Present Past: Crosscurrents of Memory

Memories can be brought into consciousness by an almost simultaneous complex of sense impressions.  And those memories can be affected by the crosscurrents of time.

This time there's no expert saying this.  Just my own observation.  For example:

At some moment in the recent past, I was scanning the supermarket shelves for the brand of teas I prefer (Stash) when I happened to notice for the first time in a long time a familiar-looking black and red box, with an almost forgotten name, written in fake cursive handwriting: "Constant Comment."

It took me back, though not to childhood.  Growing up in Greensburg (western PA), the adults of my parents' generation drank coffee.  When I got to be of the age that coffee was no longer believed to "stunt your growth," I drank coffee, as well.

People drank tea mostly in the summer, when it was iced tea.  My mother probably made herself a cup of hot tea once in awhile.  So there was always a box of Lipton or Salada tea bags in the kitchen cupboard.

Then tea became a Thing in the 1960s.  Beginning in the mid-60s, the Beatles and the groups that followed in the English Invasion made everything English fashionable and gear, and that included tea.  Especially when the boom in British movies made it over to our TV sets and theaters.

But we were still basically stuck with Lipton and Salada tea bags. I remembered that at some point I became aware of Constant Comment, a tea of unique flavor. It was the tea that the hippest girls served.  It came in a tin in those days, and if you were truly hip, it was loose tea, not bags.  Those tins were in the kitchens of off-campus apartments, and particularly after our campus arts center got a ceramics studio, served in a ceramic tea pot and ceramic mugs.  In my memory I always see a young woman with long hair pouring the Constant Comment.

It wouldn't be long before its hipness was overrun as more exotic brands became available, with green tea the accompaniment to various forms of the cannabis. But Constant Comment was the first of the tea variations.

With those vague memories and images in mind, and a pretty good price on the shelf, I bought a box.  Then the distinctive smell of the tea when I made a cup evoked a more specific memory.

I remembered the afternoon I was first served Constant Comment.  I was probably still in high school, or maybe an early year home from college, and made one of our adventurous forays into Pittsburgh with my friend Mike.   We visited his older sister Mary Ann, who lived in a basement apartment in Squirrel Hill.  She worked as a buyer for a major department store.  I had no idea what a buyer did (and even now I'm not completely clear on the matter.)  But she was a single young woman with an important job and her own apartment in the big city of Pittsburgh, so she was the acme of sophistication.

We sat in her living room, looking at the feet and legs of passers-by through the window we faced, and she served us Constant Comment, which is basically a blend of black tea and sweet spices, dominated by an orange flavor from orange rinds.  I can't say I was immediately crazy about this unfamiliar taste, but it felt like a rite of passage.  My world was expanding.

The memory of the orange smell and taste might have been reinforced by something I think I remember being on her coffee table: a small ceramic bowl of those tiny orange balls that I was to see on other coffee tables in those years.  But when I heard the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne, with the line "and she serves you tea and oranges that come all the way from China," I thought about this moment.

That line, by the way, was very effective in supporting the sense of special mystery about "Suzanne" that went with the mesmerizing melody and (in his version) Cohen's hypnotic voice.  Today it's sort of a funny line. Oranges that come all the way from China was a fantastic and exotic idea then, whereas now of course virtually everything comes from China, except maybe oranges.

My association of the line with Constant Comment may seem either a poetic leap or insultingly reductive, but it turns out to be neither: just accurate.  Cohen himself explained that the song is based on a young woman who lived in a riverside apartment in Old Montreal, and served him...Constant Comment tea.  The rest is poetic license.

The problem with this coincidence however is that I probably didn't hear the song "Suzanne" until several years after that afternoon tea.  I first heard Judy Collins' hit version when it was popular in 1966.  It was on Cohen's first album, which I remember either I had or a housemate did, released in 1968.  (And then there's that song "So Long, Marianne" that may have reinforced that memory as well.)

So while the association of the tea and that afternoon formed at the time, the association of the song--which likely strengthened the memory--did not occur until afterwards.  One of those crosscurrents of memory.