The long dark teatime of the soul

Back a hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in the Army, I worked for a couple of years in a windowless building on top of one (of two) manmade “mountains” in the middle of the Grunewald forest in the city of Berlin (Berlin is flat as a pancake).

The US shared this building with the British. While it was hardly luxurious, the rooftop break area offered spectacular views of both East and West Berlin downtown areas. The US ran the bulk of the office, but the British contribution to the support staff was the tea truck. The tea truck came daily at 10:00 a.m., and offered tea, sandwiches, and chips (which they called “crisps”). My usual order was 2 cups of tea and a liverwurst sandwich – sometimes an order of salt & vinegar chips as well. The sandwiches were pre-made on hard rolls, so getting there early was important to get what you wanted. Offices sent one or two people, loaded down with thermoses and orders from their co-workers. We were shift workers since it was a 24 hour operation. We joked the down side of working day shift was having to put up with the bigwigs that worked days, and the up side was the tea truck.

While that time & place are both gone, to this day I still stop for tea at 10:00 a.m. Usually its Earl Grey with skim, but last night on a whim I decided to live dangerously and bought a box of Bigelow Vanilla Caramel tea. What would Jean Luc say?????