ACuppaTea

Breakfast in the Bay is one week old, and perhaps the candles on the cake can serve as both light and warmth for the morning. Far below an overcast sky, one perhaps asked to act too much in these days of fires and warming and wireless connections, I greet July in my pea coat, nuzzling between the gentle traffic of College and Alcatraz toward A Cuppa Tea. I step in to get the paper, but Safeway is out. Not so safe. I circle the block and all of the Chronicle stands are empty. Some strange vacancy of words, as if the news wanders lost in the clouds. So, for the first time, I find my news on the internet: “S.F.’s Crack Dealer Snafu.” Perhaps I am living a front page metaphor, feeling much like the San Francisco authorities when they checked in on the illegal immigrant drug dealers they placed in a group home rather than turn them over to federal authorities. The news and the offenders have both disappeared from the morning. Other headlines like, “Baron Davis Shockeroo,” “Oakland’s Outpouring of Grief,” and “Battling Bin Bandits” speak for a front page clouded by disappearances, perhaps also of deft linguistics. A Warriors player walks away from $17 million, unexpected airplane deaths, and networks of quick-fingered recycling bin sifters: can we count on anything in this cold, harsh world?

I lean back into my lush cushion and drift with the symphonic music at today’s breakfast spot, A Cuppa Tea. If nothing else, this place is comfortable. The crowd is 30 and over, hunching over laptops or whispering into cell phones. There are an incredible number of signs reminding me that the seating is only for customers. They seem to encourage the disappearance of those unwanted. My coffee, the organic house French roast, appears from the pump, and will not substitute for the sun. The walls are full of art, from electronic fountains and tea sets to flyers and calligraphy. My favorite muses that, “Three days without food is better than one without tea.” If our food supply starts to act like the front page, we may be testing out that ancient sage. Overall, A Cuppa Tea is a great place to grab just that, relax on a comfortable chair, and think about the world without feeling pressured to solve its problems or reclaim its disappearances. While I won’t go there again for breakfast, I will take my mother there for an afternoon “talk.”

Enjoy your break slow, dear readers. After all, if the front page holds on to our tomorrow, it may be gone before we get there…

Breakfast in the Bay: Making sense of waking up since Tuesday, 2008.