Lilian's Tea

This time of the year – with the leaves turning and the light quality changing – it calls for a little break from reality. Sometimes that might come in the form of a good binge on alcohol; other times maybe some transcendental meditation. Then there’s the afternoon tea party. This year was the year of the afternoon tea party and so I took a little trip over the weekend. A few score of miles down the dusty back roads past the old shot out refrigerator, through the oaks and park the car and then it’s a scramble through the poison oak and coyote brush and then your almost there. It was early in the afternoon when Trish and I stumbled across a make-shift bridge over a dry creek bed and down a slight crease in the hill where Lilian’s trailer is parked. Planted is more like it. The old fiberglass shell hasn’t been moved for years and the grasses and thistle grow through it and around it. Little purple and yellow wildflowers are spotted here and there as well.

Lilian is dressed in her usual – a white flowing dress to match her long flowing light brown hair with flowers behind her ears. I have no idea how old she might be. I know she’s lived in that trailer for more than twenty years – longer than my wife has been in Chico – but her age is impossible to gauge. She could be thirty as easily as fifty – though simple math suggests she’s closer to the later. Her teeth are white and straight and she almost always smiles. I saw her frown and shed a tear once after a cat friend of hers died but then five minutes later she was smiling again. She understands the efficiency of positive thinking but I’ve never been able to convince myself of the notion.

Back in town they’re fighting over a disorderly events ordinance – by the time you read this it will either have been approved or not. Overseas they’re fighting and dying in the streets for reasons nobody clearly understands. But today, here an hour away from Chico we are drinking tea.

There is nothing like Lilian’s tea. It is sweet and thick with honey and slightly blue. I don’t know what she puts in it – I don’t ask and if I did I know her answer would be vague. “A little of this and a little of that.” You know the story. I drink a glass of that tea and I am smiling before it’s even half gone. My eyes can see. The world looks bright and shiny new again. This must have been how it looked to Adam and Eve – maybe the snake too.

Eventually we end up back in that garden. The clothing disappears somewhere. Who knows where? The nudists tell you not to look at the naughty bits but we look and they are not naughty anymore. We laugh because there is no reason not to. My wife and I disappear to spend some time alone together. Time has become strange and shifty. It doesn’t matter. In an oak grove we stumble across a minstrel in a dark suit drinking from a bottle of gin and taking a wiz. His teeth are bad and his hair is shockingly red. He smiles through mangled teeth and his laugh is a prolonged wheeze. Then he sings us a tune as sweet as any we’d ever heard. He is like a bird and then he disappears but joins us all later at the trailer for a cup of Lilian’s tea.

Eventually night falls and the bugs come out but they don’t bite. We laugh with them as they flit about us in the twilight.

Lilian starts a small fire and over time it grows larger until we are warmed and illuminated by it and then we begin to see the old gods, and the ancient gods swarming around us like the mosquitoes earlier. We don’t pray to them – we don’t have to. They are here with us. We only smile and cry and laugh and sing and wonder at this incredible world and the why of it all. Then those thoughts are gone too and we just are – one with everything and nothing, one with everything we can see and one with everything we cannot, everything that is there and the things that are not. My skin tingles and burns and disappears. Trish is a smiling pool of luminosity. I cannot keep a straight face. I cannot consciously do anything anymore except to love and to be loved and to be.

Lilian’s Tea.