Monday, July 29, 2019

The Leaving of England

The days we leave are always the best of days. There is a pure shaft of sunlight illuminating the marble across the floor and a morning chill outside the heavy door.

Beyond the rambling houses and this comfortable suburbia the landscape beckons. It's a morning to lose yourself in deep lanes with high hedges and fields lined with beech trees and gleaming cowslip above the downs.



You feel the essence of England most keenly when you leave. There's a fresh smell to the air that's lost on the natives. There's a distant hum of planes in the fragile blue sky.  it's a day to find ruined castles clad in avenues of briars or to see the quicksilver of the Thames from a nearby escarpment.

I'm not sure if I'm alone in feeling this essence of paradise lost. I don't believe in Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. But I realize now in the leaving that's it's the closest thing to home; England with all its contradictions, its subtle understatements, its hedge mazes that flatter to deceive and it's perfectly landscaped vistas. I feel I was always nomadic and destined to wander. Growing up, I had hated the claustrophobia of the mild hills that held me in; I had yearned for ruggedness, big horizons, and jagged mountain tops to climb.

Now I don't know anymore. I'll miss the cozy pub gardens, the stores that never change their names, the half-smiles and the memories of those high banked lanes we drove down as kids. Does the place we grew up define us or are we a reflection of the stops along the road?

Right now I'm not sure but I'm missing the places I never got to see and the people I meant to catch up with who slipped by because there was not enough time. England has gone on without me and better mortals. The vaults of Westminster Abbey are full of the learned and the powerful, yet today they have less influence than the men and women in red jackets on the tickets desk. We are just a moment in time but we should take the time to watch that shaft of sunlight play on the marble floor because it's part of this blessed plot, this earth, this England.


Monday, July 8, 2019

Stan the Funny Man

Random thoughts and images occur to me often. Today I had a vivid memory of Stan the Funny Man.

Stan knew my grandmother. Some kind of agency put him in touch with her. I'm not sure why or how or what agency would really want to put anyone in touch with my gran.



I remember Stan being tall with a large nose. He walked into the antique dining room, bringing his large nose in tow. He muttered a few inaudible things and stared at the clock. Then he continued to stare at the clock that ticked out the awkward seconds. After what seemed like an eternity, he walked out. 

My gran described him as a "funny man." I believe he may have shown up to perform odd jobs from time to time without any real purpose.

When I think about it "odd jobs" is a strange kind of British expression. It doesn't really mean odd jobs. An odd job is repairing a broken drain with a dead peacock. But odd jobs really means inconsequential or occasional jobs.

Anyhow, the description of Stan as a "funny man" and his strange presence instilled fear in us as children. I truly believed Stan was some kind of Sandman or character from Friday the 13th who would whip out a knife and hack us to bits. The subtext here was people with mental disabilities are dangerous folks and we should fear them.

Much of my grandmother's world view was shaped by the fear of people who were different. She would cross the road if she saw black men approaching, which means she must have put herself in a fair bit of danger by crisscrossing the roads of Birmingham.

Time really stood still at my gran's place. She resisted electric washing machines and Empire mugs and spoons lined the cabinets. This was the cozy world of the Britsh Empire and Queen Victoria where people with dark skin were kept at arm's length and far away in colonies like India. I've joked about the good old days when half the world was colored pink on the atlas without coming fully to terms with the evils of colonization and the ownership of other nations and other people.

The nature of Stan's disorder eludes me. Maybe he was born that way or he suffered shell shock in the trenches. I doubt if few people apart from me remember him now and he seemed to lack family. The dining room where the clock carefully chimed out the dawns and evenings of the days and the vanishing chink of light remaining in our lives is long gone. Stan and my gran are stencil memories along with the lavender wallpaper,  the faded blues and pinks of the hydrangeas down the walkway and the jars full of jam put out to trap wasps.

I worry sometimes that the vestiges of prejudice live on. Disorders didn't happen to us and our family. They happened to other people. Yet now I have a young relative with autism. I hope one day when he's picking his difficult path through the world nobody will ever call him a funny man.




Monday, June 10, 2019

P is for Positano

It doesn’t get much better than your first sip of strong Italian coffee on a patio awash in the morning sun overlooking Positano. I wondered if anywhere could look and smell more like heaven than the Amalfi coast? The villas fell away below me,  in a harmonious symphony of balconies and terraces, down to the dull golden cupola of the cathedral. The lemon grove was fragrant and the morning light slid across the moss-encrusted stones on the terrace. Each vista and even the shape of each iron chair was a work of art.



