A Cup of Tea
When Ryshoni Joy turned four years old last month, her birthday requests included a tea set and an apron. Unlike her mother, Rysha is the classic “little lady.”
She had multiple, miniature tea sets, and although they gave a day’s thrill, Rysha was more interested in actually serving the whole family a “real tea time” than just pretending. So we made a trek out to the pole barn and dug out a carefully-wrapped 50-year-old box: my great-grandmother’s bone china.
Rysha carefully helped me unwrap and wash each gold-embossed piece, talking the whole time with utmost excitement about how she was going to serve tea. The pink roses never bloomed so brightly on that china set as they did for Rysha Joy. Each day after naps, the girls and I set the table with saucers and cups, creamer and sugar bowl, and fill the teapot with tea. Little china bowls of nuts, fruit, and tiny cookies are set out. Then Rysha triumphantly serves tea in her little ruffled apron. Sometimes Daddy and Joe Courage join us. Rysha knows how to pour and stir, and does it all with a charming giggle.
Now, you should know that Rysha is not naturally very attentive or intuitively graceful. She’s actually a bit of a space cadet and is constantly knocking things over, running into walls, and falling off her chair. She is the most bruised and scratched-up kid I’ve seen since my sister Shoshanna was little. To watch her set the table with fine china is truly a breathtaking experience, to say the least. But I’ve no intention of taking that china to Heaven with me, and Rysha Joy needs something to give her incentive to learn grace and attention. I am not a tea party kind of gal myself.
When I was a girl, my all-consuming interest was reading and writing. I remember my parents driving me all over Memphis to look in every office supply store for a hard-cover, lined journal that I could write my stories in.
This was before the journal and diary craze hit the market, and real journal notebooks were impossible to find. I loved those precious lined pages. I used to finger them with pleasure, and put my nose in the white pages to breathe in the clean smell of new paper. It was a sheer joy to write every letter of each word, and I sat for hours thinking up poems and stories so that I could continue to write. It seemed as though my hand craved the wooden feel of the pencil, and the detailed motion of each stroke. But, just as Rysha Joy is not intuitively graceful, I was not intuitively a good writer. I had extreme dyslexia and viewed the world in doubles until I was about 4 years old. For years, I wrote most of my letters backwards. I remember telling myself to write the letters the opposite of what seemed right so that my story would be readable. In time, and with huge amounts of practice, I learned to write my letters without having to double check myself.
