‘I want my mug for tea. Where’s my tea mug?’ I stare at him. ‘What tea mug? You drink tea?’ ‘Yes, yes…where’s my mug? The white one with the blue on the inside?’ I continue looking at him. I know my mugs. I know them well. There is no white mug with blue on the inside. There’s a blue mug with white on the inside, but not the other way around. I know my mugs. ‘Um, I don’t know’. He’s frustrated. ‘The big one. All white on the outside and all blue on the inside!’ He’s waving his hands. I think that the wild waving of hands will not make any difference. I do not say this. He bends over and begins rummaging around on my desk. He moves over a stack of books. ‘Oh, here it is!’ He shows me proudly. ‘This one!’ I examine the mug. It has a floral pattern covering the entire outside. It is…a pale purple on the inside. It’s sat on my desk behind those books for a number of days.
I say, ‘Oh, there it is. I’m glad you found it.’ He heads off eagerly to make tea. I breathe deeply, sit back in my chair and look at the disrupted desk top. I think to myself, ‘This is why women generally take care of ordering and maintaining the fine bone china. This is why women take care of and maintain the tea and coffee mugs. This is why women generally arrange and polish the dinnerware’. I lean back in my chair and cross my arms. I’m still very much surprised he drinks tea.
‘You took my mug? You took my mug!’ This time I am looking for my large mug…the hand crafted one from North Carolina, large enough for a whopping two full cups of hot spiced tea, a helpmate through endless Zoom meetings. ‘I need that mug’. Again with the mugs. He looks up from his stack of mail he’s reading through at the dining room table, responding with a quick shoulder shrug. ‘I needed it this morning and I’ve already put tea bags and cinnamon in it’. The very mug I’m seeking rests heavily on a coaster by his left arm. This is his explanation; there’s already tea bags and cinnamon in it.
I stride over to the cupboard and pull out another mug; the one he declared last week to be blue on the inside. I look down into the mug. Nope. Still purple down in there. ‘I’ll take this one’. I pour in water from the faucet, place the mug carefully in the microwave and wait for the tea to heat up. ‘I’m the king!’ he joshes. He’s trying to make it up to me. I look at him. ‘I’m the queen!’ I retort. He grins. ‘Yes, but I can send the queen off to be decapitated!’ He laughs a hearty laugh. I look carefully at him again. I hear the familiar ding and I remove my mug of steaming tea. I tread quietly out of the room. As I turn the corner I announce, ‘Yes, but I can have the king poisoned’. I head back up the stairs. ‘Yes, there is that’ I hear him say from the kitchen.
690 Saint Paul 