English 145 (11): Tea
Monday, December 7, 2009
Today, taking the train to Penn, I watched my world going by. Twice herds of deer—if you can call four, then five deer a herd—were scattered by the oncoming locomotion and made a heady dash for the margins. Near Rosemont a fox was nearly caught by the tail. Near Overbrook a hawk got mired in some kind of mid-air scuffle with a bird half its size and twice as fast.
Once in the city, I walked, as I always do—through 30th Street, toward Drexel, then west and south, toward Penn. I was followed, it would seem, by that hawk (or that hawk's cousin), which finally rested in a thorny tree and did not protest against its portrait.
Later, I would sit with my class at the Bubble House, where we poured variously tinted pots of tea (and one coffee) and shared a long, long lovely lunch. How do you say goodbye? Maybe you don't. That's how I'm figuring on it.