Charlie was the first real pu-erh that I ever had.

 

I'm pretty sure that before I had Charlie, I'd had something that called itself pu-erh. It was probably something in a teabag, or maybe something loose and crumbly somewhere. I'd probably had something that I thought, “huh, nothing special."

 

And then I subscribed to the white2tea tea club. (Full story about that here.) I waited impatiently for the first delivery to arrive, and when it did, I read the little sheet talking about Charlie, saw that it suggested having some now and then saving some for later to see how aging changed a tea. I ripped into it right then and there, and ever since then, every six to twelve months or so, I have some more Charlie. I've talked about Charlie on here before, and in fact, it's the only tea that I've ever really repeated. (I've done different years of the same tea, and different ways of making the same tea…but I've never done the exact same tea cake over and over, over the course of years. I have thus far reserved that for Charlie, but I have teas that I've aged for around five years and they are going to be practically different teas.)

 

Charlie is now about five years old, and beginning to come into its own as a tea. The firs steep is now already a deep, dark caramel color, smooth and chocolatey. By the second fifteen second steep, it's coffee-black, but it tastes nothing like coffee. It's almost airy in taste: hot and without even a hint of bitterness. (By my notes, when I tried it a few years ago, it took to the third steep to get that level of color).

 

The taste is rich and less earthy-vegetal than before. I use the word “chocolate” to describe it, but I'm not sure chocolate is the right word. It has sweetness to it. It has the mouth-feel of chocolate: rich and just a touch of bitterness. It doesn't have the cocoa-flavor or aroma though.  It feels, in some ways, like this inhabits the exact opposite space from carob.

 

If you've never had carob as a chocolate replacement, be glad: it lives in the uncanny valley of chocolate imitators. (I recognize that those who can't have chocolate for whatever reason, like having allergies or being a dog, may be fine with carob. Carob is nonetheless extremely Not Chocolate.) It has some chocolate-ish elements, but it is NOT chocolate and it's wrong to make it try. This is exactly not that. It doesn't really have chocolate-ish elements, and nobody would ever try to make a pu-erh-based chocolate replacement. But precisely because it's not trying to be chocolate, it's allowed to shine as the thing that it is: 

 

 It feels like a cousin of chocolate: something that almost could be, but perhaps isn't. The deeper into the steeps we went, the more that almost-chocolate-but-not at all came out.

 

By the time we got to the fourth steep, this tea was tinged with magic: it felt persistently sweet and yet incredibly not at the same time.

 

It has been five years, and I'm about half finished with the original 200g cake of Charlie that started me off on my gong fu tea journey. The time-lapse method of drinking this cake has been exceptionally good: enough to remind myself where I came from, and to look forward to  where I might go in the future. Time is a gift for this tea.

I am about nine months away from fifty years old.

 

It feels strange to say so. Some part of me believes that fifty has to be “old” and I do not feel old. I strongly suspect this has more to do with false preconceptions of what it means to be old.

 

I think I imagined that old would mean a lack of change and growth: that I would have already perfected myself as much as I could, or given up on what I couldn't. I foolishly thought that youth was changing and age would mean constancy.

 

This has not been true for me. I find out things about me--about how my brain works, how my body works--every year.

 

Here is a thing I have discovered about my body, in the aftermath of my latest knee injury. First, I discovered that walking a little bit helped my knee feel slightly better temporarily. And then I discovered that walking more helped my knee feel even better longer than temporarily. Finally, through sheer accident, I discovered that walking a lot actually helped my knee heal, when nothing else seemed to be working. 

 

So I spent about six weeks averaging six to seven miles a day. I didn't do it all at once--about half of that was just choosing to walk to the store or the movie theater or a restaurant, rather than affirmatively “going on a walk" as a form of exercise. I felt amazing physically and mentally. I slept better; my weird little heart rhythm issue (my doctor says it's fine and nothing to worry about but I'm aware of it) totally disappeared. I had less pain everywhere.

 

Now I'm hitting the point where my knee doesn't start aching if I don't go on a walk, a thing that triggered me to walk. So I stopped walking quite so much… And I don't feel as good. I don't have as much energy, and my sleep is deteriorating. My whole being is letting me know that I need to be up and moving more.

 

I'm also learning more about how my brain works. About a year ago, at a friend's recommendation, I got a little sensory workbook, and I discovered that I do, in fact, have numerous sensory issues that I've never articulated.

 

I am extremely picky about what lotion or sunscreen I wear. (Most sunscreen is too greasy for me; I can't stand anything that leaves a film.) I cannot stand the feeling of things being stuck in my teeth, to the point where I have to lie to my dentist about how often I floss, because nobody believes me if I say that I floss eight times a day. 

 

Loud, persistent noises wear me out. My whole life I have believed that I was deeply an introvert, because being around people made me exhausted. And I am almost certainly an introvert, but now I'm wondering if it's not the people who make me exhausted, but the noise that large groups of people generate. I got a pair of earplugs that my brother in law recommended (it's Engage from Loop, if you're wondering) and that has helped me filter out background noise so that I can concentrate on what people are saying. 

 

And lo and behold, things that used to exhaust me now…. well, they still exhaust me, but where some things would make me want to retreat into a corner and hide after about an hour, I can now tolerate more of it before I want to hide. It wasn't the people. It was the noise.

 

All of this makes me think of the operation of time. Time is one of the greatest gifts we are given: the time to learn, to understand, and to use that understanding to grow and be better. I hope that by talking about this, that I can help people discover this before the age of forty-nine and three months. Because what are we here for, if not to help each other understand the world we live in?

 

Using our time to be better--instead of of trying to hold to a misguided sense of identity that centers our wrongness--is what age should be.

 

So here I am, in a country that is two hundred and forty-nine years and three months old, and it feels as if that is the war we are fighting. Are we going to learn and improve? Or are we going to calcify and double down on the mistakes we've made?

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