I have, during these months of winter, been able to pick-up a 12 pack of Lipton’s Diet Green Tea, Peach flavor. Now, I haven’t done it often, but when I have, there has been a pack for me. Not now. Knowing I would be wanting a lot of iced tea soon, I checked out the stores and found, “Yes, we have no peachanas.” Well, rats. I really liked that peach. They had lots of the flavors I don’t care for, but no peach and my only hope was that the new berry flavor would do. Today I tried it, and it is okay. Different from peach, but better than the others – much better.

I love to drink iced tea in the summer. That I am drinking it poured over ice out of a bottle would be news to my grandmother. She always made hot tea and it was poured over ice that cracked. It had no flavors other than “tea” and back then I had no idea there were different kinds of tea, anyway, let alone flavors. The glasses were tall and thin and the spoons long and graceful; condensation formed on the outside. As I grew older, I learned by example to run the glass slowly over my forehead when we were sitting on the porch. Of course, you didn’t do that at the dinner table.

I was so fortunate as a little, little girl. The war was over and people were happy; people gave you the things they had wanted in the Depression. My father took graduate courses in the summer on the GI Bill and one year we were in Bloomington for the whole year. We lived downstairs from a Chinese gentleman who had a daughter my age  – only she was in China with her mother and couldn’t get permission to come. I’m told he used to come and see me and that I was afraid of him. I have no idea why and now I feel sorry. And somehow I have come back to tea – tea in china cups with a man from China during a Midwestern winter.

I feel sorry for the cute little pseudo-orphaned polar bear cub at the German zoo who was brought to – uh, let’s call it – “really bigness” by the people. Knut is the bear whose picture has been on the Internet news a lot lately – you know the one, the picture where it seems he is trying to bite, eat, whatever a kid and would have succeeded had it not been for the Plexiglas barrier his face rammed against.

As I understand it, the people who were with him all the time, the ones he thought were friends and family, decided it was time for him to live like a bear, alone in his cage. (I guess they call them enclosures now.) He has, in a very real sense, been abandoned. This time he is no longer the incredibly cute little polar bear cub and some people in the zoo community are calling him – forgive me – a psycho bear.