. If I were ever to come to a point where I believed the universe had no meaning or that destiny was a fiction – I have only to remember this one day to set me right in my thinking again.

Rob’s modest proposal kicked off a whirlwind of long distance courtship that culminated with our meeting in Idaho Falls a month later and the rest, as they say, is history. One that we are still working on and is destined for the books, in my humble opinion.

*Every new widower who posted on the widow board was subject to her “attention”. It wasn’t the good natured banter that occurs in co-ed groups. It was predatory Gone with the Wind style. She fancied herself a southern belle and I always pictured her a cross between Suzanne Sugarbaker and Dolly Parton. In reality, she sported the biker chick look complete with a mullet on top.

A Cup of Tea


A cup of masala chai

Image via Wikipedia

When I was a little girl tea was Lipton.  Scalding, flavorless and punishment for being ill.  The only people I knew who drank tea willingly were my aunties.  Neither of whom believed that the vile steaming concoction should be sullied in any way by anything flavorful – like milk or, god forbid, sugar.

Like any good Midwestern girl, coffee was my anticipated beverage of choice, but though both of my parents drank it by the pot full – not one of their children developed a taste. Even twenty years of teaching failed to coerce me to take more than a sip.

So it was a surprise to all when I became a tea drinker.

It began rather innocently with my late husband who cajoled me into sampling a vanilla chai latte at that coffee shop in the mall. He was a Mocha man himself and we couldn’t go a Sunday without making a stop. He loved coffee. He bought one of those coffee makers that could make anything and taught himself to steam milk and make espresso and lattes.

Then, of course, Starbucks arrived and chai became my vice of choice. The only drive through in the entire city for a goodly while was right on the way to the high school where I taught. A convenience I was sure that the universe placed there just to make it up to me for recent slights and injuries.

Rob is the one though who taught me to make a cup of tea after coddling me first with chai latte from a mix. Although he swears he had as little idea as I about chai in the beginning. He, at least, knew how to make a simple cup of tea.

There is, though, a proper way to make tea. American people do not make tea of any kind properly from hot to iced*;  it’s an epic fail.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece recently on the proper way to make tea. He was inspired, or incited, by a quote by Yoko Ono relating her tea tutelage under her late husband,

It was Dec. 8, and Yoko Ono had written a tribute to mark the 30th anniversary of the murder of her husband. In her New York Times op-ed, she recalled how the two of them would sometimes make tea together. He used to correct her method of doing so, saying, “Yoko, Yoko, you’re supposed to first put the tea bags in, and then the hot water.” (This she represented as his Englishness speaking, in two senses, though I am sure he would actually have varied the word order and said “put the tea bags in first.”) This was fine, indeed excellent, and I was nodding appreciatively, but then the blow fell. One evening, he told her that an aunt had corrected him. The water should indeed precede the bags. “So all this time, we were doing it wrong?” she inquired. “Yeah,” replied our hero, becoming in that moment a turncoat to more than a century of sturdy Liverpool tradition.

I simply hate to think of the harm that might result from this. It is already virtually impossible in the United States, unless you undertake the job yourself, to get a cup or pot of tea that tastes remotely as it ought to.

I think he should cut Ono a bit of slack. Thirty years on one’s memories of one’s deceased partner are shiny and yellowed with age after all. And she’s allowed to paraphrase. My version of my live husband is often disputed by him. I can only imagine how far off the mark I do on the dead one and he’s only been gone five years now.

Hitchens goes on to outline proper tea making procedures according to some ancient rules dreamed up by George Orwell:

If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: “[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.” This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle.

It’s not quite over yet. If you use milk, use the least creamy type or the tea will acquire a sickly taste. And do not put the milk in the cup first—family feuds have lasted generations over this—because you will almost certainly put in too much. Add it later, and be very careful when you pour. Finally, a decent cylindrical mug will preserve the needful heat and flavor for longer than will a shallow and wide-mouthed—how often those attributes seem to go together—teacup. Orwell thought that sugar overwhelmed the taste, but brown sugar or honey are, I believe, permissible and sometimes necessary.