This would be paradise … but for these Americans.

It was a paradoxical thought that immediately marked me out as an ingrate. They had paid for this trip. Had it not been for the Americans I would be back at home staring at the bare ribs of a gas holder. But now I was here, I longed for solitude. Or different company. Or a bit of both.

The night before we had driven up to Ravello, perched high on the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast. I was driving around the hairpin bends when I heard a series of high and pained signs.

“Ooo, ooo, ooo.”

I almost crashed the rental car. Was the MIL having a seizure?

“Gorgee, gorgee, gorgee.”

“What now?”

It was the MIL’s reaction to the sight of the moon over the water. I was relieved we didn’t have to get an ambulance up these roads.

Another day we were at cookery school. The terrace of the trattoria was high above the cliffs. Positano was a splash of the watercolorist’s brush below, inked against the sea. We made ravioli badly by hand and drank too much. I fell to musing on the nature of happiness. Was it possible to be truly happy? How could we feel such unease in Paradise? B became over friendly to the instructor. We laughed and drank some more Chianti. This inability to assimilate, to blend in with the cliffs that ran away like breakers is not just an American thing. As humans, we are always dissatisfied with our lot. We want what we don’t have. Even here in this postcard-perfect place, we feel ill at ease. Only later will we look back longingly to the terraces of Positano.

Today we are on the coast road. The sea below us is sparking but cruel. It is like the MIL. It would buoy the swimmer to the surface, bathe him in sunshine and drag his spine onto the backbreaking rocks. 

MIL is across the road. They are visiting a tile shop to plunder the goods for the yard back home. They want to create a little slab of paradise. The MIL is wearing her hair scraped back in the Italian style. She’s thinking Sophia Loren. I’m thinking Marlon Brando from The Godfather. 

They never bought that slab of paradise or shipped the tiles. Still, I like tiles. They are calming. One of my favorite museums is the Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon, often known as the Museum of Tiles.

Their garden near the sound in North Carolina became a small oasis in its own way. There was a trickling fountain and a bird bath. It was a refuge from the angst and uneasiness their company brought. They are long gone from that place. My last memory of the MIL was white and lifeless and as detached as the statutes that stare out at the sea from the cliffs of Ravello, Positano and Amalfi. 


It’s true I felt some sadness but much of it was for what might have been. Why when our lives are so finite do we waste them in petty power struggles? Our stone is too brittle and time cracks our fine features. Why do we parcel out love in such small measures and take back what we give? We pass though Positano too fast and it remains for the rest of our lives a vision of loveliness in the rearview mirror.

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

O is for Oxford

O is for Oxford and "oh dear. I never made it." It's the last day of the challenge and I'm still out there lost on the open road. At least Oxford is a good place to lie down and never get up. When you lie on the grass of the water meadows and rise to see the Oxford skyline, you can be forgiven for imagining you are in a netherworld where anything is possible. The Dreaming Spires are certainly evocative.




It occurs to me now that it has always been sunny when I have visited Oxford. Still, the skyline is out of reach. On one occasion, I saw some people from the north of England. They watched students playing croquet on one of the lawns of the ornate colleges and muttered something about "posh people" in their broad vowels. Oxford is as distant as it ever was for many of us.

In Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy wrote of Christminster, an ancient university that Jude yearned to study at to better himself. Christminster was loosely based on Oxford. In the end, the "New Jerusalem" the stonemason idolized remained steeped in privilege and was out of his reach.



Clearly, there is something magical and inspiring in the air of Oxford. Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Caroll, wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland here in the 19th Century. He was a scholar and teacher at Christ Church, the most prestigious of colleges. The college's refectory was used in the Harry Potter movies.

In the 20th Century, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were both on the faculty at Oxford University at the same time. Lewis' relationship with Joy Davidman, an American who died of cancer, formed the basis of the movie Shadowlands. It's vintage Anthony Hopkins, reprising his self-effacing persona in Remains of the Day before he started eating people's faces.



It's probably not surprising that Oxford spawns so many fantasies. It's an ancient and cloistered place, far removed from the outside world. It's the sunny opening of Brideshead and the jolly japes with Aloysius, the teddy bear. It's long day punting on the river and the morning bells that ring across the misty fields from the tower of Magdalen College. it's a place that flatters and shimmers in a fragile dawn sun and disappears when we reach out to touch it.


