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Sense of Direction

How to make tea

June Donohue
Posted 8/12/22

The Bergen Record dragged Bill Ervolino out of retirement recently and I am borrowing part of what he wrote in one of his columns.  Ten years ago he became frustrated while trying to order iced …

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Sense of Direction

How to make tea

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The Bergen Record dragged Bill Ervolino out of retirement recently and I am borrowing part of what he wrote in one of his columns.  Ten years ago he became frustrated while trying to order iced tea at a Peruvian restaurant.  He was told they didn’t have iced tea.

Bill asked if they had ice and the answer was- Yes.  His next question was “Did they have tea?” and again the answer was- Yes.  He told the waiter/owner that was the secret recipe and asked him if  he wanted him to write it down. All said with a sarcastic smile.  Bill Orvolino gets away with  a lot that we ordinary people don’t.

All that tea talk reminded me of my own experience with tea.  After Jim and I got married, we lived out west for awhile and Jim convinced me to buy loose tea because that was how his family made tea.  And to an Irishman tea is almost as important as tea is to an Englishman. So for a whole year I religiously made it with loose tea.  That all came to a screeching halt when we came to New Jersey to live and stopped off at Jim’s mother’s house and were served tea made with tea bags as if it was a new discovery.

The few times that we had tea in my house when I was a kid, it was served with lemon and sugar, never with milk, so when Jim asked his mother if they had any lemon to go with the tea, his family looked at him with surprise and shock, thinking “ What new creature is this?”   For an entire year I not only was serving Jim loose tea but with lemon instead of milk.

So in blending families,  there sometimes occurs new ways of blending tea.

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