Not a Dramedy, but a Comema.

I made the switch from coffee to tea because it had less syllables and is easier to spell. Apparently there's no difference in nutritional value between the two. I have just learned this today. Tea sounds better for you somehow, though, it's pretty lethal when it's brewed by the gallon in an enormous glass jar and mixed with enough sugar to kill the entire child cast of the Barney show. This is what I grew up on. Sweet tea, or, to be more specific, Tennessee Sweet God D*mned Tea. My father had a flare for verbal ornamentation and would often stretch out words, phrases and occasionally a syllable or two. God D*mn was like his punctuation. Sh*t replaced all forms of conjunction and F*ck had so many uses that it was like the letter a, you never knew where you were going to find it. My father loved sweet tea almost as much as my sisters and I did. We drank it as a family after school when we all got home. Like a glass of milk. No ice. I'd take it down by the pint as if I hadn't had a drop of anything in weeks. My sister had braces for the first part of her life and I guess tea seemed pretty harmless compared to apples and corn. When she got to high school it was time for the braces to come off. To her horror she discovered yet another hidden danger of tea. It had stained her teeth in between the braces so badly that it looked like she was still wearing them. She was mortified, and understandably so. This was her debut in high school and she was a freak. She never drank tea again. Some years later my father learned that he'd acquired diabetes, a disease not uncommon in our little family. The doc told him to change his diet, and sweet tea was not on the new one. He tried un-sweet tea, but it just wasn't the same. My mother gave up making her sweet, dark liquid treat and instead brewed homemade beer and made fresh fruit juices and sugarless lemonade. My smallest sister and I would sneak to our friends houses and drink their sweet tea whenever we had the chance. These binges always resulted in a large amount of guilt, and we would hang our heads low at dinner and try to explain why we were too full to eat anything. Our sister knew what we were up to and she would scowl at us from behind the ketchup. A few years later, when I was preparing to leave for college, my father passed away. The disease that had eliminated sweet tea from our household had now taken our father as well. I never said it aloud nor thought about it consciously, but I didn't drink tea for 5 years. Just the other day I was at my mothers house visiting and I saw the old tea jug. She'd made it into a vase and keeps flowers from my father's garden in it. She never thought about making tea again, even after my dad passed. I guess some things you just get used to. I have drank coffee steadily for the past 5 years now and I found out yesterday that I now have diabetes. This morning, first thing, I woke up and drove to the coffee shop and ordered a large Earl Grey. Tonight, I'm buying a huge glass jar, and an entire bag of sugar.