Idle Minds

     The other day B and I were standing around the kitchen. She was making a pitcher of Arnold Palmer -- a mixture of iced tea and lemonade. She had a fistful of teabags in her hand, dipping them into a pot of hot water. Then she looked at me and said, "I wonder who invented the tea bag?"

     I pondered a moment. "Gee, I have no idea."

     "I bet it was the British," she said. "Probably a guy who was the Earl of something."

     "Or, it could have been the Chinese," I countered. "Maybe they figured it out a  thousand years ago, and Marco Polo brought back the idea to Europe."

Did the English invent the tea bag?

     Suddenly, B was out of the room. A minute later she came back with her phone. She googled tea bag. "Actually . . . it was an American," she reported. "A man named Thomas Sullivan, a tea and coffee merchant in New York. He invented the tea bag in 1904."

     So, we learn something new every day. Then B continued, "But it was an Englishman who invented iced tea. Or, at least, it says the first recorded serving of iced tea was by an Englishman, Richard Blechynden, at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis."

     So I learned two things the other day. Then, this morning, I was lying in bed and for whatever reason I started thinking about two other things. Don't ask me why, but in that blurry time before I was fully awake, I began to run down a list of all the euphemisms we have for dying. And then . . . if for dying, why not sex? The beginning and the end.

     Here's what I came up with; but surely there are others.

die                                                                     have sex
croak                                                                 make love
meet your maker                                               do it
perish                                                                sleep with
expire                                                                make whoopie
buy the farm                                                      go all the way
pass away                                                         do the dirty
reach the promise land                                      screw                                
go to sleep                                                         bang
kick the bucket                                                   get laid
go toes up                                                          hump
lose your life                                                      have intercourse

     So anyway, don't blame me. Who knows what random ideas pop into our heads in those murky moments when we're swimming back up to the surface of consciousness? Maybe it was the caffeine in that Arnold Palmer I drank last night.