I dreamt about London this morning just before I got out of bed. I remembered it only tonight while I found myself musing over my coffee. Don't get me wrong; I love my life and all of the people in it, my house, my family, my dog, my job, my friends, and hell, even Northglenn isn't all bad despite its whitewashed middle-class oatmeal-ness. But I long to have a different life sometimes, or maybe I'm invoking a past life, or a parallel life - but I want to be in London, smelling the damp air in the morning, having afternoon tea, wandering through free museums, and traveling by Tube. Look at this photo: I stood there at the Tower and encountered a ghost - it brushed past while I snapped this picture, not once but twice. I was alone on this parapet and I didn't imagine it. I long to travel for the weekend; I want to say "Saturday? Oh, sorry I can't - I'm off to Paris for the weekend to read my book in a cafe on Montmartre." I want to be free of lawn services and car payments. I want to drink pints in pubs that are older than the country I now live in; high doorknobs; red phone booths; the Thames and South Bank; clotted cream on my scone; cobbled streets; charming gardens; chocolates from Harrod's; Kensington Gardens; I want real theatre; fresh sushi; foggy cool and the chiming of Big Ben; I want to stroll across the campuses of Oxford, walk the halls at Cambridge.
I spent my birthday last year in Hampstead with Jennie. She and I shopped for inexpensive jewelry and trinkets from the street vendors, perused old books in a used bookshop straight out of a Dickens novel. Side lanes twinkled like Diagon Alley, and I knew then that Harry Potter could only come from a place like this. America has its own beauty but nothing compares for me to the sense of real history in Europe. We strolled the heath and fed ducks, pet happy dogs, and drank our take-away coffees (from Starbucks, of course) until half-three in the afternoon when it was tea time. We sipped English Breakfast and Darjeeling in real china cups served on saucers by sweet old English ladies in the shop that took up the front half of their house probably built a century or more ago. We ate delicate rich handmade sweets with fresh berries and dark chocolate; ate real butter on our crumpets; watched the sun set over the lone cathedral church in the center of town. I returned to the city where two other friends picked me up and toured me through Whitechapel and treated me to cheap beer and the most excellent Indian food I've ever had. I can say without reservation that this was the best birthday I've ever had and only the absence of my family would I change.
I'm at Starbucks again. I'm supposed to be teaching a fiction course tonight, but alas, I couldn't make it fly. One student told me last week that he had to go to Texas and attend to a father in a nursing home, one was puking today, another had a migraine. That was three down out of a class of only seven, so I gathered myself up and decided I'd take the remaining four for coffee (on me) and we'd discuss our novel for tonight. Two of the four showed up and we decided amongst ourselves that they'd rather finish reading the novel than attempt a conversation having only read the first few chapters. Since they were the solitary two who showed, was I really going to punish them? I could have gone back home but instead opted for coffee anyway. I thought I could grade papers, maybe get some work done that won't get done at home whilst the television blares American Idol (which sucks me in every time), but I'm screwing around even here. Even with caffeine.
I've opted for a new experiment; I'm going to leave this pile of student papers sitting out, with a nice pen atop the stack, and see how long it takes for them to grade themselves. It's cool; I can wait. For this, I have the patience of a saint. When my students ask me on Friday where the fruits of labor are, I will simply explain the absence of them is all in the name of research (it is a course in research and rhetoric, after all). Perhaps the university may even fund this effort. Heaven knows they spend more on less each and every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment