At Malady's Front Door

I felt a little droopy as I sat drinking my first morning cup of tea. Feeling only slightly under the weather, I was suspended in that poorly-defined state, located somewhere between true sickness and good health. The state wherein your movements slacken and your gestures more languid than usual. There truly is a deliciousness in this languor, this license to whittle down -if just for one or two days- your full schedule of activities to a mere handful. There were patients to see in the hospital and the weekly marketing to do, but aside from these, all other pursuits I made optional.

My tea was a chumushi (Rishi's Okumodori sencha), a medium-steamed sencha and a 1st flush from this year's spring harvest. Elsewhere, I have discussed its counterparts, the asamushi sencha (light-steamed) and the fukamushi sencha (deep-steamed). Acquired a week ago from my formidable farmer's market (where after ordering by phone only a day beforehand, I was able to pick up my tea purchases at the Rishi tea-stand -which stood conveniently next to a stall containing the plumpest tomatoes I have seen this year), the chumushi now complemented my sencha collection. It brewed up a wonderful light green liquor, that characteristic turbid-green of a sencha. This tea was truly a study in balance, umami in equipoise with a soft vegetal tang that really blossomed in the second infusion. I sipped and marvelled at the stray tea leaves which settled on the bottom of my cup. They were tiny shards of green, like broken stained-glass fragments in many shades of one color.

I lingered over the last few drops, not ready just yet for the day to start in earnest. I was still savoring a languor, where my mind calmed from the tea mirrored the lassitude of my limbs. I lifted the page of a magazine and felt myself more aware of the movements that this act entailed. The sequences of these movements -which are so commonplace and usually done without conscious thought- become marvelously complex when broken down into their components. I find that I can hardly describe them individually without invoking an anatomist's obsessive attention to the workings of the human body. But I really have no interest in the sterile deconstruction of my act of flipping a page of the New Yorker. Just the thought of relearning all those muscles and nerves of the arm and their functions (which I once memorized in medical school under duress) is enough to elicit from me a very audible groan.

I am interested, however, in appreciating the random slices of life, those prosaic flutterings of an ordinary day. I share a miniaturist's delight in a gentle flicker of a cat's tail, a cupped hand around a warm mug of steaming tea.