Tea is for Trouble

I found myself one day at MIT, and I thought fondly of my friend, C, who had moved across the country with her family some years ago. She and I had had similar jobs, mine at Harvard, hers at MIT.  Our bosses were good friends and we easily became friends, too. "Gee," I thought to myself, "I wonder if C is on Facebook." I went home, had a look, and there she was. Soon enough we were in touch, caught up ever so briefly and, as they had moved back to Boston, we made a date to meet up at Bernard's in the Mall at Chestnut Hill for lunch and a formal catchup. Lunch was delicious, the company was wonderful and I had a marvelous afternoon. We walked a bit around the mall after lunch.

She needed to stop at Teavana, which I took as a sign. I had never been inside one, but with Ash Wednesday and Lent ahead of us, I thought of my looming sacrifice: for both my spiritual growth and liver, I had decided to give up diet soda. Obviously a familiar face at the store, she asked for two pounds (Two! Pounds!) of her preferred tea, and the clerk bundled up, I kid you not, a grocery-bag-sized package of tea for her. I had never seen so much tea in my life.

Even if I replaced one-for-one every diet soda I drank in the course of a day with a pot of tea, I wouldn't need that much tea in a year.  So instead I asked for a quarter pound of Earl Grey and a quarter pound of Himalayan Splendor (how could I resist such an evocative name?) along with an airtight tin for each. The tins were labelled, and I remember thinking that ten dollars was a lot of money for tea, but it was Chestnut Hill, after all: a pretty swanky mall; and this was for Lent (a thought which, if brought to its logical conclusion, would go something like this: "What? It's Lent -- I should deprive myself just because it's expensive?")

So my first mistake was not quite thinking my Lenten sacrifice all the way through.

I choked (holding the actual gasp in check) when the clerk rang me up and announced, "That will be $102, please." But I was with my old friend, whom I hadn't seen in years, and I didn't want to be the cheap one. It was only then that I looked at the sign a little more carefully: $10 per ounce. Oops. So I swallowed my good sense, handed over my credit card, and bought one-hundred-and-two-dollars' worth of tea that day.

To add insult to injury, when I got home I inspected the receipt and discovered they had charged me for FIVE ounces of the Earl Grey. Except I was so mad at myself for buying the stupid tea in the first place I couldn't muster up any more emotion to be mad at them for overcharging me.

In a year I have made exactly one cup with that poison tea. I tried to enjoy it, and it was indeed delicious tea. But one-hundred-and-two-dollars' worth of delish? Not. Even. Close.

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RIP, Mr. T
19?? - 2012