Remembering the old, looking to the new

The old  

Good morning.  Welcome to my new laptop, whose predecessor, my 12-year-old standby, lost its motherboard to old age one morning, just as I was about to post another travel journey.  It's not so simple buying a new one...not even time to mourn the old...but somehow at the end of the new year, and at the end of a decade we'd mostly prefer not to have written up in the history books, it's symbolic to begin with a new keyboard, no?

So I dug in, asked questions of expert family members, looked all around the web reviews (you know the drill) and found this one, which I ordered in the car while still parked in front of the fixers who had given me the news, polite sadness in their voices.  I had to wait a few weeks until it arrived.  When it did, I was out of town giving my sister the birthday she asked for (more about that later), but Joseph brought it to me, so I could at last admire it in its handsome, Brooks Brothers-like gift box.

Once home again, I took it straight to the fixers to ready it, and, voila, in an hour I had a call that it was ready.  An hour!  I baked them cookies for their kindness in a rushed season. The attendant (called the "agent", though I would have changed that to "elf") genuinely admired what I had chosen...really well built, easy to use, enjoyed working on it!  I went out proud of myself, and hoping they liked the cookies...chocolate thumbprints.  [This is a photo of what they would have looked like if I were a better baker, but it's close enough.]

So you all are kindly and, I hope, with some patience, helping me practice on the new keys, which seem to want to fly faster than my fingers.  I apologize for the long delay.

There!

Now we can get to the subject of the season...not the unexpected (ouch) gift to myself, but the nice things we count on when fall turns to winter and suddenly the end of the year brings us closer in lots of ways.

We have had a couple of cheerful, cluttered holiday events, and a special few evenings and outings  with Alexander who lit candles and flung wrapping-paper with the best of them, pulling out his new camouflage boots, and saying, half asleep, awe still in his voice, "I can't believe you gave me an archery set, Nana!"  He spent all night playing with a sort of helicopter landing game.  He's been, as children are, all about presents.

Earlier that day, however, after school, after he had shown me the reindeer he had made in woodworking, justifiably proud of it with its delicate twig antlers and a tree, its arched neck, its tiny tail...Scout Reindeer, he named it...

...he and I went shopping for gifts of another kind. As it happened, he was wearing his new cub scout hat and talking about the scout rules he had memorized, so we decided to practice one of the most  important rules, kindness. We talked about how much we have and what others don't. At the drug store he pointed me to, he lead me purposely through the aisles as we gathered a gift bag of necessities for moms and babies and dropped them off at the door of the women's shelter.

 I was so proud of him for stepping up to my prompt to think about the rest of the world with another scout rule, cheerfulness.

After our celebrations, we scooted away, each of us, to our own destinations...he to visit his other grandparents and cousins in Florida, and I going west for Eileen's birthday (the winter solstice, the longest night of the year). Joseph would follow after work.  We miss Alexander when there is something to celebrate.

That birthday brings about another good prompt, this time to ourselves, especially this time of year.  Eileen's wish for her day was a good one, considering how busy she has been doing holiday sorting and labeling for her Council on Aging thrift shop (a task that goes on all year behind doors and comes out shining, thanks to her, around Hallowe'en), playing bingo and singing with the seniors in the Assisted Living center she also volunteers for, driving with Jim for Meals on Wheels, and baking and neighboring at home.  All good works, certainly, but enough, as we say, when the celebrations become a bit draining--and as she herself said when, several times, a party for her was suggested.  No.  She just wanted a sister or two around, to sit half the day in our pajamas and do nothing.  It sounded perfectly reasonable to me.

So we did. Ann visited for a night and morning on her way to West Virginia (we missed our other sister, Mary Ellen, who really should move south soon).  After lunch, Eileen and I took a trip to the grocery (surprised?) and a side track to her favorite coffee drive-in, for which friends and family did her proud with many gift cards...

Joseph made his latkes for dinner, we worked a puzzle and Scrabble and Boggle, watched a holiday movie, and she was happy.  Meanwhile, I was happy sewing her a new set of napkins and untangling a huge skein of beautiful hand-spun yarn she passed along to me...such good winter things to do...

Despite rain.  I ate too much chocolate, and the rest of them ate too many cookies, and then drove home to get up a cocoa and waffle party for some small friends coming to bring me (more) cookies; I was thinking I had best stick to tea while they indulge, but I'm afraid I did not.  In between bites, they hit my stash of oddities I work with for art ("Why do you have all this stuff?" asked the oldest, though he was the first to rummage around in it) and got to work making things.  I love the way they think as they rummage, and what comes of it.