Wednesday, April 24, 2019

N is for New York City

Nobody forgets the first time they see the New York skyline. I first saw it on a trip to the Big Apple in the 1990s.



As we trundled through the drabness of Queens, we turned a corner and the tall towers appeared. The Empire State Building pierced the afternoon sky like a giant syringe. New York was both intoxicating and frightening.

About half a dozen of us visited New York. My life was falling apart at this stage. We were mostly journalists and we drank too hard in as many places as we can. We stood on chairs in the White Horse, the famous Greenwich Village pub where Dylan Thomas had his last orders shortly before his death.




Mark wore a "Friends" T-shirt but we were anything but friends. The hate simmered down the long boulevards of Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge. In the end, I struck out on my own. My only real friend was my copy of  Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

I found the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. It's a fascinating place which relives the hard lives of the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Poles and others who scraped a living n the Big Apple in the early 20th Century. This put my first world angst about marital breakdown and the like into perspective.



Later on, I took the elevator up the World Trade Center and felt sick and dizzy looking down at the roofs of buildings far below. I never imagined that a few years later people would be jumping to avoid the flames in the stricken structure. We still don't imagine. We know the details but we can't put ourselves there.

We are prisoners in our own puny frames. Our trails and tribulations can be utterly consuming but they are nothing compared to the bigger picture. So why can it be so hard to see the world from the point of view of others?

Almost two decades later, I visited New York with my kids. The Empire State Building no longer looked like a large syringe but the Chrysler Building was as silver and serene as ever. The World Trade Center is replaced by the giant Freedom Tower. The sky over the tall buildings was a timeless azure from Liberty State Park in Jersey City. The ghosts had not gone entirely but they were hidden well, in dark alley in Chinatown or in the shadows of Central Park as the sun goes down.



Saturday, April 20, 2019

M is for Mesa Verde

This is a repost but Mesa Verde is the kind of place that lives on in the imagination long after you leave the canyons.



Walking the Petroglyph Trail reminded me of the microscopic nature of our world. One man is a small speck in the great gorges out west and not even a pinprick in the vastness of the Cosmos.








In this borderless wilderness, we are all destined to wander companionless like Shelley's moon for much of our micro existences. The ancient people recognized as much when they carved the petroglyphs in Mesa Verde in the rocks that were once part of an ancient sea.

There is sad beauty to this park that shimmers in the afternoon sunlight. You feel it when you view the empty windows of the cliff buildings and imagine the world of the ancient people.

Being in the desert fulfilled a dream from long ago when the swing would point west and I would close my eyes in the setting sun and think of cowboys, stream trains and cacti crowding the skyline. The old cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in Colorado live on in my imagination now. I think of the faraway world of the ancient people and the words of Willa Cather from The Song of the Lark.



"From the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified, unobtrusive sadness; now stronger, now fainter - like the aromatic smell which the dwarf cedars gave out in the sun - but always present, a part of the air one breathed. At night when Thea dreamed about the anyon - or in the early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating it - her conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in the sunlight the swallows, the cedar smell, and that peculiar sadness - a voice out of the past, not very loud, that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude eternally."

You can view the full post about Mesa Verde here.

Friday, April 19, 2019

L is for London

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life" - Samuel Johnson






London is one of the world's greatest cities and you never really run out of things to do here. Still, living in London can wear you down, The days were long and started and ended with a mile long walk to the tube station. London is a place where you work hard and play hard. After work, it's straight down the pub, back on the Tube and doing the same thing the next day.

Rather than being one great mass, London is a collection of small villages. Admittedly, the mile-upon-mile of brick in the East End could be depressing. After too long in London, you want to escape to the countryside but it seems to take forever to get back to the city.



I was fascinated by London but never swept away by its beauty like in Paris. Today when I go back it's as a tourist. I take pictures of red phone boxes, I check out galleries. I probably end up flaked out on a bench at the National Art Gallery No. I don's ask the locals if they've met the Queen. I'm not quite so American yet. I get tired in London but I'm not tired of the city.




Tuesday, April 16, 2019

K is for Kent

My first visit to Kent was the bleakest introduction possible to one of England's most fascinated counties. I struggled with some nefarious illness, smallpox or cholera - actually tonsilitis I think. I recalled the taste of dried beans in my mouth. I tried to convey this to my parents but they didn't get it. On the third day, I thought I was better. I walked weakly along the seafront of Margate with my father to the grey sands and a chill enveloped me.



