21
ENGLAND
We spend a week in Normandy and Paris, showing my in-laws my second-favorite European city and touching the sacred sands of Omaha Beach. Daily gelatos are replaced by daily crêpes. We climb the steps up the Eiffel Tower, devour a box of macarons from Lauderée on the Champs-Élysées, and wander the Pompidou and Louvre. I queue at Shakespeare and Company while the family sips cappuccinos and sodas in a crowded café across the street from Notre Dame, and we take a family selfie underneath the Arc de Triomphe. We pack all of Paris into a few short days, then hop on a puddle-jumper to my first-favorite European city.
I’ve been to London at least five times before, but it’s been a while, and the kids have never been. Kyle’s only been once, when we were engaged, and it was such a short jaunt and we were so poor, we did almost nothing. I am eager to show my favorite people my favorite city.
Ending in London isn’t an accident. Except for Australia, now more than ten thousand miles away, its culture is most similar to our own. There are differences, of course, but the disparities between the United States and Britain, and the United States and, say, China? There’s no comparison.
Our primary agenda is togetherness. We walk by Big Ben, the London Eye, the Globe Theatre, the Tower Bridge, and they form the backdrop for family chats about what life will soon look like. We sigh with relief at the lack of a language barrier, and we make heavy use of the cleanest metro system in the world. I also want to find a souvenir of my own.
We’ve been collecting art this year, rolling up prints and tea towels in a travel tube, grateful for lightweight mobility. I’d eye a ceramic tea set in Sri Lanka or a gumwood bench in Australia, yet our lengthy backpack living couldn’t justify them. But London is our last stop. I want to find something.
I reckon I’ll find what I’m looking for on Portobello Road in one of London’s most iconic markets. It’s in Notting Hill, one of my favorite areas. Every Saturday, the street and surrounding alleys of Notting Hill fill with throngs of booths offering antiques, books, vintage clothing, and records, with even more hordes of people eager to browse and buy. It’s a collector’s dream, it’s a Highly Sensitive Person’s nightmare, and if you want something British besides a Union Jack magnet or snow globe, it’s worth the overwhelm.
All morning, we skirt the alleys and main street, weave through crowds, and stop at booths to eye old-fashioned cameras, teacups honoring the queen’s jubilee, and forty-year-old double-decker bus toys. I drool over old copies of Peter Pan and Winnie-the-Pooh, but nothing is priced well enough for my few precious pounds, so by lunch, I resign myself to fish and chips. From Notting Hill, we head toward the Tube station, and on the way, I see precisely what I want. It’s nothing special—a silver pitcher, part of a long-gone tea set, now orphaned and priced to move. Eight inches tall, tarnished, and boxy shaped with a flip-top lid, it’s not worth much to anyone. But I want it. It could be used for tea, or it could house flowers as a vase. Probably, though, it’ll sit on top of a stack of books, high on my bookshelf, as a reminder of our year around the world. It is lovely.
Engraved on the front, in plain-set typography, are the words Rosebery Felixstowe. I have no idea what this means, so I ask the booth’s vendor, who’s busy making change for other buyers.
“No idea, love. It’s old and missing its set, so it’s hard to say. But it’s yours for ten pounds,” he says. He returns to haggling a price on a set of teaspoons. I toss the man a ten-pound note, wave thanks, and tuck my new silver pitcher into my backpack.
When we return to our flat I search for Rosebery Felixstowe on the Internet, and I discover that Rosebery is a short neighborhood street in the seaside town of Felixstowe, not far from Ipswich. I’ve never been there, I have to find its whereabouts on a map, and until now, I’ve had little interest in visiting that part of England.
I’m a confessed Anglophile, my loyalty second only to Europe as a whole. When I graduated college, I backpacked around the United Kingdom with a girlfriend, and a year later, I returned with a group of friends for two more weeks. I love English gardens, my favorite movies and books tend to be set somewhere in the British Empire, and of course, I still dream of a white owl delivering an acceptance letter to Hogwarts. High on my travel list is a month in a rental car, winding backcountry roads in summertime with the family. I want to visit the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Yorkshire, head up to Scotland’s Isle of Skye and the Shetland Islands, touch base in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. I want to nibble on scones in Canterbury. And now? I want to visit unassuming, unknown Felixstowe.
