Friday, February 26, 2010

The Miracle of Every Day

I'm going to break with tradition in this blog and go personal for an entry.  I had a timely experience that queued up in my mind something I felt ought to be communicated, and it just happened to be personal.  So there.



This morning I walked my kindergartener to school.  We had a conversation that went like this:

Son:  Mommy, I really wish I could have known my great, great, great, great grandfather.

Me:  I understand, but I didn't even know him.  He died before I was even born.  But I knew one of your great-grandfathers.  The one who was my father's father.  My mother's father had died before I was born.

Son:  Tell me about him.

Me:  Well, he lived in Russia and he came to America.  He married your great grandmother and they had four kids.  One was your grandfather.  He had the same name as you. 

Son:  I wish I had known your mommy and daddy.  What were they like?

Me:  I wish you had known them, too.  My mommy was such a wonderful person.  Everyone loved her.  I sometimes joked that my friends loved my mother more than they loved me.  She would have loved you so very much.  She was very loving.  She was kind to everyone she met, and she was kind to all living things.  She was also very smart.  You could ask her anything and she would know the answer, or know where to find it.  And she was very funny.  She made people laugh and enjoyed making them laugh.

Son:  What about your daddy?

Me:  He was very smart and loved his work.  He was very good at what he did; he was a scientist, a professor, a writer.  He taught me a lot.  He took me to his lab and I learned a lot just by watching him, so I was very good in science later on.  And he played ball, and card games and chess with me.  I don't think he remembered a lot about how to play with kids by the time I was old enough to want to play, but he tried.  And he came to my plays when I was acting in high school, and all my graduations.  And he wrote me letters when I was in college and law school.  He wasn't easy to be close to, but I know he loved me and he would have loved you.

Son:  I wish I could know them.

Me:  I wish you could, too.  You can't know them as living people, but I have videos of them and tapes of their voices, and pictures you can see.  And I can tell you about them. 

This is the hardest part of being an older parent.  Lack of grandparents.  This is the hardest part of being an outlier from the rest of the extended family.

What's the answer?  I don't think there is one.  And I'm sad about it, but I refuse to view myself as lacking as a parent somehow because of it.  I never knew one of my grandparents, and one died when I was one.  Even though the other two shared a good bit of my life span, they lived far away and I didn't see them much.  So if my kids only have a single living grandparent, and see her sporadically, it is what it is.  It is not optimal, but it is what it is.

But the miracle of every day life is that despite the lack of a continually or even frequently present extended family, my kindergartener is developing a sense of personal history.  He is becoming a person with a history, and that is, to me, miraculous.  May he have a grand and worthy history, that, as he comes to know it and to build it for himself, will serve him well.  I hope that thanks to his brother, he will always have stability and continuity in that history.  Having lost both parents prior to having my own kids, and having no siblings, it was very important to me that mine have at least one other person bound to them through immediate family ties that they could turn to, always.  And the bonus is, I'll have that, too.   

**Morgana**

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Tea Update: It's Not a Problem So Much as an Issue...

Since when did we decide, collectively, that we were all so perfect we couldn't have problems anymore?  Instead, we have "issues."  Daddy issues, work issues -- nothing is ever a problem.  Problems are things that used to mark us with character flaws, or render us incompetent.  Issues are things that might or might not be problems depending on how we address them (or successfully distance ourselves from them).  Issues are things that our very California-inspired, passive-aggressive collective consciousness can deal with, no matter what.

Perhaps the idea is that language is power and if we call something a problem that will most assuredly make it definitely a problem; whereas if something is a more gentle sounding "issue" it might or might not be a real problem.  We're not sure.  If it is, though, it isn't because of our character flaws or incompetence.  Most likely it's because of somebody else's "issue."  So his or her head should roll, not ours.  I agree that language is power, but the problem/issue thing seems to me, as you've likely gathered, to go way too far.  And, it seems, I'm not the first to have had this thought.  For musings after my own mind, take a read here.

Lest it begin to sound as though I'm in William Safire mode (who also apparently wrote on the problem/issue point though I couldn't dig it up quickly online) today, let me step down from my soap box and talk some more about tea.  Specifically, my rapid evolution as a tea drinker over the last week plus.



I have learned so much in the past twelve days I'm more than a little embarrassed at the naivete I displayed in my February 5 post.  In particular, I have learned how to correct myriad tea problems, or at least reduce them to being mere "issues." 

For one thing, though I went out and bought a ridiculous number of different types of tea bags only a week or so ago to begin my tea tasting adventure, I have now become convinced that I must move on to loose tea sooner rather than later.  To that end, after researching the various methods of keeping the loose tea from becoming dental floss when one sips, I have settled upon the Finum Teeli filters as my initial method of choice.  Tea balls, I've read, compact the tea too much.  One must give the leaves plenty of room to unfurl.  I have also ordered a set of tasting samples to try out my new filters.  I may have reached a bit high for my first try as I went with Oolongs from Upton Tea, but we'll see. 

I've stopped using water from the tap, and have been experimenting with either using the bottled water I have delivered every two weeks or tap water passed through a Brita filter.  Both seem to work better than pure tap water.  And the piece de resistance is my brand spanking new Zorijushi water heater/boiler.  I made (bagged) green tea with it today at both 140 degrees and 175 degrees, and for the first time, I understood the appeal of green tea.  I can only imagine the heavenly result when I graduate to fine, loose tea.

Additionally, I've read a couple of books about tea, which I've added to my Read on the Spot list in the sidebar, and I've bookmarked a number of online tea sites as well as becoming a member of Steepster just for giggles (I've already been so bold as to offer some opinions on teas there as well, where I am __Morgana__ as they don't permit user names with asterisks).  Here are just a few of the sites I've been enjoying browsing:  Upton Tea, American Tea Room, Todd and Holland, The Necessiteas, Harney & Sons, The Tao of Tea, Adagio Teas, and Rishi Tea.

The search for the perfect cup of tea is fast becoming something of an obsession to me, but at least it's a relatively healthy one that adds to rather than taking away from other enjoyments and commitments.  It isn't my intention to inject my novice palate into the already rather crowded world of tea blogging to the extent that Morgana's Spot ends up being completely hijacked, but at the same time I'm enjoying my tea adventures so much that I have a feeling this won't be my last word on the subject.

**Morgana**

Friday, February 5, 2010

On the Problem of Tea

Let's begin with a confession.  I am a coffee drinker, and have been virtually since birth.  I was born in Chicago, without the hot chocolate-loving gene.  So from the time I was a wee tot, my mother heated me up on winter outings with my preferred beverage -- coffee.  Cream, no sugar, just the way she liked it and so I came to like it, too.  I acquired a taste for hot chocolate later in life (for all its relevance to this discussion, which is to say, not at all).

From time to time, I've tried to become a tea drinker.  Not to supplant my coffee addiction, but to supplement it.  Typically, the desire is whetted when I have a really wonderful cup of tea and wonder why it isn't a greater part of my life.  Then I remember.  Most of the time, the tea I make has at best no taste I can discern, and at worst, tastes simply like hot water, or the vehicles by which it entered the hot water:  paper or metal.

This begs the question of whether it is simply that my tea-making skills suck.  This could well be.  In my recent foray into tea drinking, I actually read the packaging and discovered there is a preferred hotness of the water (sometimes boiling, sometimes not) for pouring over the bag or leaves, depending on the brew.  And a preferred steeping time, also depending on the brew.  I paid attention this time and I have improved my results.  More on that later.

I should also say that I don't use condiments in tea.  My father drank it with lemon, but most tea with lemon tastes like weak, hot lemonade to me.  Pretty gross.  So unless the tea is a lemon tea to start with, I've passed on the lemon.  In college, I had a roomie who drank tea with honey.  So I tried that as well.  Every tea I tried that way tasted like honey diluted with hot water.  Where was the tea?  And then, being an Anglophile of sorts, I tried drinking tea with milk and sugar for some time.  When I did, I tasted hot water, sugar and weak milk, but no tea.  I stilll drank it that way until my recent foray, though, just to look worldly.

If it hadn't been for the really stupendous cups of tea I happened on from time to time, I might well have concluded that tea was a sort of placebo:  that it deludes people into believing they are drinking something more flavorful than hot water, through various ruses like color and aroma, and a statistically significant group of them claim actually to like it.  One of my major complaints about teas is that many smell wonderful, but the smell doesn't translate into taste -- I know the two senses are biologically related, but I feel it a sorry second if the primary enjoyment I get from a beverage is smelling it rather than tasting it, and often aromatic teas again simply taste like hot water to me no matter how wonderful they smell.

