Scrabbles Sundays

I'm already late and in a hurry. Stuck in a town somewhere between my hometown and my destination, driving to a work conference meticulously planned by my superiors to supposedly improve our underperforming sales department. Realistically, it was probably more of a pep rally to dispel the increasing lack of morale at a rapidly shrinking company.

This was not a conference I looked forward to, but also not one I felt I could ditch either, not without intense scrutiny by my superiors. There was too much competition in my field already, with frequent layoffs to optimize profits and increase individual productivity incentives. Or in other words, people were frequently getting fired while the remaining staff took on the workload of three people, at least.

In any case here I was stranded, two hours from home, in one of those picture-perfect towns whose history and original beauty had been meticulously preserved, its original cobblestone streets lined with Cape Cod and Georgian housing. These were maintained by what I could only assume was neighborhood pressure paired with the strictest building codes. Of course, the business district was a sight to behold, transporting any visitor into the equivalent of a Charles Dickens novel or the set of a historical British mystery show from Britbox.

Nonetheless, I need to get out of the rain and entertain myself for a couple of hours while my tire is being replaced. "There are worse places to be stuck" I mutter to myself as I settle on going into an upscale tea shop surrounded by knee high wrought iron fences protecting the local foliage of red begonias and pansies. The inner decor is filled with antique loveseats covered in soft gold brocade and velvet skinned Queen Anne chairs that I would expect to find in either a museum, a movie set or a collector of antiques. Not the decor of the average household at any rate, being made of materials that offer neither comfort or practicality.

The teacups and tea pots for sale are delicate, ornate and works of art in and of themselves and reflected in the price tags they bear underneath, hidden at first glace until you try to discreetly check the price before deciding that $40 is a hefty price for one teacup, regardless of its beauty. Someone buys these items, but not anyone I personally know. Soft classical baroque music in the background finishes the ambience of the place in a neatly tied up red velvet bow. I decide to just have some tea and catch up on emails and the mindless paperwork I avoided longer than I should have.

I look at the chalkboard with its selections and confess that I feel an ambivalent mixture of annoyance at the lack of choices while also being strangely impressed by the intentional simplicity. This place caters to tea drinkers and tea drinkers only. There are no offerings of coffee let alone the fancier drinks offered at most cafes that resemble a milkshake far more than an actual coffee bean infused bitter brew. I really could use a strong cup of coffee, its still pretty early in the morning. I'd only had one cup before leaving the house in a rush, and I usually have at least two or three cups before I was truly able to engage in even the most rudimentary form of conversation with my fellow human beings. As the saying goes, 'When in Rome" is really hitting home right now. Giving up on the dream of the coffee I really wanted, I succumb to seeing what options I actually do have available. The cafe's tea selection is simple and classic. Black English tea, Irish Breakfast tea, Oolong, Darjeeling, green tea, Jasmine and the one that finally catches my eye, Earl Grey. I admit to myself begrudgingly that the smells in the tea shop are of course one part comfort and one part nostalgia and that having to settle on tea instead of coffee isn't the disaster my original irritation conveyed to my sense of entitlement. I'm reminded that tea has its own charms though I cant quite remember the last time I’d drank or ordered it outside of to sooth a sore throat when I was sick. A sense of nostalgia starts to creep in. Before I can catch it, a memory slips into mind unprompted, subtly and quickly bypassing my feeble attempts to block it from surfacing. I feel the familiar yet unwelcome sensation of my throat tightening. Surrendering to my discomfort I settle on Earl Grey and order it.

