Drinking tea at the coffee club
By STEVE HONEYWELL
Honeywell: There’s plenty of conventional wisdom the breaks down the human race into two kinds of people. For the most part, I follow the idea of author Tom Robbins who once wrote that there are two kinds of people in the world – those who classify others into two types and those who are smart enough to know better. Still and all, just as there are Cubs fans and Sox fans, I think the world does break down into two distinct factions: coffee drinkers and tea drinkers. And, just as you can claim to be both Sox fan and Cub fan, you can claim to like both drinks. If you do, though, most people will talk about you behind your back.
While tea may be the drink of the world, it’s not the drink of this country. No one yet has gotten filthy rich creating a Starbucks-like chain of tea shops (or shoppes). As is often the case for me, this puts me in the minority, as I can’t stomach coffee and have a cabinet full of different varieties of tea.
Watching other people pour pot after pot of coffee down the hatch has led me to a particular number of observations about both coffee and tea. For one thing, it doesn’t surprise me that coffee is the drink of choice of most Americans. We live in a coffee society, where everything moves as quickly as possible all the time. Coffee is like that; you pour water in the machine, push a button, and out comes the coffee. Tea, on the other hand, takes time and patience. Any innovation I’ve seen that brews tea instantly does so at the cost of brewing tea well. Even if you can make the water hot instantly, it still takes time to drag the goodness out of the leaves.
I like to think that there’s a mental difference that accompanies the two drinks. Coffee is a drink for rushing around while tea is a drink for quiet contemplation. Coffee is ready in a hurry, drunk in a hurry. Tea requires patience and quiet. A friend of mine, a former paramedic, tells me that as a group, paramedics drink coffee, and drink it black. This doesn’t surprise me, given the nature of that job. Tea simply takes too long for people who might need to be off and running at a moment’s notice.
As a tea drinker, I naturally concocted this particular set of views so that they reflect as favorably as possible on myself. That said, I do find myself slowing down when I’m brewing myself a cup (or a pot!) of tea. It naturally forces me to wait for it to be ready, and then to wait longer until it has cooled enough for me to drink it. When everything in the world seems to be going faster and faster, I’m finding more and more value in slowing things down to a pace I can live with.
• Steve Honeywell is a father and sometime stay-at-home dad. He teaches English composition at Kishwaukee College and is a freelance writer and proofreader.
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