Tea Thrice for Two

Tea Thrice for Two

So now I am a cave-dweller. My grandfather would laugh at my fate. He was the one who introduced me to the term when he was driving me to a hockey game on a Saturday. When we approached a particularly cave-like apartment building, he pointed at it and declared, “There is where the cave-dwellers live.” I was only six years old at the time, so he had to explain what he meant by that comment. It created some rather imaginative images in my mind of people dressed in furs walking around barefoot in a hole in a wall in which a carefully managed fire provided the only light in their homes. If grandfather were still alive today he would certainly shake his head if I told him that I was living in such a place. He then might make some comment about how I should have studied to be an electrician like he and my father (his son) was, and not an English teacher. He read no books, only the sports page of the newspaper.

While I do enjoy my new job working in a book store, certainly the conversation aspect involved in taking about books, but it is not nearly as well-paying as my gig at the community college. But it had just gone through a large scale down-sizing. This included the English Literature course that I had taught for seven years. I had earlier rented a house, but I had to give it up for an apartment which was all that I could afford. I had no real choice in the matter.

The apartment building I am living in is an old one, but it does not seem to have the flaws that I had expected it would have in terms of the electricity powering the lights, stoves and televisions suddenly going off.  And it didn’t smell bad either.  The only real physical flaw in the place was the elevator. Sometimes it would jerk rather quickly and violently when you pressed the button to close the door. You had to be careful not to let it knock you down when it did that. I fell victim to that two times the first week that I lived in the apartment. Now I lean low against the side of the elevator where the buttons to be pressed are. When I complained to the manager, he just said “I’m looking into the problem”. He maybe doing that, but he must be looking at it from afar. He has not been doing anything constructive. But then he doesn’t live here, so it does not affect him.

The Other Cave Dwellers Are Ignoring Me

           I have been here a month now, and still there is no one in the building whose name I know, or with whom I have had what could be called a conversation. I say ‘hello’ to people at the entrance door, even open the door for them, but they do little more than nod their heads or say a very non-enthusiastic ‘thanks’ back at me. And there have been no conversations in the elevator, despite the fact that I live on the fifth floor, and often share it with my fellow cliff-dwellers.

Tea for Two

The day of the big change in my life started off as an ordinary day. I got into the elevator to begin my trek to my workplace a block away. I carried three copies of the novel that I had recently published, as the boss thought it would be a good idea to have me flog my books at the store.  He knew that I would be a particularly enthusiastic salesman for what I had written.  He is a good boss, one of the positives of the job.  My book just came out a few days ago, and I was going to ask him to sell them once he had seen them, and maybe read one when business was slow.

I proudly carried my books into the elevator, holding them tight with my right arm like they were paperback children of mine. I didn’t want them to fall when I pressed the button to go to the first floor. All was well. It did not jerk that time.

Two floors down, the elevator pulled to a stop. Someone had pushed the button. The elevator door opened and a young woman stepped in. I had never seen her before. She was carrying a full cup of tea in her left hand. The elevator made a rather jerking motion shortly after the door closed. It caused the woman to stagger and to almost completely lose her grip on her cup of tea. In so doing she pretty much flung most of her tea right at me and my books. My perverse sense of humour got the better of me. Rather than complaining,  I called out words, I thought were rather clever: “I guess we are having tea for two, aren’t we.”

She laughed immediately, then said, “I like your sense of humour. Some would have sworn at me for doing what I just did.”

I did not want to part company with her, so I decided no to ride the elevator back up to the fifth floor, to my apartment to get a dry shirt. When we left the building in stride with each other, she looked at the fast food joint next door and asked me whether I was in a hurry to go to work. I told her that I wasn’t, as it was a short walk to the book store where I worked, and very few people buy books at eight o’clock in the morning. 

Her reply was , “Why don’t I buy us a more pleasurable ‘tea for two’, that we can both enjoy without anyone getting sprayed?” Of course I agreed right away, both for the free tea, and also for her continued presence in my life. When we sat down with our tea and a big chocolate cookie each, she asked me about the books, whether they were a good read. I told her that I was biased in favour of them, as I was their author. I then handed her a copy, one that I made sure was still dry. My oh so clever comment this time was “Tea for two, and a book for you.”

The next tea for two we would have would be in my apartment.