365 True Things: 189/Mugs

I like to collect mugs and, lately, tea cups. In the latter case, not the delicate china of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, but solid handleless cups that you have to let cool down before you can grasp them—thus allowing the tea to settle to just the right temperature.

The last time I was at Tassajara, I picked up a new dragonfly tea cup, white with flittery rust-colored images, to go with the blue cup I’d bought on my previous visit. Both complement a dark blue metal tea pot with, yes, a dragonfly motif that I bought at Peet’s many years ago.

I’m pretty sure the dragonfly imagery partners with Zen because those beautiful insects live only for days: the impermanence thing. I’d tell you for sure, but my Internet is down—has been all of this day, the agony!—so I can’t research.

My favorite mugs include a sea-green one given to me upon graduating Antioch University with an MFA in creative writing in 2006; a Nature Conservancy mug featuring birds—red- winged blackbird, cardinal, oriole, goldfinch, ruby-throated hummingbird, blue jay, and . . . cowbird? (this mug was designed by an East Coaster, clearly); a silly one I picked up in Scotland sporting a cormorant who asks, “How’s my diving? Phone 017 32519” (I’ve always wondered who would answer if I were actually to call); a green and gold U.S. Forest Service mug, a thank you gift from the Monterey Ranger District; a “Life is good” mug featuring a dog roasting a marshmallow over a campfire; a Tintin (et Milou) mug I picked up at the bande dessinée museum in Brussels; another silly British mug featuring sheep: Blackface, Rebel sheep, Mountain bike sheep, Dalesbred, Swaledale, Oxford Down (the “w” is crossed out), Sheepish sheep, Alan the Lamb (a cricket reference, apparently), Shorn sheep, etc. And then there's San Francisco's Friends of the Library mug, with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "I cannot live without books" (more than 2 million reasons to live).

The mugs aren't special, exactly, but in a way they remind me of who I am.

Several of the mugs in our collection are David’s, including Fluid Dynamics: From Imagination to Discovery; CHAOS: the newest frontier in science; and CHES 2005, Edinburgh Scotland, workshop on cryptography. I like drinking out of them because they remind me of a larger world than that which exists in my very small brain.

For tea (I in fact usually use mugs for tea; the tea cups are for my visual pleasure) I have a favorite: cherry blossoms, a photo by my friend-whom-I’ve-never-met, Susan. If that one’s in the dishwasher, I resort to a USS Kitty Hawk mug, which David picked up on a cruise down the coast on said aircraft carrier many years ago. I choose those two for tea because they’re supersized.

And then there’s “life . . . liberty . . . and the pursuit of chocolate,” which I inherited from my mother. I believe I gave her that mug: she did love chocolate. I also gave her the Nature Conservancy one with the birds. Because she loved birds even more than chocolate. When I’d go to visit her in her last years, I’d fix her tea in that cup. Her caregiver, Susan, once remarked that I was the one who was into birds. It reminded me of how unlike herself my mother had become, and made me sad that she couldn't share that love of birds with Susan. But I hope she looked at the cup and remembered the old passion. Even if she never talked about it again.