Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Bottle caps and Churchill

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." -Winston Churchill

Don't get excited I don't have a theme to this post. There is no thread, no through-line to carry us all through to the last period of the last sentence. I'm going to ramble stream of consciousness as always. That's my way. That's how I speak and think and that's how I blog (mostly).

The quote came on the inside cap of a Kashmiri chai cold tea I purchased on the way to my doctor's office. It's fair trade organic tea and didn't contain honey so I decided to try it. It was delicious and once home I discovered this quote on the inside cap. The bottle has since been recycled, but the cap sat on my desk for a day and I wondered what to do with this piece of information. I use to store this stuff in a drawer or stuff it in a notebook, but now I have the blog.

Of course if I put the quote on the blog and toss the cap I lose the design of it. There's something in the design that I appreciate. It reminds me of coke caps (on the real bottles when they were mass produced here) and how you could work your fingernail under the rubbery gray insert and peel it away from the cap to uncover if you'd won a free coke or bag of chips or something (sorry mom, I drank coke when you weren't looking. My teeth didn't rot either). Sometimes an imprint was left behind on the silver cap. You had to make an initial purchase in order to reap the benefits of a reward (assuming you won). You felt like you had really won something, but there's a price right? You have to buy the coke or fanta or one of their products. Is this cap working under the same principal? Will I start to seek out these teas so I can find other quotes? I really have no desire to try and hunt another one down. Fair trade organic? That's a limited purchase here. You have to hit the right store and they might not even carry the same products as another store. Oh those small businesses with their individual thinking! Where would we be without them? Loblaws I suppose.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Celestial Seasonings teas often have little sage quotes somewhere on or in their boxes. I love quotes. I recently read somewhere that Oscar Wilde's last words were: "Either that wallpaper goes or I do."

redjane Stephanie Belding said...

I too, love quotes. I seem to garner no end of whimsy or strength or insight from a good quote at the perferct time. So many writer friends I know travel with tiny notebooks and pens to compile them as they go. Mine are all over my life- in journals, blogs, scraps of paper, books and boxes. Yogi teas is good for little sayings as well. I wonder if it all spins out of the fortune cookie?

sp said...

That's right, I'd forgotten about the Celestial Seasonings tea quotes. I use to drink Yogi teas for a while too and looked forward to their quotes to get my morning writing going.
We all love quotes don't we. It's those small bits of information that convey so much.