BitterSweetLife

…has always seemed to me like an adage more or less lacking in support. In my experience, good things typically comes in ones if they come at all. Think about it. If the proverb was really true, then getting married would always be a coin flip. But I digress.

Yesterday, perhaps for the first time, good things did come in pairs. One of our friends gave me an unopened bag of Starbuck’s Kenyan coffee beans. Why? Because the coffee had been a gift to someone in her family, and while her family drinks coffee, they are not “into it enough” to grind up beans.

This strikes me as an excellent reason to give me a bag of coffee beans, and if anyone else is in this position, I’m more than ready to help out. There’s no reason why your unopened bag of gourmet coffee beans should be left on the shelf to slowly disintegrate. And clearly, throwing them out would be equally wasteful. I’ll bail ya.

The second good thing was an authentic menu from “The Eagle and Child,” the Oxford pub frequented by C.S. Lewis and other members of The Inklings. (True to form as writers, Lewis and his fellow authors, couldn’t help renaming the place as “The Bird and Baby.”)

The menu, lushly produced for resale, contains a paragraph on Lewis and the Inklings:

It has been a favorite watering-hole of J.R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, as well as other fellow writers. The writers dubbed themselves ‘The Inklings’ and often met for discussion (and argument!) over a pint or two in the Rabbit Room of the pub they called ‘The Bird and Baby.’ Lewis wrote of the ‘golden sessions’ they enjoyed by a blazing fire with their drinks to hand, and the wide ranging nature of their philosophical and literary conversations. On a wall near the bar is a note to the landlord from these men, written in 1949 during one of their convivial meetings – it bears their signatures and states that they have drunk his health.