It's strange to think my parents ended up in Kent so many years after that early family holiday and now my father is more likely to be the one walking gingerly in the cold wind like a five-year-old with tonsilitis.



There's a lot more to Kent than Margate but for some reason, that holiday was suffocated by the British summer. Even the famous white cliffs of Dover were shuttered and grey and my parents declared themselves disappointed with Dover Castle. I'm not sure how anyone can be disappointed with Dover Castle but such is life.

Kent is a rich tapestry. There are prehistoric ruins and the stump of the last lighthouse that was abandoned by the Romans before the barbarians arrived from Germany. In the dark days of the 1940s, the white cliffs became a symbol of the last outpost of civilization in Europe.

There is far too much to Kent to describe in these lines. It stretched from the ragged ends of London to the sweeping North Downs, the marshes and coasts and the magnificence of Canterbury and its great cathedral. Then there is Rochester and its gaunt castle.





Still, it took me many years from the taste of beans in my mouth and the gloomy guesthouse with its mirky wallpaper somewhere in the 1970s for me to warm to Kent.

Monday, April 15, 2019

J is for Jockey's Ridge

It's not always easy to keep going. On days we are trapped in a cage of our own making. Those carefree days when we could soar and fly a kite are relegated to a half-forgotten past. I was always fascinated with sand dunes and flying kites high across the wispy marram grass. The most beautiful place I remembered from childhood was the island of Lindisfarne and coming upon a pristine and undiscovered wilderness of dunes beyond the ruined abbey.




The shore at Lindisfarne seemed little changed since the Vikings came ashore here. In the long years past I have dreamed of the place half a dozen times.




Jockey's Ridge in North Carolina, the highest sand dune in the eastern United States took me back. I have climbed the dunes with the kids a few times and flown kites into the high blue. These miles of sand like strung out from sea to shining sea, in this case, the Atlantic and the Albemarle Sound.




I wonder sometimes why we head to the sea for solace. Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy because people have done it for years? Do the waves and the calls of the gulls lull us back to childhood? It's hard to know but there is something about the feel of the end of those sun-kissed days that puts it all in perspective. It's tempting to let go and to drift where the current takes us.

Sunday, April 14, 2019

I is for Isle of Wight

Isle of Wight is a county in Virginia and an island in England. I'm a bigger fan of the British version here. The Isle of Wight is like the country in microcosm. There's a Medieval castle, A National Trust home, the white cliffs of the Needles, gently crumbling seaside towns and a pretty thatched village. The Isle of Wight has Smithfield and that's about it.



 Our memories fade to sepia but I still recall the bright bands of the sand at Alum Bay back at home as we spooned them into glass vessels. I assume the chair lift down to the beach is now an overhyped and overpriced tourist attraction but the beach was empty in those days.



Even Blackgang Chine, the UK's oldest amusement park on the Isle of Wight seemed tranquil back in the day, although I'm sure it was not. Today a 'saver' ticket costs 74 GPB. I'm not quite sure what the saving is. If you are disabled and over 60 you can get in for 20 GBP. given that Blackgang Chine is perched on the edge of a cliff this seems like a risky undertaking when you can check out garden gnomes outside people's homes.

At least it's free to get into Windsor Castle Park in Smithfield and there are some pretty views across the marshes. In fact, once I Smithfield Station I found myself geographically confused and imagined myself in Suffolk, England. The slow meandering rivers and the way the gentle light plays on the reed beds reminds me of long afternoons on the estuaries of Eastern England. Suffolk, Virginia is nearby too. I'm not sure why the settlers couldn't be more original in their choice of names.





Friday, April 12, 2019

H is for Hollywood Cemetery

Uh oh - I am falling further behind in the A to Z Challenge by the day. I have a recurring dream like this. I'm back at school and the teacher is demanding four decades of French homework. This is a stressful dream. The challenge is hard reality.



What can I say about Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery? It's steeped in time and tradition. It's the resting place of Presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, not to mention the southern upstart Jeff Davis. It's breathtakingly beautiful and creepy in equal measure ... as boneyards tend to be.

In 1866, 20,000 people attended the First Confederate Memorial Day here. The fault line as wide as the James River is more insidious now. But it's still here.

On Blog PTSD

Now then. What the heck. It seems I had forgotten about my blog completely rather than just neglecting it this time. To return after so long...