Today is a colder day, middling into the forties. My grandfather (with whom I've been staying for a long while) recommended we take a walk downtown and get ourselves breakfast. As it's a chilly Friday morning, there weren't many people about nor businesses open, but we found a cafe serving drinks and Mexican breakfast food. It was nice :) God bless Mexico. I had some green tea, but it suffered from the common mistake of being steeped with boiling water, so it was very bitter. To remedy this I slowly made my way through a singular packet of sugar crystals by shaking a little at a time onto a spoon, letting it sit in my mouth, and then taking a sip so it would melt into my tongue. I've never had to have sugar with my green tea before and wasn't sure of how it would taste, but it was quite alright!
Japanese green tea used to make up a very sizable portion of the tea imports to the United States until trade was cut off during World War II, at which point black tea from the British Empire naturally surged to the top. Black tea remains the most popular today. I was telling this to my grandfather and he suggested we get some green tea to brew ourselves. There's a shop which sells loose-leaf tea and spices downtown, we hadn't been in a few years but remembered well enough where it was and so we went there to explore. He got us sencha! I'm very happy.
Upon returning home there was a perfectly record-sized package at the doorstep, which brings me to the second interesting thing of today. My grandfather grew up in a small town in Ohio and tells me a lot of stories about it. I like asking older people questions. In a story about the churches there, he mentioned a Reverend Osuga who could sing beautifully. Some time later, I plugged his name into a search engine out of curiosity and found that the Reverend's voice had actually gotten onto records, some of which were for sale on the Internet. Upon discovering this my grandfather purchased one, and it was inside that package we recieved today. It's a lovely record, perfect quality. He has no record player himself but I do, so when we go back to my parents' for Christmas, he'll get to hear that voice for the first time in years and I for the first time ever.
My grandfather is a delight. No other adult in my life has ever been so kind or open to me. He raised me. He's almost eighty, and has seen so many things that I now get to hear about. It's harder to anguish or to spiral when he's in the other room. He stabilizes me. I truly love him. That's the most important reason that today is a wonderful day.