Miz Fancy Pants

The Healing Power of Tang

Well, the cold has gone from my throat, to my sinuses and has settled in my chest.  I wish I could say that I’m one of those tough, martyr-types for whom any illness is just a minor inconvenience.  Like a hangnail, to be ignored.  (But hangnails are REALLY painful!)  Someone who sucks it up and and purposely powers through the day. I guess I’m a bit of a baby (or maybe I just feel things more deeply ) The pale silver lining in misery is that it invites comfort.  When in spite of our best over-the-counter efforts, we can’t completely escape feeling horrible, we remember to seek out those things that lift us up in the simplest ways.

I remembered that I had some Russian Tea way in the back of my cabinet.  This jelly jar of magic elixir came as a re-gift from my mother-in-law last Christmas, and I hadn’t opened it yet.  She doesn’t drink it.  I don’t really either; that is, unless I’m sick.   My mom would make it from time to time when I was growing up, and I can remember feeling very sophisticated while sipping it from one of Mom’s coffee mugs.  Nothing says comfort like a hot, steaming cup of Tang and Lipton Instant Tea.  I drank a lot of Tang growing up.  Just knowing it was consumed in outer-space made me feel as if it must contain every nutrient needed to sustain life.  The instant tea by itself is completely vile, though.  It tastes nothing like brewed tea, and given a choice, even lukewarm tap water beats it hands down. But in making Russian Tea, something magic happens in the mixing, like a chemical reaction between additives, preservatives and nutmeg that produces healing citrus vapors. Or maybe it’s something else entirely that brings the comfort.

My mom was not the June-Cleaver-homemade-soup-type, or the Earthy-natural-remedy-type.  She was the Pill-Pushing-Synthetic-Chemical-Mom.  It’s not easy to conjure comforting associations with Benedryl, though.  So maybe the Russian Tea is a better peg for hanging good memories.   I had a dream the other night that I was away at college at a pay phone and trying to reach my mother.  It had been such a long time since I had talked to her and for some reason I couldn’t remember her number.  I thought I remembered her moving far away to Kannapolis, maybe?  Is that a 670 area code?  If I could just get someone to tell me the exchange, maybe I could remember the rest of the number. People I called to ask weren’t home, or I would reach someone and we would have a bad connection and the number didn’t come through clearly.  I called everyone I knew and I was running out of change.

It was then I woke up to the pang of the reality that she has been gone for 4 years now.   It’s funny how your brain can “forget” such a key piece of information while you sleep.  This wasn’t the first time I had dreams of trying to reach her.  In the better ones, I do get through.  I run into her in the strangest places. We share a smile.  Maybe she’s at a party holding a cigarette with her pinky finger delicately extended.  Her expressions, her mannerisms flood back to my memories and I get the warm hug I was missing.   I long for those dreams.  I wonder if they are real.  I like to think that on some level they are.   Maybe my soul is reminding me of the reality my head can’t really grasp.  My faith tells me she’s with Jesus.  My soul knows she isn’t really gone.  She’s just far away.  Unreachable for now.  Someplace exotic with a new area code that no one here knows yet.  For now, I’ll sniffle and await the day we can sip Russian Tea together in Kannapolis .