A Dream of England - Day Two

     "Breakfast tea, black, with an almond croissant, please."

     The cafe across the square is our first stop each morning and I am learning how to order tea properly so as not to confuse the young French and Italian workers across the counter. No milk. Just black. No one ever asks me if I want milk in my tea at home. The croissant is so flaky I leave crumbs of it everywhere.

     We catch the tube to Tower Hill and as soon as we emerge from the underground, I see it: the London Wall. To my surprise, there is nothing to prevent me from walking over and touching it, no barrier, no polite notice. I have a penchant for reading fiction set in Roman Britain, especially Rosemary Sutcliff's books. Words and stories have a unique way of connecting us to the past, but so does this: the feel of two-thousand-year-old grit and stone beneath my fingers. The thrill it gives me feels like bubbles in a glass of champagne.

     The Tower of London is crawling with tourists and school children and we walk past, cross the Tower Bridge to Borough Market on the other side of the Thames. Next to the market, Southwark Cathedral is a surprise. It isn't on my itinerary. My husband remembers it from his last visit.

The Tower of London and the Shard

Tower Bridge

No trolls allowed beneath this bridge

Southwark Cathedral

     The Market lives up to its reputation. The cheese and chocolate, bread and brews, pasta, paella and patisserie lay cheek by jowl with fruit and flowers and fish, tea and tins of game. I have never been to an outdoor market where goose fat and wild boar pies are sold. After some deliberation, we settle on splitting a Scottish venison burger with caramelized onions and bacon relish for lunch, then stand in a corner of the market with our meat and drink, grinning with the goodness of the day.

     We have booked tickets to The Merchant of Venice at The Globe and make our way there along the Thames Path. The play exceeds our expectation. I wept with joy when we booked the tickets, and I hide myself in a bathroom stall to weep a little when the play is over. I can't help it, the production has moved me to tears and, at the same time, I am so happy it spills over. Shakespeare. At the Globe. In London.

"The quality of mercy is not strained..."

A Dream of England - Day One

     It is a dream forty years in the making. A dream of walking the dusty halls of history burnished bright with expectation and stirring the ancient particles with my passing. A dream of breathing in spaces that Shakespeare or Dickens inhabited long ago, and trailing my fingertips along the broken walls and aged stones of my ancestors. It is a dream that has, at last, emerged from the buried hopes of someday into the sunshine of today.

     I sit with my husband in Pret a Manger a few blocks from our hotel absorbing the fact of my presence in England. The accents spoken at the tables beside me are British. The black cabs parked at the curb outside are British. The butter on my baguette tastes foreign, and I am eating a crayfish and avocado salad. You will not find crayfish on the menu at Pret in Chicago. I believe, at this moment, I can truly claim there is not another soul on this great green isle of England who is happier to be here than I am.

     It is my first trip to London.

     Even though we are tired from our overnight flight and the everlasting traipse through customs, I can't bear to waste a moment of the time I have been given. I have meticulously mapped our course for the afternoon, so we set off to explore Westminster with the light that is left to us.

Westminster Abbey 

The guardians of the Abbey

Parliament

The guardians of Parliament

Looking up the road toward Piccadilly

Admiralty Arch

Guardians of the Queen at Buckingham Palace

     Already, we have met some lovely people: a young woman who offers to help me up the steps with my luggage at Pimlico Tube Station, and a middle-aged gentleman who kindly offers directions when he sees us standing on the corner with our map and looking puzzled. We eat fish and chips for supper at The Barley Mow and return to our hotel to rest for another day.

The Passenger's Photo Album - Tanzania

Dugout fishing boat in Dar es Salaam on the coast of Tanzania

A fisherman mending his net on the shore

Cry, the Beloved Country

     We invited two South African couples for dinner one night a few years ago, and after the cake and coffee were served, I asked if anyone had read Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, a twentieth century South African writer. I asked the question in innocence and ignorance. At the time, I didn’t know that the book had been banned during apartheid and that its author had been a controversial figure. No one at the table but me had read it.

     My pen pal recommended the book to me, so I borrowed it from the library and promptly fell in love with it. I think it is one of the best books I have ever read. It was written before I was born, and yet, I didn't find it until I was 46 years old.

     The consensus among our guests that night was that it was primarily a political book. I had seen it reviewed by Oprah Winfrey and former president Bill Clinton on television, and they too, presented the book as a protest against the structures of a society that would lead to apartheid. Yes, social injustice is one of its themes. 

     It is also a book that has undergone a great deal of scrutiny. Activists have criticized it for falling short of their own political ideals. Some have painted it as sentimental, while others praise it for its searing beauty and consider it to be the most important novel in South Africa’s history.

     I told our dinner guests that I thought it was a book about forgiveness. I think it is true that we often take from a book what we bring to it. We all carry within us a system of beliefs that informs our thinking. At the core of my own beliefs stands the unfathomable forgiveness that restores my broken relationship with God, and the call to reflect that forgiveness to others around me. In Cry, the Beloved Country the struggle for equity is certainly present between its pages, as is the struggle for justice and for understanding; but the struggle for forgiveness is the siren call of searing beauty that has me returning to the book again and again. 

     It still haunts me.

     "The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again."

                                                                     ~ Alan Paton ~

There's No Bed Like Home

     Last week, for reasons we have yet to unravel, when we turned our computers on we received the British versions of Google and YouTube. Perhaps it had something to do with our guests from London the week before, or perhaps it was merely a coincidence. Either way, we were impressed and amused with the brilliance of the Ikea adverts that we have not seen in the United States. So tickled, in fact, that I feel compelled to share my favorite with you.

Here

     It isn't high art and it won't induce me to buy a mattress, but I paused, I watched, and I wrote about it when I would normally ignore the adverts and go into the kitchen to rummage for cookies or cracker peanuts.

My Best Dress

     With six children in our family, and me stuck irrevocably in the middle, most of my clothes as a child were hand-me-downs. With only one sister ahead of me, however, they were still in good shape when they came to me.

     When I was in fourth grade, the mother of one of the “rich” girls in church gave us a bag of clothes her daughter had outgrown. There was a red velvet jumper in the bag that fit me. I had dreamed of wearing patent leather shoes with heels that clicked on the floor like tap shoes when you walked in them. I had dreamed of wearing taffeta with layers of tulle that suspended the skirt in a perpetual twirl. But velvet was beyond imagining. Velvet was like fur and diamonds to a girl like me.

     Even so, it was a dress my grandmother made for me the year I was in kindergarten that I remember with the greatest fondness. It was a new dress that no one before me had even tried on. A one-of-a-kind dress made with me in mind. I felt invisible for most of my childhood, but that dress said: “There you are. I see you.” It was blue plaid with a full skirt, puffed sleeves and lace-trimmed bib. I wore it for that most auspicious of occasions in school: Picture Day. It was my best dress and I must have worn it to shreds because I don’t remember either of my younger sisters wearing it. That dress and the memory of it remain mine alone.

The Passenger's Photo Album - Vietnam

     The Passenger, stopping by a potter's shed on the road from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay, found something to admire in the unfinished forms.

What do you see at first glance--a shiny or matte finish?