Blighty

I didn't realize until just now that the last line of the post from two weeks ago was a dumb joke about "time traveling" and then the post the subsequent week was a picture of a giant clock. This was not me trying to be clever. It were me trying to be clever, it would have had all the normal hallmarks, meaning about 2,000 words of flailing in a painfully futile attempt to contextualize and disguise a dick joke.

I will concede that, to be fair, last week's post itself could be considered a dick joke given the shape of the building in question. I mean, "Big Ben," come on...*

I've seen a great deal of monumental architecture in the last week and a half or so, and I have to tell you, there are a lot of phalluses in it, literal and figurative. Phalluses and devotions to the divine. I'm not sure what sort of training it took to become an architect, but apparently all the inspiration they needed came from men either looking up or looking down.

Also when you go abroad, I noticed: so many foreigners. It seems obvious, but what I mean is, if you go to London, nobody you meet there working in hotels or bars or restaurants is English. Nearly everyone is Italian or eastern European. Maybe it was just in the areas around the high-traffic or tourist-heavy areas so I was getting a skewed sample, I don't know. If immigration and immigrant employment works there anything like it does here, the immigrants are doing the jobs the natives don't want to do, except instead of crop-harvesting or child-rearing, in England that means selling overpriced food to weary Americans.

I'd been to the UK once before, so my focus was mostly on the experience my kids were having. Beyond just sharing some things I'd seen nearly 20 years before, when I wasn't much older than they are now really, we also saw a great deal of new things for the first time together, all while experiencing the unavoidable social, emotional and aromatic bonding that comes from sharing a hotel room with someone for eight straight days. As the only adult on the trip, I was also intensely aware that not only the quality of everyone's experience, but also their safety and comfort, were 100% my responsibility, from the moment the Super Shuttle picked us up at my house until the moment their mother picked they up at the airport in LA on the day we got back.

With all that, it took until the very end of the trip for it to occur to me that I was having a very rare and precious life experience at the same time, not just leading one as some kind of shepherd or sherpa. It struck me while walking back to the hotel for the last time on the last night, before switching over completely to packing-and-escaping mode. It was raining at twilight outside a train station, along what would normally be a busy road in a business district, but being a Saturday night, was mostly empty but for other stragglers and searchers from ours and the other hotels clustered in the area. Paradoxically what hit me was that I love where I live and where I'm from and that, geographically, few people can say they've been as blessed with undeserved good fortune as I have. Travel to spots--even great spots I love, like London--would be a privilege and a joy, but there'd always be a pull back to my Mediterranean winters and cloudless summers, wide beaches and canyon oaks. The odds of a permanent displacement is, to put it mildly, on the unlikely side. So walking through other cities, someone else's neighborhood, someone else's urban or native good fortune, is always going to be a borrowing at best, a look in. And as I get older, the opportunities to peek behind the curtains of space that divide us from what we want to see diminish, at what feels like an accelerating rate. In that moment then, in the English weather on a sidewalk--sorry, pavement--with a subway--er, tube--humming underneath, tiny cars zipping past on the incorrect side of the road, I was able to wrestle it all to the ground for just a second, to achieve a type of moment of temporal and spatial awareness that fuses and burns itself into the kind of engrams that are indelible by everything short of Alzheimer's or railroad spike skull impalement.

That or I was struck with a week's worth of Stendhal syndrome all at once. Either way, it was heady and interesting and not un-intense.




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*Yes, I know that's technically only the name of the bell.