In-Between
“Daydream Believer” is playing in the Tesco as I ponder plastic containers of soup and an array of yogurts and desserts and microwaveable meals, and I’m so tired, my head is spinning and I am on the cusp of forgetting where I am and in what decade. There are moments of beauty: a wintry sky beginning to turn pink and etched with bare black branches, houses with wreathed doorways and windows filled with warm light, streets slightly glazed with frost.
The boisterous little boy we’ve come all this way to visit is skipping and running ahead of us along the sidewalk. He is a mercurial and complex person, flickering readily from delightful to irrational, alternately brilliant and silly. Sometimes he lets me snuggle him, and sometimes he sneezes in my face. He is stubborn and opinionated. “That is literally disgusting,” he says, referring to a hangnail on his thumb as well as the soup we were served for lunch.
He wonders about the size of outer space and whether mermaids are real, and he sounds out letters and almost reads, and he has an invented language with his friend Rosa and tells me the made-up names of places on a map. We have already enacted battles between a bad king and a unicorn-sea horse, been recruited for extravagant Lego constructions, and gone camping in his bedroom. “This is like a dream,” he muses. “We’re in a dream.”
We walk to a neighborhood playground where I have an up-close opportunity to observe kid culture unfolding, touched to see what an eager participant he is, feeling absurdly protective, wanting to shield him from all hurt and harm, and praying that these precious children will grow up to know a thriving planet.
“Come on, Nonna,” he tells me at one point, “you just have to cope with it.”
I’m coping as best as I can. We arrived just the day before yesterday, emerging from the long tunnel of discomfort of a flight from Los Angeles to London, and we’re still jet-lagged and disoriented. He was there with his dad to meet us at the airport, and he jumped up excitedly when he caught sight of us, and suddenly it all made sense. Pure happiness.
Another memory I shall treasure forever was taking a night time walk with my daughter in the crisp, cold air, all the way to the riverbank, and she is pregnant in that beautiful almost-ready way, and it does seem like a dream.
Yesterday in the playground an older boy overheard a fragment of conversation between me and a woman from Canada, and saw fit to tell us that he hates Americans. It was an oddly dissonant moment. “I’m not even American,” the Canadian woman said, “but why would you say such a thing? America is a big place, with lots of different people.” His reply was undoubtedly a list he’d picked up from his parents: they’re stupid, all they care about is guns…etc. He was just a kid, but it was sobering to realize the America he was talking about is probably how we are viewed by much of the world right now.
It briefly nudged me back to the ugliness that I don’t want to think about. I have been suspended for two days in transit and transition, but I know it’s out there. I grant myself permission to shove it aside for now.
And a fusion of exhaustion, gratitude, and incredulity comes over me. I could never have imagined living this story.
At moments I am nowhere as much as in-between, neither here nor there, adrift in another dimension. Maybe this is just fatigue talking, but “home” is an abstraction, and “here” is a place both foreign and familiar where I have not yet found my footing. The danger is in slipping through the in-between and into sadness. It’s easy to do that as twilight draws near. That old sense of loss and fragility comes with the darkness.
We are visitors in the landscape of our daughter’s life, and exotic elderly playmates to our grandson, who has no idea how weary we are and how short-lived we shall be. In about two weeks, there will be another miracle: a new baby will arrive, and we will carry the sweetness of that back to our other lives.
How foolish I am to be thinking about good-bye when we have only begun this visit! I suppose a good night’s sleep will sort me out.
Now fog has settled softly above the streets of Oxford, and there’s something timeless about it. Yes, it feels like a dream. We’re in a dream.
And Nonna will cope.
