We're Out Of Iced Tea

Hey, hey, how's this for a daisy chain of blogging? I just wrote a blog post at Dada Boheme explaining my blog posts at Grandma Slump. And now I'd like to comment on one of the true elements in the Dada Boheme post. About the iced tea.

We really were out to eat at a fancy restaurant -- fancy by local standards. And we really were having iced tea, which was pretty good too. Not like the crappy iced tea you get at Burger King, which tastes like some kind of powder three or four generations from any DNA connection to actual tea. This was good tea.

I was scrunching the lemon down with my straw, poking at it, terrorizing it, trying to extract all the juice I could, then swirling it so that lemon pulp was clouding my glass. That's beautiful, and incidentally, a pretty nice description of what I was doing. Then I was taking sips, so much so, in fact, that after a time of drinking it -- I wasn't rushing -- the glass became progressively emptier, and I'm an optimist about half-empty, half-full glasses ... but no amount of optimism could deny that this glass was finally ... empty.

The waiter, who seemed pleasant enough, saw me flagging him like he was a cab. He saw what I wanted and indicated to me these terrible words, "We're out of iced tea." OK. I might've looked disappointed but not overly so. He listed off the brands of soda pop I could get but I settled on water, which he brought.

Pretty soon there were a few individuals in the process of moving from one table to another and they came by us with a waiter accompanying them. So we could hear them clearly make their drink order, which was "Iced Tea." We looked at each other and chuckled, "They're going to be disappointed."

Maybe five, eight minutes went by. And coincidentally our own waiter was coming to our table. I said to him, chuckling, "How is it you run out of iced tea?" He's starting to explain, "We brew it in the morning and----" He doesn't have a chance to explain further, because we and he can see those folks' waiter approaching their table with a tray that has four full glasses of iced tea on it!

[Insert that it was an uncomfortable moment for someone, our waiter. It was also uncomfortable for me, because I hated to see him in that situation.] He excused himself, saying something like he would go check on the tea situation, but I didn't catch the exact words because I felt embarrassed. I'm a compassionate person, which is no secret.

He brought the new glasses of iced tea, didn't say "Sorry about that" or anything, which was just as well, because I preferred to overlook the whole thing.

Anyway, I wasn't really even in the mood for another whole glass, having already drunk the water too.