Time is A Country

Miranda and I are taking the train from Oxford to Bath for a mother-daughter weekend before I go back home to California. We have chosen Bath on the basis of simplicity: it’s a short, easy trip, a manageable place, and a good setting in which to talk and relax. “It's where Women of a Certain Age go to be pampered,” adds her boyfriend, and I can't say this appeals to me.

But there seems to be more shopping than pampering taking place in Bath, and my daughter and I will do a bit of  that ourselves, stopping into bookstores and dress shops as we wander through the city, along the Royal Crescent, Parade Road, Cheap Street. We walk by the River Avon, through beautiful parks, past well-tended gardens and stately Georgian buildings. There are young mothers pushing strollers through the park, dads with babies on their shoulders, tattooed teenagers talking on cell phones, weighty matrons licking ice cream cones and trying on sensible shoes.

First, though, we check into a bed and breakfast on a quiet street across from the park. It is run by a German woman named Inge who leads us upstairs to a pale green room overlooking a garden. There are twin beds, side by side, with a little lamp next to each, and it feels exactly right. We have come here to reconnect, to catch up, to get to know each other as we are.

In the evening we have dinner with a friend of Miranda''s from school and her mother, V., who live in Bath. The daughters engage in animated conversation about their writing and their lives, and we mothers seem to know each other immediately. Both of us are still in a state of astonishment at how fast everything has happened, but as we watch our girls sail off into lives of their own, we are also hoping there is time for us to claim some small adventure for ourselves. V. has a chance to live for a year in Kenya, a prospect she finds both intriguing and daunting. She is disenchanted with her English life and ready for something new.

"It's hard to find happy people here," says her daughter, who is planning a summer adventure involving a boyfriend, a motorcycle, and a continent or two.

As Miranda and I walk back to the guest house it seems the streets are filled with drunken carousers. One unappealing fellow is parading around with pants that open in the back to reveal his ass to all the world, and many of the girls are dressed like hookers in short, skin-tight skirts and precariously high heels, but there are also loud, laughing women in complicated hats and glitzy Saturday night costumes. It is like a procession of the badly dressed.

"How is your writing going?" Miranda asks me. I hear myself using words like deflated. I talk about being in a lull, about maybe just trying to make my life be my art. I just don't know anymore if I will do any serious writing.

"Well, you are almost sixty," she says, not unkindly. "It's not the same, is it?"

I suppose it's not.

A pair of hot air balloons cruise lazily in the air high above the rooftops and steeples. We walk through a park, now emptied of people, where vacant blue and white striped chairs are clustered in circles as if having a party of their own. When we return to our room, it is still illuminated by the lingering white light of this first night of summer.

My daughter loves her life.  "If it helps to know this," she says, "I have never been happier."

It does help.

The next day I buy her earrings, silver ballet flats from a charity store, a book by an Irish poet she likes named Louis MacNiece, whom I have never heard of, but he is wonderful. I open it at random: Time is a country, the present moment/a spotlight roving round the scene.

On our last morning in Bath, we chat for a bit with Inge, who turns to Miranda as we leave and says, "Take good care of your mom." It's an innocent comment, but it makes me wonder if I am someone who seems in need of care, and I ponder this as we walk to the station. I worry sometimes about becoming one of those baffled and befuddled types who's in everybody's way. But for now I am feeling self-contained and unafraid, hoping there might still be one good stretch ahead.

And I came here not to be pampered but to pause, just to pause and focus on this interesting young woman who five minutes ago was a streak of color running through my house. I take her hand as we walk through a very green park smelling roses and grass.A little girl in a red dress pedals by on a bicycle giggling.