In Oxford
This should be a post about England, which is where I am at the moment, but maybe it’s more about the joy of taking a hot bath in an old brick house on a blustery day in East Oxford, and about the tender fledgling moment in the lives of two young people as they set up a household and a more independent life, and the privilege of being welcomed into it, at least for a little while. It’s about the sparkling familiarity of places encountered in literature, and about the oddly off-putting nature of travel, even in a culture more similar than different, which shoves you out of your comfort zone and makes you view yourself as other, and is precisely why one ought to do it. The need to ask directions, the gauging of protocol and etiquette, even the awkwardness of counting out strange coins – all of these build character, I suppose, reminders that the life you live routinely is only one perspective. More than that, it’s discovering how American you seem, no matter what, or how American indeed you are.
Or maybe it’s just about the proclivities of tourists. I see them in Solvang, those Japanese visitors dislodging from tour buses, taking pictures of the windmill, posing for each other in the middle of the street, unaware of how silly they appear. In the current context, I am just like them. I like to think I click at artier subjects, but it isn’t any different really. And here I shall defend it wholeheartedly, for what is wrong with seeing old things with new eyes, with the enthusiasm that leads one to pause and look again, with desiring an image to take away? I stop on the sidewalk to photograph the daffodils in front of someone’s house because they are yellow against pale blue and slightly wet with rain, and I actually read all the historical markers, and I talk to the people in the shops about their stories because I can never stop feeling slightly astonished by the very fact that our lives have brushed, as unlikely as it is.
It was the latter tendency in particular that led to an interesting conversation with X. Apparently his mother, too, strikes up conversations with shopkeepers, waiters, checkout clerks in the market, pretty much anyone. X’s view: These people are strangers with jobs to do and places to get to. They don’t really want to talk to you; they’re just being polite.
And all this time, I always thought that my easy way of chatting with folks I encountered in my travels was part of my -- I don’t know -- charm? A manifestation of my interest in others and my curiosity about the world? Acknowledgement of our shared humanity? Suddenly I was being asked to consider the possibility that it was none of those things, but rather a tedious tendency that others have indulged or humored or endured.
And I was seeing myself as those others might see me, which has become a sort of theme for me.
Additional case in point: If you suggest that your hosts could use more towels and even offer to buy them, this may be because you yourself have an inflated idea of how many towels are needed for a good quality of life. Apparently mothers everywhere believe their children need more towels. I didn’t know that. Also, it is not a good idea to wonder aloud where the broom is or a garlic press or extra hangers, all of which may sound like criticism when coming from the mouth of a mother-type person, even if not intended as such.
So here again I was forced to realize that while to myself I am the same Cynthia I have always been -- earnest, well-meaning, baffled, curious, and just trying to make sense of things – to everyone else, I am a fully established middle-aged adult, and although that renders me completely invisible and irrelevant in many situations, I also possess the power to appear judgmental and disappointed, and I can really ruin your day if I’m someone you were hoping to please.
It just occurs to me that I am not writing about being a tourist in England at all. I am writing about being a tourist in the lives of those two young people whom I dearly love. I’m learning so much. This is a line of thought I am bound to continue.
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A few quick glimpses since we’re on location in Oxford, though. I started my trek down Cowley Road yesterday with a stop in a post office to exchange my seventy American dollars for 32 pounds. That stung a bit. “You can stop and buy a lottery ticket on the way out,” said the clerk by way of sympathy. Resigned primarily to window shopping, I peered into the Bombay Emporium where a statuette of the Hindu god Ganesh was displayed beside a Buddha made of pewter, a large flat shell with a carving of the Last Supper, and a Cleopatra holding up a mirror in her outstretched hands. There were beaded shawls, knit scarves, Chinese emperors, and brass elephants too.
On the same street, a delicatessen called Il Principe advertised “products straight from Italy” and right next door Hajduczek’s Polish restaurant and take-away was closed due to a family circumstance, apologizing for ‘any inconvenient.’ There were Thai, Lebanese, Indian, and Chinese restaurants, not to mention a particularly bleak-looking Subway, grocery stores with colorful produce displayed outside, hair salons, discount shops, all manner of commerce and enterprise, slightly seedy but somehow optimistic, varied expressions of that ancient human impulse to produce and trade goods -- the perennial bazaar.
Walking into Oxford proper, I passed a pram center, and a store filled with chess sets and, curiously, holographics, a place that sold tuxedoes and gowns, and one that seemed to specialize in miniature ceramic flowers. Then spires and bridges, churches and colleges, gargoyles gazing down at us, narrow streets and cobblestones, bicycles, even Christ Church meadow, and grass more green than seemingly possible, and hyacinths and daffodils. I went into Alice’s shop and ate a chicken pie in the covered market and lit candles in St. Michael’s and stood before a font where William Shakespeare once stood at the baptism of a friend's child.
And I watched those two young people walking down the chilly streets in winter coats and scarves, pausing beneath the Bridge of Sighs so I could take a picture, conversing and giggling and looking oh so 1960s and reminding me somehow of the album cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and sometimes of myself at that age but although I too knew a kitchen with a yellow wall I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t here and I know it wouldn’t have mattered how many towels I owned.