It’s delivered to me in a few minutes, in a fine bone white porcelain teapot decorated with tiny wine-colored roses and green leaves. The teapot is served on a wooden platter with a matching teacup, almost as if the teacup is the teapot’s very own child. After the tea has a chance to seep, I finally pour myself a cup of steaming hot liquid and am struck immediately by the smell of bergamot, its scent unmistakable to tea connoisseur and polite tea partaker alike. Sharp and pungent with the undertones of perfume that bears the signature of a good Earl grey tea for those who worship at its temple. It occurs to me that Earl Grey tea, by its very unique flavor profile invokes in many tea drinkers either a fervent love or reserved hatred for the classic English brew. I recall as I'm sipping my tea that I used to love it myself, and regret how much time has passed since I had been able to savor this lovely flavor, realizing that for years I had avoided drinking this tea, avoiding the bittersweet experience of lovely memories of long passed times and people that hurt too much to remember intentionally. It was now all coming back to me, memories I hadn't thought of in years, like an unwelcome monsoon to my heart.

Earl Grey was always a favorite of mine growing up. An adoration that I inherited from my grandmother. Everyone in my family loved this tea from the oldest members all the way down to the youngest who were given a special blend of hot milk, sugar and only a small amount of tea. Just enough to add that special flavor and keep the kids included in what we grown ups were doing. Three generations of Earl Grey fans, a shared collaborative love that was encouraged by my grandmother, the noble and magnificent matriarch of my family. Sunday dinners were a fairly typical event in my family, hosted usually by my grandmother at her bequest. Dinners were potluck but my grandmother always made the main course. Unless it was summertime dinners were usually warm comfort foods filling the stomach as well as the soul. Roast with potatoes and carrots, shepherds pie and chicken pot pie were among my favorites often served at those Sunday dinners. After everyone had eaten and the dishes were put away it was time for games. The kids would play Uno, Twister or Operation in the basement and the adults playing the only game that we ever played on Sundays: Scrabble. This is how those Sundays became known to friends and family alike as "Scrabble Sundays”. Scrabble Sundays were always accompanied by pots and pots of Earl Grey tea, served with an ever present side of homemade cookies.

My grandmother was a true and fervent lover of this special infusion of bergamot in a basic black tea. She would try new brands and formulations whenever the opportunity presented itself, whether from specialty tea shops such as the one I was presently sitting in or from run of the mill grocery stores. The source of where the new tea was purveyed was secondary to her excitement of trying and then comparing and critiquing, sharing her analysis with the family with full belief in her ability to judge precisely what the tea should and shouldn't be. I realized as I grew into adulthood that this love of all things Earl Grey that had been passed down through her children and subsequently her grandchildren probably was just as much induced by sentimental memory association of Scrabble Sundays as true love of the actual tea itself.

The tea itself was merely a conduit for the much larger reason behind our excitement on these special Sundays, Scrabble! Not just any old ordinary Scrabble game was Scrabble with my grandmother, and for those with a rigid sense of grammar and semantics the game would have been infuriating. A fury I often felt myself before settling into an understanding of its more endearing qualities. My grandmother’s version of Scrabble was putting down words that most, if not all the people at the table did not know nor were remotely common in day to day conversation, let alone in a lifetime. With a well-worn Scrabble dictionary that was scarily beyond its first publishing date and practically falling apart from too many hands opening it too many times to check for the existence of words like Qat or Cvm or Xi or XII. Oddly most of these were legitimate with rules about word origin that went beyond logic. A Chinese word or a Yiddish word was acceptable as were Roman numerals but if you tried to put down another word such as the French vrai the word was vehemently rejected the deciding ruler of course being the holy grail of the game....the Scrabble dictionary. Its rules were its own ...followings rules of grammar that would cause any self-respecting English professor to pull their hair out. The game always felt reminiscent of throwing spaghetti at a wall to see if it sticks.

In any case I and most of the family did eventually come to find these Scrabble Sundays with their strange grammatical rules, if one could call them rules, and the ever present teapot with its fragrant tea, accompanied by well formulated opinions of all things Earl Grey as endearing and something to be savored. Something we came to associate with being a trademark of are most precious matriarch long after she and those wonderful Sundays were no longer with us. My beautiful grandmother. I realized now as I sipped my tea, the long-forgotten flavors revisiting my tastebuds, lingering there like memory itself, that I missed my grandmother and those memories deeply.