House of Tea

The other night, I got home from a Tantalus meeting and found that my father had sent me this article, about the House of Tea in South Philly. When I was a teenager, my father and I would regularly visit the House of Tea as part of our weekend grocery shopping. The first green tea I ever drank was from there, a Japanese sencha that a overbrewed until it was intolerably bitter.

The owner of the House of Tea was named Nathaniel. He was this short man with a great big Franklin stove of a belly who wheezed with every breath and knew more about tea than anyone I've ever met.

He'd say things like, "I'm a seventh level tea master. I could become an eighth level tea master, but it would take too long."

How do you become an eighth level tea master?

"You perform the tea ritual over and over again, meditate on tea, write poetry about tea."

The man always had a story to tell, no matter when you were going into the shop. He'd deliver it in the most matter-of-fact fashion, without theatrics or elaboration, as though he wasn't telling the story for any other reason than to tell you the story while he was measuring out your tea. I was never sure if they were true stories or if Nathaniel was just an accomplished bullshitter, but it never much mattered to me. They were fascinating stories and that was all it took to keep my father and I in wrapt attention for, at times, a good hour.

Nathaniel died a couple of years ago and with his departure, I had assumed that the House of Tea was no more. It's good to know it's still there and that his daughter is carrying on his work. Maybe I'll stop in there the next time I'm in Philly. See if she's got her father's gift for gab.

Homeward

My vacation time is coming to an end, and for once at the end of a vacation, I'm happy to be going home. Which isn't to say that I haven't enjoyed being in Asheville. I have spent the past couple of weeks reconnecting to people and friends I never should have lost touch with, and for that reason alone, this trip has been fantastic. Now I'm ready to go home and be in my city and see my friends from now. I'm ready, most of all, to sleep in my own bed again and enjoy the company of a familiar form there with me. I have moved forward and so has Asheville. It was good to be here again and to know that it's still here. It will feel good to go home and start forward again.

My, but There's a lot of Banjo

Yesterday I said goodbye to a friend of mine I haven't seen in two years. She had come in from Durham the night before to see me and reconnect a bit, and we'd spent a couple of days wandering around town. We had seen a Klezmer Gypsy Tango Punk band (the combination of genres sounded very promising and delivered on it abundantly) play at a pirate/goth club owned by an old friend of ours, who, as my friend from Durham pointed out, always threw the best parties anyway, so it really made sense that he opened a bar.

After the show, we crashed on sofas at a big old semidilapidated house where I know people. My friend was a bit mortified by the entire idea of just dropping in on a group of people for the night and was doubly mortified when she saw the place we were dropping in on. I think it was the giant spider in the bathroom. Or the squatters we displaced coming back at two in the morning, looking for a place to sleep.

The next morning, we had breakfast at Tupelo Honey and spent the rest of the day window shopping in galleries too expensive for either of us to ever afford . Then we said our goodbyes in the afternoon in a parking garage and I walked off happy to have seen my friend and wishing it was more than just a couple of hours in a couple of years. Wishing I had someone around to talk to. I walked into the Everyday Gourmet to check my e-mail and to write a bit, and as I fixed my coffee, I got into a conversation with an elderly lady who spent the next hour telling me her life story--a hell of a life story, at that. By the time she was done and I was off to get dinner, my blues were gone and I was ready to move on with the night.

This is the kind of town Asheville is. It's the kind of town where you can have the most interesting conversation of your life with a complete stranger and you can spend hours sitting in a coffee shop refilling the same cup of coffee for a dollar fifty. It's a quiet mountain town whose streets are alive at night with bluegrass musicians and street artists of varying quality. It's a place where the worst poverty you've ever seen exists side by side with grotesque wealth. It's a town of rastafarian white kids who drive to downtown in fancy cars with leather interiors and hang out talking about bringing down Babylon, not seeing their own part in it. It's a town where even being open minded means corraling your thoughts into a specific viewpoint. It is it's own bubble, and what a pretty bubble it is, a self-contained little generator of a kind of energy I find I need from time to time. It would be easy for me to forget why I left in the first place, but ultimately I find myself thankful for what I've had since I left. For opportunities I've been given and for the people I've got.