Tea Cup

I’ve always been a haunter of antique shops, a lurker in the remnants of long gone lives which were as full – if not fuller – than mine.  I have to guess more.  These were, after all, the times when people met face to face and wrote long, literate letters; times before electronic friending and thumbed messages in cryptic quick-code.

These were the days of a different kind of 24-hour news cycle.  What time the sun came up – that was news.  What you made with your hands, what you pulled from the ground, what you heard about your neighbors – from your neighbors themselves – that was all news. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not idolizing the past.  I’m just fascinated by these objects, these solid echoes of a world I can’t ever know.  It’s so hard to conceive of a time when I wasn’t here; so hard to imagine that someday I won’t be here again.  The dark forever stretching out on either side of my glimmering little life is both a horror and a mystery, a paradox I can only barely examine, a zen koan so dense, it can take my speeding mind from 60 to zero in a single moment of psycho-spiritual whiplash.

It’s like the summer we first moved to Vermont, to the cabin in the woods.  I begged Daniel to go sleep outside with me.  I wanted to wake up every once in a while to watch the endless movement of the stars in a blacker-than-black sky.  Daniel predicted that thanks to the mosquitoes, I’d stay awake the whole damn time.  “Molly,” he said, “a few minutes of that whine in your ear, a couple of bites on your face, and your grand romance with the cosmos is going to end in a very ugly divorce.”

So I agreed to wait until later in the fall – after the frost, after the leaves came down.  Except  I waited a little too long, and suddenly it was late November and there was snow on the ground.  My loves-to-climb-mountains-for-breakfast friend Jen thought this was A Great Opportunity.  “Winter camping is the best!” she enthused.  “Get a tarp, wrap yourselves in down, light a fire, you’ll be fine!” 

So we made a little nest in the snow-encrusted grass in the upper field.  Actually, it was more like the back portion of our lawn.  But it felt like a field.  Daniel, dubious about the whole experiment, was still kind enough to drag out our futon.  Well, what he said was, “If I’m going to freeze my ass off, I might as well be comfortable.”  I called him “The Doubter, Also Known As Mr. Crankypants.”

So there we were, winter bags zipped together, wooly hats on tight, cozied up in our little feathery nest by a crackling fire, staring up at the stars.  It was gorgeous.  I fell asleep in love with Daniel, in love with winter camping, in love with, well, everything.

Sometime later, I woke up in middle of the night.  Opened my eyes.  Gazed up into the sky.  And realized what I was actually looking at: An infinite universe.  Billions and billions and billions of stars, clusters of galaxies, countless unknown worlds, endless distance beyond all reason and measure.

Of course I totally freaked – complete existential meltdown.  More than anything else, I wanted a roof to shield me from having to contemplate my utterly, utterly inconsequential existence.

I wasn’t even embarrassed to wake Daniel up and tell him I wanted out.  In fact, I wasn’t going to wake him up at all, I was just going to bolt for the house.  But you just try a subtle, non-partner-waking-up egress from a double-zipped-up sleeping bag when you’re in an identity crisis of galactic proportions and see how you do!

Fortunately, Daniel knows me really well, and it turned out it was the guest futon he’d hauled into the yard.  We went inside, I chugged a slug of 12 year old single malt straight from the bottle, and we were in bed and asleep in 5 minutes flat.

Anyway, this all started with antique stores.  I don’t usually buy anything.  We’ve got plenty of stuff.  But this is a form of relaxation for me.  Like reading the SkyMall catalogue on the airplane.  I find it oddly relaxing to see what the mind of man hath wrought.

Well, usually it’s relaxing.  There was one time, a few years ago, when the mind of man hath wrought me a migraine.  

Daniel had just lost his job.  While we’re normally on the same team in a crisis, this was an unexpected body blow, and he turned into a Mr. Crankypants of epic proportions.  I couldn’t do a thing, couldn’t joke or jolt or cajole him out of his misery.  Every effort just made it worse.  All I could do was leave him alone to lick his ouchy spots and hope that some version of his old sunny self would turn up again in the not-too-distant future.

Unfortunately, about a week after Daniel crawled under his emotional porch, I lost my job, too.  I won’t get into the details, save to say it was a disagreement with a fellow known as Captain Stupidhead which suddenly escalated into a China Syndrome-type nuclear meltdown.  Tragically, while only one of us was right, only one of us had the power to fire the other.  And it wasn’t the same person.

It was the same time of year as The Camping Debacle – The Foothills of the Holidays, as my Dad used to call it.  Which would have been bad enough.  But the kicker was that we were in the middle paying off a huge debt load plus a mortgage, and the dual loss of income at a time when nobody is even going to think about hiring for another six weeks looked like it was going have us sleeping in the yard on a more permanent basis.

The hardest part was that I couldn’t tell Daniel.  Every time I tried to bring it up, I took a look at his sad, clouded face and just…brought it back down again.  I couldn’t do it. 

But I couldn’t very well explain staying home every day either.  So yes, it’s true, I kept up the ruse of going to work.  Ironically, part of me must have been pleased about not having to hang out with Captain Stupidhead because Daniel, in a lucid moment of observation, actually asked me if things were going better at work because I seemed a lot more willing to get out the door.

Where did I go?  Often the library – where I conducted many Job-Searching Activities.  If, miraculously, I landed a new position right away, I could tell Daniel after the fact and it would actually end up being great news.  Sometimes I went to Winter Camping Jen’s – though she’s not a good person to hang out with in this kind of situation because she’s so unflappably cheerful and optimistic.  I mean, it’s great to have a friend who will tell you, repeatedly and beyond all doubt, that everything is going to be ok.  In fact, it’s more than great, it’s a monumental gift.  But still, every once in a while, you need someone who will descend with you into the Pit of Despair and acknowledge how much everything sucks.  Jen will just tell you how much she enjoys rappelling down the sides of the Pit. 

