Hot Tea! Coffee, too, please.

As I’ve mentioned before (see previous post), I love to travel. One of the greatest discoveries I’ve made in my travels abroad is the electric kettle. It sounds silly, right? Hear me out. It’s this great little single-serving machine that heats up your water IN NO TIME in a way that a microwave could never do – and your coffee or tea comes out perfectly every time. Every hotel room has one and I always look forward to using it. It’s my understanding (and I haven’t bothered to confirm this) that one reason they’re popular over there and not so much over here is because our voltage is different. And an electric kettle in the States wouldn’t have the same amount of oomph as one from across the pond. I don’t know if that’s true, but I would like it to be. Which means that for me, now it’s a fact. Don't ruin this for me. And if you were to tell an Englishman that you heat up your water for a single serving of tea in the microwave, you might kill him from sustaining the shock of such information. (“Why don’t you use a kettle?!”) As Texans, we typically drink our tea by the pitcher and serve it over ice, even though it starts out hot. If or when we do make enough for just a single serving of tea, it’s probably going to be something fancy and not your standard Lipton-type stuff. But that's not where I'm going with this; let's stick with the Lipton types. And in my household (I cannot speak for yours), to make tea we put water in a pot on the stove with a teabag or two – and when it gets to boiling, we take it off the stove and make our tea in a pitcher. It’s the best! We wouldn’t *dream* of putting the water in the microwave to make tea. But now that I’ve said it, I’m a little curious about it even though it sounds ludicrous. 

What made me think of this was my grandfather. He died in 1998 at the age of 83. (His wife, my grandmother, died in 1987.) I was the last grandkid stuck at home, so I got to spend a good amount of time with him. It helped that my aunt (my mother’s youngest sibling) still lived at home for part of that time, so I really had plenty of time with both of them. He was a typical grandfather: he wore a hat all the time, drove a Buick to church and back, and had dinner at our house every Sunday. He also did some quirky things that none of us understood, but accepted: he would wash and hang dry the foil papers that the sticks of butter were wrapped in, he would always buy canned green beans and Vienna sausages at the grocery store (although I can’t recall ever seeing him eat either), and he would boil his coffee on the stove (but that one almost became a close call). He died before he was unable to take care of himself, although I know that he and my mother discussed having him move in with us. I used to dream about him all the time – not only while he was alive but even after he died. And if I wasn’t dreaming of him specifically, it was highly likely that my dream would have me going back to his house for some reason or another – it didn’t matter that he wasn’t there. It became a bit of a running joke for me – “guess what I dreamed about last night?” – so much so that my first college roommate would undoubtedly remember the same. He’s been gone for almost two decades now, but I still think of him from time to time. Maybe not daily, but often. I remember teaching him how to tear the Saran Wrap off the roll – he thought the teeth were on the lid portion of the box; I showed him that the teeth were actually on the bottom of the box. Once he learned that, he never had another problem. But a confession: I pulled this one out of my memory bank because of my own personal recent mishap – the box surrounding my roll of cling wrap tore apart (don’t ask), and I ended up launching the roll across my kitchen…. Much like he did before he asked for my help. And then I eventually thought back to him boiling his coffee on the stove. Such a weird thing! But it was always after he had brewed it, and was only using it to reheat what was left over. And. Then. It. Finally. Hit me. Two decades too late. Like a ton of bricks: that poor guy probably didn’t know how to use a microwave, so he reheated his coffee the same way we make our tea. I am such an idiot for not figuring that out sooner. #epiphany 

THE END.