We took the long way to Birmingham and various regions of Neal’s mission. We caught a plane from Milan to Liverpool, where we rented a convertible too small for the three of us with luggage, but just right for a vacationer’s ethos, that footloose and fancy freedom that Fozzy made a career singing about.
After a couple of abortive rounds about the parking lot, a little coaching from Neal, and some pop-psychological pep talk (you can do it, you’re good enough, smart enough), I took us and our automatic Saab convertible onto British roads. My job was to drive; Neal’s was to tell me where to drive; Mom’s was to ignore the fact that I’d never driven on the left side of the road and that Neal didn’t really know where he was going. Together, with the help of the Big Atlas of British Roads, we got it more or less right on and in relatively no time found ourselves cruising alongside the rolling hills of rural England with our sights trained on Stoke-on-Trent and the Potteries.
Neal and Mom know more about the Potteries than I, and it is from them that I learned what little I know. Forefather Edward Henry Rhead left here in 1856 at five years of age with his parents to cross the Atlantic and join up with the Latter-day Saints in the States. The local accent in the Potteries, I was told, which is so unique to the region, in large part developed as a function of noise pollution, one of the byproducts of making and firing pottery. In consequence the quieter, shyer vowels got dropped, and the result: Neal had to do some translation work for the poor Yankees he was toting around England with him.
A local bum attempted to instruct us on how to use the self-cleaning public toilet. Neal made the instructions meaningful by essentially repeating them verbatim, and Mom, urged by biological exigency, dropped her tuppence into the slot of the green silo, entered, and turned just in time to see the door slide automatically to shut her in and us out. She looked as if she knew this was no self-cleaning public toilet but the portal to some other world on which there was no Saab convertible, no Nathan to drive it, and no Neal to translate English into American. Neal took it all in stride, no doubt having been in the portal himself in times past, but I credited Mom with more courage than I myself could claim, and by the time she’d emerged I’d gained a temporary stay against the same biological exigency.
We made Birmingham a brief stop: we took the time only of an afternoon to walk about the city center—a pedestrian’s dream—eat lunch on a bench overlooking real teenage British hoodlums, and catch a commercial art museum just before closing. Neal, the artist, was both pleased and perplexed by the museum’s offerings. It exhibited work from famous names, including Picasso, but had made at least one mistake in describing the type of art (lithograph or etching?) and even misattributed a piece. But Neal’s biggest trouble was Mom and I: the undereducated, the laypeople.
Neal sees a painting by Damien Hurst: it’s a largish canvas painted in symmetrical, polka dots of different colors. Mom says, “What’s so important about this? Why is this so valuable?” Neal says, “What’s so unimportant about it? Do you think you could do it?” Mom says, “Sure.” Neal says, “How would you do it?” Mom says, “I don’t know, get some construction paper, make circles, paste them to a poster board.”
Later in the week, in Huntingdon, Mom gets this gleam in her eye. It’s more than a bright idea; it’s a devious one. The three of us are walking down the pedestrian section of the town toward evening when Mom lets out this elated sound, as if she’s finally clapped a pesky mosquito between her hands. We look and follow her pointed finger through a shop window to a collection of wrapping papers. Among the vertical tubes is a roll of large polka dots of varying colors on a white background. The implication is clear: she has found her replica of Hurst, and if the shop were only open she could wrap every present in Hurst this Christmas, and for a very fair price at that.
Huntingdon: the little hamlet next to St. Ives, the little hamlet. The word “hamlet” sounds diminutive and inaccurate, but its connotation does more to describe these quaint, quiet, noncontiguous towns in otherwise rural England than the word “town” itself does. And, besides, I was enchanted. Huntingdon is the kind of place you feel lucky to stumble onto. St. Ives even more so. The quality of the quiet in these two towns is such that a wedge of swans battling over the remainder of Neal’s beef kabob was both the nosiest and most active event the town had to offer. The sun set over the water the canal and the medieval bridge spanning it and tempered everything, even the remaining sounds, and we sat there on a bench alongside the canal, three travelers for a moment painted into a harmonious, panoramic standstill.
If Huntingdon felt pastoral, Birmingham seemed grim, glum, and real. There were no tourists, except us, and so the city center became a place where people came, repeatedly, to enact the rituals of living: shopping, courting, picnicking, rendezvousing and commuting. We suspected nothing of this reality in London, among the countless tourists and the veneer of the capital, and since we liked Huntingdon so much, we decided to stay on at the historic George hotel for thirty pounds per each of three individual rooms. At night we’d part for our quarters with wishes of sweet dreams; in the morning we’d knock on each other’s door to coordinate for a descent to breakfast. Here we were rather unlike tourists, but rather more like borders in a new city, brought together by the proximity of our three doors along a hallway that slanted and creaked with the feeling of a potent, friendly haunting.
We spent as little of the morning of our last full day of the joint trip at another full, greasy English breakfast among other patrons of the hotel restaurant. Shortly afterward, Neal made his only solo flight in the car to chauffeur himself and Mom to church. I stayed back to work on my thesis, which still haunted me from abroad. I walked about to find a hint of Internet access somewhere in Huntingdon only to convince myself that the town has figured out a way, in all its quaintness, to circumvent the computer revolution. I found a supermarket instead, picked up the makings for a fresh salad—what Mom longed for most during all our travels—a Tupperware bowl, plastic utensils, and a whole pineapple to welcome Mom and Neal home with a meal one-third the price and twice the freshness of everything else we’d found abroad.
After the salad, Mom took to carving the pineapple with the two-inch blade of a pocketknife and simultaneously started a conversation on impressions of our travels. She asks Neal first, “Name a couple of events or aspects of your experience that stand out.” He mentions learning to appreciate his family more, making good professional contacts and good art; learning again that he wants to live where he can walk places. I talk of liking the feeling of incongruity when the modern meets the ancient, e.g. photographing the Roman Forum or the Coliseum. Mom talks of the concerts we attended and, despite the heat in the buildings or the discomfort of sitting on hard benches, the beauty of the performances (Vivaldi, Kreisler, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Mendelssohn) and the virtuosity of the players.
And how surreal it was for her to sit with her two baby boys, grown into these foreign adult bodies, in these foreign places.
When we parted at Heathrow airport, we had little to say that our smiles and our tears could not adequately convey. And then they went one way and I went another, they to British Air, I to Turkish Air. And the rest is history.
08.07.2006
P.S. Two days later official at Heathrow airport discovered liquid explosives in baggage, canceled numerous flights, especially to the States, and forbade the carrying of any liquid or paste into the cabin of the airplane.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment