Tea for two

When I was three, and we were visiting family friends, I would make a point of asking the host/ess where my coffee cup was. Because, apparently, I drank coffee back then. One part coffee, 52 parts milk, I suppose. At 4, I quit drinking coffee, to the point where I wouldn’t even eat coffee-flavored ice cream.

Or couldn’t because I couldn’t handle the taste.

Sometimes I disagree with a columnist.

I don’t remember how I got back on the caffeine train, but it was during my years at the Canadian Embassy, so that would have been in the late 90s when the caffe latte wave reached the shores of Helsinki. Actually, at first, it was a cafe au lait wave, because that’s what Cafe Esplanade had. Their cups were so big that I called a cafe au lait the soup of the day.

Now, ten years later, I have an espresso machine in the kitchen, and when I say “I have”, I mean just that, being the sole coffee drinker in the household, and having got that as a birthday present from Wife a few years ago.

For some strange reason, though, I always drink tea at home in the morning. And only at home in the morning. Staying at a hotel, I always go for the cup of coffee, and staying at my home office when the family has left for work and school and daycare, I make my lattes.

But in the morning, at home, I sip my tea, eat a couple of sandwiches – and read my paper.

The other day, I almost choked on my tea and sandwich, when Wife asked me if we should still subscribe to a morning paper. I thought that she asked me because she’s got an iPad now, but I was shocked.

“What do you mean? Not have a paper paper at all?” I asked.

“No, just checking if you still want to have the morning paper delivered,” she said.

Now, you might think that that was the excuse I had been waiting for and that I ran to the Apple Store, but no. No, it wasn’t. I haven’t been waiting for an excuse to get an iPad, and to get rid of the morning paper might be the worst of the excuses.

There’s no better way to start the day than read the sports section, sip the tea, and hear Wife make her funny comments about the world events, because the world events are in the sections that she’s holding onto. I usually have the Economy/Sports section, the flip-over section. I quickly browse the business news, then flip the paper over to get my sports feed.

And when the columnist says something silly, I tear his photo out of the paper, and throw it away. If Wife sees something funny in her paper, she tears it out and throws it across the table for me to read, or if it’s a photo of a cute animal, or an ad about a cool exhibition in a museum, she tears it out and shows them to Son and Daughter.

If I spill some tea on the counter while making our cups – mine with sugar and milk, thank you – I dry the bottom of the cup on the newspaper on the table.

Any funny comic or photo that we see, ends up on the fridge. Daughter learns to read, spelling S-P-O-R-T upside down, then she looks at the weather map and tries to find our home town on it, and see how cold it’ll be.

This morning, I put on my slippers and went to get the paper from the mailbox, but my hand grabbed a fistful of air. No paper! I walked back in, hoping that Wife had already been outside to get the paper, but she just shook her head.

“No paper today?” I asked. “Damn.”

It’s always tough, but it was especially depressing this morning because since a friend of mine gave me a three-month subscription to the other morning paper, I’ve grown accustomed to reading two papers in the morning.

I stood in the kitchen, fiddling a magazine that was lying there on the kitchen counter, and read a paragraph about bananas out loud to Wife, but it wasn’t the same. I sat down, and watched Son reading a comic book, Wife reading the monthly supplement magazine of our paper, and Daughter reading her comic book.

I grabbed the magazine again, and switched the espresso machine on, thinking that I might as well make a cup of coffee when I suddenly saw a black car stop in front of the house. Then I saw an arm stretch out of the car, and a hand open our mailbox.

Wife got up, and ran out. She came back with two morning papers, saving the day.

I switched off the coffee machine, and sat down again, happy. This morning, even the columnist got to keep his head.

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