tea time no. 24: Be Mine

Drinking: Hot chocolate

Listening to: You Are My Everything – Miles Davis {click play below if you want to listen with me while you read}

It’s a rainy, Parisian kind of day today which has me thinking of Valentines. Here are some heart-shaped links for you:

*Chocolate. Chocolove chocolate bars are my favorite and even come with a poem inside. I have not received any freebies, but I welcome them with open arms.

*Pack Your Bags. Here is a honeymoon packing check-list from Real Simple which I thought might come in handy if you are leaving town for Valentine’s Day.

*Here’s a link on how to tie a bow tie.

*Music. A link to the most romantic album of all time: Ella & Louis.

*Movies. Catch a good love story. {Here are some ideas…Shakespeare In Love, Four Weddings & A Funeral, When Harry Met Sally, Only You, Pride & Prejudice, Amelie, Say Anything, Sense & Sensibility, Emma, An Affair To Remember, The Notebook, Sliding Doors, Moonstruck, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones, Fools Rush In, Stranger Than Fiction, The Wedding Date, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Up at the Villa, French Kiss, Pretty Woman, The Holiday, Mansfield Park, Roman Holiday, Love Actually, and so on.}

*Love letters. I love the Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1845-1846) vol 1 which you can read online for free here if you can’t find a copy. I searched for years for the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw & Mrs. Patrick Campbell. I searched bookshops in Sligo and Galway and Dublin and finally found one upstairs in the attic at Poor Richard’s Books in Frankfort, Kentucky for $11. Go figure. Whenever I have anything for work in Frankfort, I swing by Poor Richard’s. They have a coffee shop, too. Though not love letters, I do have my eye on this collection of letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Speaking of letters, I’m eagerly awaiting the DVD release {because I can never make it to the theater} of Bright Star, based on John Keats and his love letters to Fanny Brawne.

*Poems of course. There are so many to choose from on the topic of Valentines. Nikki Giovanni’s Love Poems are old faves. Though not a romantic poem, wanted to share A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal, by Billy Collins, from Picnic Lightning. {I think about this poem sometimes when I write here as I often don’t know the people, 2,000 this month, who are reading on the other side. It’s a curious thing and sometimes makes me feel very shy.}

A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal
Every morning I sit across from you
at the same small table,
the sun all over the breakfast things—
curve of a blue-and-white pitcher,
a dish of berries—
me in a sweatshirt or robe,
you invisible.

Most days, we are suspended
over a deep pool of silence.
I stare straight through you
or look out the window at the garden,
the powerful sky,
a cloud passing behind a tree.

There is no need to pass the toast,
the pot of jam,
or pour you a cup of tea,
and I can hide behind the paper,
rotate in its drum of calamitous news.

But some days I may notice
a little door swinging open
in the morning air,
and maybe the tea leaves
of some dream will be stuck
to the china slope of the hour—

then I will lean forward,
elbows on the table,
with something to tell you,
and you will look up, as always,
your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.

*A novel about crazy love like Love In The Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My copy is marked up and I’ve underlined passages like these:

“It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and the omega, an end in itself.” p. 293 Penguin Press.

“… marriage ends every night after making love, and must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.” p. 209

*Photos.
Fuji Instax film cameras is the Fuji answer to Polariod.  I have not tried one, but aren’t they the cutest?