If you are a tea aficionado, you might, at this point, question my tasting mechanism.  Is it possible that seven or so years of smoking, which ended about 14 years ago, dulled my taste buds?  Or that the stronger, richer, fuller taste of coffee has undone my ability to taste subtlety?  (Is tea supposed to have more subtle flavoring than coffee?  I don't know.  It does to me.)  It may be, but I don't think so.  I can taste subtle flavors in foods and in wines.  So why not teas?

Maybe I haven't tried hard enough.  My usual tea phase starts with a decision that I should get to know tea, a purchase of several types, along with some supplies, such as tea balls or strainers.  I taste hot water and clog my drain with tea leaves, so I let it sit in my pantry until the next time I get moved to convert.  If I go back to it, it's probably stale by that time and so not fair to judge.

My latest tea attempt was fueled by my weight loss efforts.  To put it mildly, I'd been drinking a shitload of Diet Coke and chomping a shitload of sugar free gum.  When my consumption went up to about eight 20-ounce bottles of Diet Coke and a pack or so of gum a day, I thought perhaps I was entering lab rat territory on the Aspartame front so decided there had to be some other low cal beverage I could put into the mix that would calm my orally fixated self.  Tea seemed the perfect fit.  I just needed the right tea to start with.  In the past I'd done Twinings and Bigelow, so I got some of that -- mostly the old favorites like Constant Comment, Earl Grey and some herbal ones.  But I was pretty curious about Tazo.  I'd seen it in Starbucks forever, but never tried it.  (And I'm not being paid by any of these companies.  Oh would that it were.  I can use any additional money I can get these days....)

I took myself over to one of my four local Starbucks -- don't get me started -- and found the Tazo section.  I discovered that Starbucks had recently commissioned Tazo to do a full leaf version of its teas in what they call "sachets" (which makes me think of the little do-dads my mother always stuck in my underwear drawer); tea bags that are made of fabric rather than paper.  This was apparently big news when it happened, though I learned of it months later from the 20-something Barrista I'd asked whether the cool-looking tins contained loose tea that would require the purchase of tea-making accoutrements.  I bought a few kinds and went home to try one.

I got really lucky on the first one.  Wow.  With Vanilla Rooibos I was finally able to replicate the experience of an awesome flavored tea at home.  This gave me courage.  I tried Calm, Passion, Awake, Chai and Orange Blossom, and all of them worked to some extent.  In any case, better than I'd recalled with other brands in other times.  The better ones were actually the herbals.  The teas themselves had less impact, but it was still a much better experience than it ever has been in the past.  Though the Bigelow I Love Lemon and Peppermint came out nicely as well.  I still can't really get Green Tea to work, though I've not tried a Tazo version as yet.  The Twinings was disappointingly weak and flavorless.

Why might my tea experience be improving?  First, let me say I am being very anal about tea preparation.  I follow the directions, as mentioned before -- I set a timer for steeping and don't let it go one more, or less, second than it is supposed to.  But it may also have something to do with the state of my body in general. 

I've written about my weight loss efforts before, and I can say now that I have made an honest drivers license of my driver's license.  It says 140, and so I am; give or take.  I was down to 139 the other morning and up at 143 the next, and I just got back from a week long convention-type business trip that is bound to have wreaked havoc with my body.  They even joked during the last session about the week of caffeine, sugar and alcohol, and yes, I was one of those who succumbed.  But I'm still in much better shape than I've ever been and I've resolved to get back on track tomorrow. 

Getting here has been, as Shay of biggest loser fame would say, "a journey."  I'm on month 7+ of weight loss, probably the longest time I've gone where I've really eaten almost no junk and have exercised like a machine.  I'm also older than in previous tea-loving attempts, and probably entering "the change" slowly but surely.   It seems plausible to me that a palate unhindered by too many bad fats and simple sugars, and in hormonal flux, could be a tea-loving palate.  I think about the tea lovers I know, and they are generally pretty healthy folks, and older folks.  Anecdotal, I know, but it's what I've observed.  And tea itself is touted as a healthful beverage.  Coincidence?  Which is the chicken and which is the egg? 

In any case, as you have gleaned, I'm giving tea another try.  I once said to someone I'm willing to try anything once.  Fortunately for me, he did not hold me to that.  Tea has gotten a lot of passes from me on the try anything once front, and somehow I think it will eventually be worth the repeated attempts.  I'm already tasting the difference.

**Morgana**