Mostly, I agree. Though Rob thinks there is nothing wrong with the milk going in first and I think the non-sweetener people are a bit daft and maybe show-offy to boot.

Can’t imagine a reality without a cup of tea anymore. Such a place would be dystopian.

*Most places in the States have sugar-free iced tea. They bring it to you in restaurants too cold really to add any sugar to it when it should just be sweetened already. The horror. I had no idea though actually that ice tea should be sweet to begin with until I moved to Canada. Civilization where tea is concerned really.

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Starbucks at the Safeway


Olivia and Wendy are usually the baristas on duty at the Starbucks when I am in Safeway during the week. Because I see them more than any of the others who work there, I asked them to pose for the photo I took when I decided to write about Starbucks. You might wonder, why write about Starbucks? It’s a completely commercial coffee house that is as responsible for the decline of civilization as Wal-mart, strip-malls and mega-plex theatre chains. They sit in nearly every grocery chain and mall and sometimes on multiple street-corners on the same city block. Starbucks is not the real deal but a pretense and so is not unique or special. But that is precisely why I want to write about it. Because they are everywhere. And for that reason, to me, they are special.

My step-daughter, Jordan, refuses to step foot in Starbucks (or its Canadian equivalent Second Cup) because she believe that the company is immoral and exploits poor coffee growers in the third world countries, although this isn’t true of Starbucks – according to what I have read (I don’t know about Second Cup) – I acknowledge that a cup of just about anything at Starbucks’ is priced well over it’s actual value and that what one is really paying for when one does stop and go with the logo cup in had is the stamp of privilege because only those with the time to burn and the cash as well, run into the nearest Starbucks for their morning latte fix. People who are press for time and money, or are too sensible to pay too much money for hot flavored water, stop at the corner gas-mart for the paper (those who are sensible because they read) and a cup of whatever is brewing. I began my chai days with occasional trips to a mom and pop coffee house at the Valley West Mall in West Des Moines. Will loved the mochas and he could talk football with the owner who was a Bears fan but that was okay with Will, at least the guy was devoted and knew his NFL. The little trips made shopping and running errands more palatable for Will and I can’t remember when he got me the first chai latte but I don’t remember taking an instant liking to it. It was too hot. I have never been a fan of anything I had to swallow quickly in order to avoid burning my tongue. I am like that about most foods and beverages really and Will’s standard question during a meal would be “Is that cold enough for you yet, babe?”

The coffee shop eventually moved out of the mall to a strip mall not far from where we lived and it became a Sunday ritual for us that continued until Will went into the nursing home in October of ’04. After that Katy and I would stop there to pick up a mocha to take to him when we went to visit and eventually help with feeding him on weekend mornings and whenever I was on vacation from school. After Will died, I couldn’t bring myself to go there anymore. The couple that ran the place had been so kind to Will when he was still able to go there himself which was a rarity. So many people would pretend he wasn’t present because the didn’t realize he had dementia and his behavior was so odd, or they would give him rude looks and when he failed to notice they would direct them at me. I stopped trying to explain early on. It did no good. I can remember a police officer who overreacted to Will’s agitation once and when I explained what the real matter was, he told me that he didn’t care – just keep my husband back. Will could barely see or walk without assistance at the time.

So, when I moved up to Fort Saskatchewan, I was quite happy to discover that the local grocery, Safeway, had a Starbucks. Just like the Hy-Vee grocery back in Iowa. It was comforting because despite the Canadian version of service (slow) it was the same. The same menu. The same baked goods. The same tastes and smells. The same rotating holiday items for sale. And, if you went often enough, the people would start to know your usual order and eventually ask after you as though they knew you. Amid all the unfamiliar, here was Starbucks – predictable and known. Kind of like the Catholic mass. You go anywhere in the world, walk into a Catholic church and the mass will be pretty much the same everywhere. The same holds true with a non-fat chai latte.