Back home, wherever that is, I’ll display my heavyweight silver pitcher. Its engraving, front and center, will equally remind me that I’ll never see it all, all the places people call home, where they shop for bread and what they eat for dinner. Rosebery Felixstowe is home to someone else, and I’d like to see it, firsthand. What’s the street of Rosebery like? My pitcher will be in my American home, waving its English flag and reminding me to get back out.
Two days before our flight back to the States, we spend the afternoon in Hyde Park, a green haven in the midst of the city. The kids need to run, Kyle and I need to rest, and we all need to chat, one last time, about our trip’s end. The kids play for hours on the pirate ship at the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, and Kyle and I take turns napping. Near dinnertime, we gather our jackets for a final stroll through the grass.
“All right, kids,” Kyle says as they climb up a log, “favorite park you played at this year?”
“This one!” declares Finn, little thought beyond the present.
“Hmm . . .” Tate pauses for a moment. “I think the park in Germany, the one with the supersteep slides.”
“Oh yeah—that’s my favorite!” Finn says.
“Where was that one park with all the tree logs stuck together, like a jungle gym treehouse?” Reed asks.
“That was Strasbourg, in France,” I say.
“Okay. Then that one’s my favorite,” he decides.
We can mark time on the trip by playgrounds. Princess Di’s memorial playground is our last stop, and before this, there was the creative conglomeration of logs in Strasbourg, France, more art than child’s plaything. Before that was the modern decagon in the courtyard of our apartment in Innsbruck, Austria. There was the Bavarian theme park in the woods, of course, and before that, our well-loved neighborhood park in Turkey, where the swings still dragged too close to the ground. The kids played in the microscopic play space at the restaurant in Kosovo, where Kyle and I first flirted many years ago, and the Zagreb airport’s outdoor playground was a surprise during a layover in Croatia. In Jinja, Uganda, the kids climbed the wooden fort at Sole Hope’s guesthouse, and back in Queensland, Australia, they splashed in a park of hoses and sprinklers to soak off December sweat. The airport in Singapore had several playgrounds worthy of awards, naturally, and in Chiang Mai, we lived by a play structure full of old tires and chains, perfect for climbing. Before that, in Hong Kong, we wandered a park with an aquarium and a bamboo-hungry panda, and at our friend’s apartment in Xi’an, China, the neighborhood kids met in the courtyard to climb monkey bars while elderly neighbors made laps on the sidewalk.
“Hey—do you remember all that exercise equipment on the streets in Beijing?” Tate asks as we head back to our guesthouse in Camden Town, where we’ll start packing for the last time.
“What exercise equipment?” Reed asks.
“You remember. All those twisty machines and stuff we played on,” she says.
“That was for exercising?” Reed says, surprised. “I thought those were playgrounds.” China has a penchant for exercise machines, free to the public and lined along urban sidewalks.
“That was a long time ago, at the beginning of our trip,” Kyle muses, picking up a rock in the grass. “Back when we were still getting over jet lag. We’ve done a ton of stuff since then.”
“Oh yeah, remember how Finn woke up in the middle of the night, looking through the empty fridge in Beijing?” Tate asks. “And how he was so tired he was talking in his sleep?”
“I don’t remember that!” Finn says. “What did I say?”
“Bananas!” Reed says. They double over with laughter.
“Come on guys,” I say, grabbing Kyle’s hand. “We’ve got a big flight coming up. Let’s go make dinner so we can get a decent bedtime.”
Twenty layers of civilization park beneath parking lots,
Each dusted by feet of descendants.
You’ve played on the broken-free columns
Sarcophagus in shambles, a keen spot for play
We dance on the dead, we’re alive longer and stronger.
Take this, all this,
And take none of it for granted.
We walk hallowed halls and
You play on Corinthian columns
And soon we are like them.
Dust.
Art, marble, music worldwide splay glory in remembrance
That this, this too, shall all pass, as with us
Collected into glory like them.
Renewed.
We set out one day more,
One foot in front of another
And another, and another,
Around the bend, in awe of it all.
Earth is, after all,
crammed with heaven.