Tea for Two

This is some serious, deep, elbow-patchy professorial love. In fact, it might very well be what I’ve been looking for. Almost.

When I was on my semester abroad in Oxford, I took two classes with a person who I believe to be The Best Professor In The World. Or at least someone who was cut from the mold of the prototype. His name was Robert Osborne, and he taught my drama class and some literature class that I can’t quite recall. What I do remember, however, are two things: His persona and the way he smelled.

He was a scruffy, grizzled man probably in his late 50s. A thrush of salt and pepper hair burst from his head and whorled around like an unkempt bust of Beethoven. His face was equally decorated with this stiff and haphazard hair. He was small but had such enormous bursts of energy it was hard to keep his physical size in mind while he was in the room. And he had a fantastic dramatic presence. While he had potential to be enormously frightening (especially to small children), he was so good hearted and entertaining, I was often held prisoner to marvel and wonder instead. I wished I could have been wrapped up in a brown paper package and tucked under his arm to be carried like an absentminded parcel all day. He wouldn’t have to notice I was there; he could just carry me around so I could always observe him from a quiet distance. After it became commonplace for people to see him wandering around, carrying this parcel, someone would periodically ask, “What’s in the package?”

“Oh this?” he’d say. “It’s just something I carry around.” And with a twinkle in his eye, this would add to his mystery.

He smelled like fresh mulled tobacco and licorice and pepper. It was the bracing aspect of anise rather than the sweet note. It was the brisk, hot, fresh dirt aspect of cracked black pepper with just a hint toward menthol. It was the sweet current and moist woodsiness of pipe tobacco with a sad threat that it might be smoked, but the wish not to smoke it because it is so much more intoxicating to smell it in its “have” form (like the proverbial cake conundrum) than in its “eat” form.

I have wandered this earth for fourteen years looking for that smell. It is the smell I wish more people would smell like. And now I have it. Almost. Tea for Two captures most of that, but its anise is sweet rather than bracing, more like licorice root, really, and the pepper is not very strong. The smokiness is what comes from smoking something to cure it rather than smoking something to consume it. And the lingering, magical genie part is telling me my adventures will be golden and Robert Louis Stevensy. And it turns out it’s a rather good pair with this dress after all.

This is a perfume I could justify dropping the bucks on for a full bottle. This one could be my chisel to tap through the glass ceiling. This one, and I’m not just being fooled by the name here folks, this one was made for me.

I do wish, however, that it projected more. It, too, stays close to the skin.