Mostly, I wandered the antique stores.  It can be comforting to go window shopping for things you know you don’t need.  And with antiques, you know you don’t need them not because you’re convincing yourself to avoid consumerist culture, but because the modern world has no use for carpet beaters, wooden snowshoes, button hooks, and ox bows.  The way we’re headed, maybe we will need that stuff again someday, but for now they’re still charmingly anachronistic items from a bygone era.

Except after a while, it was all neither charming nor comforting.  It was totally depressing, wandering through rooms and rooms of useless old crap.  I felt like a piece of useless crap myself.  Except there wasn’t anyone picking me up, turning me around in their hands, and emitting a low, observational “hmmm.”  

I was in a far back room of a lower-end shop when the Smelly Old Horse Blanket of Overwhelm finally landed on my shoulders.  I sat down on a low stool and gave in to a long, wet cry.  I knew we weren’t dying.  I knew that even if we did end up sleeping in the yard, Jen would make sure we had really great gear.  But still, sometimes it’s just hard to see your way through.

Finally, the flow ebbed, and I started looking around for something to blow my nose on.  I was in one of those rooms where merchants toss the random junk they’re not sure is saleable, but which they’re also not ready to throw away.  I figured there’d probably be a bunch of stained old linen napkins, and I could get myself a hankie for a buck.

I found a pile of embroidered tea towels, and was searching for the most snot-worthy candidate when something behind the pile caught my eye.  It was a white porcelain tea cup with a gold-painted rim and a little spray of blue roses on the side.

This cup also had a crack which ran from the back, down across the bottom, and up to the front.  Clearly, at some point, it had broken in two.  But it wasn’t glued back together, it was stitched.  Someone had made little holes on either side of the break, and threaded them through with a fine cord.  The cord was so soiled I couldn’t tell if it was thin leather or maybe waxed thread, but it held the cup together tight.  I bet you could get through high tea at the Waldorf without anything dripping on your lap.

It was just outrageously clever.  I brought the cup up to the front counter, which was staffed by an old lady sporting a giant white bun and a dark blue Mr. Rogers-type sweater.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but do you know what this is?  Is it art?”

The woman took the cup and her eyes got wide.  “Jeezum, I didn’t even know that was back there.”

“What is it?"

“That,” she said with wonder and pride, “is Nana Teddy’s teacup.”

She told me her mother had come from a farm near the Northeast Kingdom village of Tice.  “Poor,” she said, “as lice on mice.”   It was one of those places so remote and impoverished that when the Great Depression hit, they didn’t even notice.  “Just like dirt don’t get dirty, broke can’t get more broke.”

Hardscrabble and hand-to-mouth as farm life was, her grandmother Teddy (short for Theodora) had one nice thing – a blue-flowered teacup.  Nobody knew where it came from, Nana Teddy was the only one allowed to use it, and she only used it once a day.  She had a little ritual – origins also unknown – of afternoon tea at exactly 4:15.  If they couldn’t get any actual tea, she’d use herbs – or even just hot water.  But the ten minutes from 4:15 to 4:25 were hers: sacrosanct and inviolable.

Except one day, in the middle of an epic spell of bad farmer luck (wet summer, lost livestock, rotting hay), there was an event known as The Accident, in which Nana Teddy’s husband, Papa George, barged into teatime at about 4:19, and the cup ended up on the floor – intact – except that it was in two pieces. 

Nana Teddy stared at the broken cup.  Several expressions kept trying to happen on her face.  None of them ever fully materialized, but she was shaking.  Papa George stared at the cup, too, and at his wife.  Finally, without a word, he picked up the halves of Nana Teddy’s one treasure, and walked out of the room. 

A few days later, the cup showed up on the kitchen table with Papa George’s brilliant repair.  This was in the days before epoxy, and no one in the family thought it could be fixed.  He also wouldn’t tell anyone how he managed it.   But the break had been clean, and the stitching held the halves of the cup together so tightly that it didn’t ever leak.

 “Nana Teddy wasn’t the type to let you know how happy she was about what he did,” the woman told me, “except that year, she gave herself the teacup for Christmas.  She wrapped it in a piece of cloth and set it on the table with the other presents.  Papa George was handing out the gifts, and he gave her that little package and she opened it up, and she just sat there with the teacup in her lap.  Looking at it.”

I stared at the woman who had just told me this story.  “Oh, she did NOT!”

“Yep.  She did.”

I bought the cup (and my new hankie), turned around, and walked very, very slowly out of the store.

I can’t tell you that the Horse Blanket of Despair miraculously lifted from my shoulders, or that I went home, presented the cup to Daniel, and we had super-duper, healing, wonder-sex on the floor right then and there.

But it definitely scootched things over in my mind.  I felt like I’d just had a quick hit of stoic self-reliance – something heretofore totally lacking in my system.  I felt a little more solid.  Capable.  Bucked up. 

And I did give the cup to Daniel.  I wrapped it in a cloth and left it for him on the kitchen table with a note saying, “Somehow, people find a way through.  Don’t worry.  We’ll get by.”  

When I got home that night he was waiting for me at the door with a sewn-up cup of tea and a hug.  “Jen told me about your little smackdown with Captain Stupidhead,” he said - and smiled.  “Don’t worry.  We’ll get by.”

I still can’t stop thinking about my place – all our places – in the Great Scheme Of Things.  Who are we, each of us, compared to the whole universe?   All I can figure is that maybe we’re each of us Nana Teddy or Papa George.  Just a couple of struggling subsistence farmers from some random corner of Vermont, but also miraculous channelers of resilience and inspiration and forgiveness.  And maybe, really, that’s plenty.  Maybe that’s more than enough.