The next evening we were due at my niece's for more family, more food, more merry wrapping paper clutter, and, as it turned out, lots more lovely and colorful yarn for winter evenings.  We drove out to the farm for more of the same, at Angie and Jim's elegant table and country brunch, lots of catching up.   And look at the wonderful gift I received!  "Can you guess what this is?"  Angie asked me. (I couldn't, so I am giving you this hint...)

Clearly this is the memo going around. Fortunately I already have a rocking chair.

There is plenty of time, too, to look again on those holiday photos, the far away ones, especially.  Here is my latest favorite (it changes every time the mail arrives)...my friend Pat's grandchild at work in her talented grandmother's kitchen.

At the end of the year, the sun, after a few clouds, is out, the sky is blue, and I've almost got this new laptop under control.  Almost.  I go out to coffee with a friend and later a dose of sushi, then sit with Alexander sleeping beside me while the new year's eve sends up its sparkles and pops.

May every tangle of your season become a moment to sit quietly while you undo the knots and enjoy those around you.

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The new 01 01 20

Good morning, again.  

Just in time for the new year, our new bundle of hope comes along.  (Her name is Riley Thomas, but...don't tell her grandmother...I'm going to call her Hope.) May we give her a world she can live safely, healthily, protected and with every reason for a future in which she can spread her arms wide and take it all in.

Giving thanks and other Scotland/Wales adventures

Good morning.  The Thanksgiving weekend is officially over, and with only two leftovers to finish, thankfully, I'm settling down to the real message, in which gratitude is forthcoming.

My friend Denise and I had a grand time wandering Edinburgh, that first day opening to bright skies, a bit of brisk wind nothing that a wool scarf, gloves, and some undersilks couldn't handle, and visits to landmarks and curious places that filled our days there.  (I've given up repeating my journals verbatim...counting the 25 large  pages from beginning to end of the journey, I have guessed that all of you would be at your wits' end reading over the next month, so I'm attempting to write, instead, these backward glances.)

The second morning found me up early after a long night's sleep, and leaving Denise to her rest, I set out to the Writers Museum.  On the way up the Grassmarket, I found a small woolens shop just opening, Bill Baber, and behind a sewing/knitting machine a young woman who cheerfully left her work to show me around their handmade wares.  Out of linen, silk and cotton were colorful woven hats, scarves, capes and jackets.  As it happened, I needed a winter hat, so bought a purple/blue cloche to carry with me...it was warm and easily folded into a pocket or bag.  Seeing their wonderful sweaters reminded me of my travel intention to take a suitcase of underwear and a pair of shoes, and then buy everything I needed in whatever country and  climate I found myself.  If only I'd paid attention to myself.  But my suitcase was small and crowded with home things, so...

Happy with my hat, I set off around the corner to Victoria Street, a short winding route banked with small shops from haberdasheries to juice bars, with reservation only restaurants and...yes...a patisserie, La Barantine, right out of the Rue Cler.  Where was I, anyway?   I stopped for an Americano, sitting outside in the sun on one of two tiny tables hugging the window display of breads and pastries from some celestial oven.

 Later, Denise joined me...that's her pastry on the table and my second cup.

The way to the Writer's Museum is both simple and complicated.  The Royal Mile, which undergoes several name changes from dour Edinburgh Castle on the hill to the inspired Scottish Parliament below, is cluttered with tourist shops which can hide the small closes where interesting places are to be found. Looking for Lady Stair's Close, I at first walked too far, and, passing the Camera Obscura, found myself on a small curve of pretty white Swiss-like houses, very Edinburgh in their placement just below the castle grounds, but starkly contrasted against the dark medieval stones of the old city.

Finally, going back under the direction of a nice woman in (yet another) woolens shop, I came to the correct close, squeezed behind a mound of Walker's Shortbread boxes and plaid kitsch, and stepped inside Scotland's old literary heritage...Burns, Scott, Stevenson, and a few others I hadn't known.

It didn't take me long to go through the three stories of the old building, but the exhibits were interesting, especially the paintings which accompanied quotes from texts.

Denise chose to go to the underground street exhibit, meanwhile, and then, after some necessary phone-card exchange on Princes Street, the major shopping street, we went hunting lunch on the small alley between Princes and George.  We soon found the Rose Pub, and its welcome offerings:  pea soup with mint (vegan), home baked flat bread, wine and ale. 

 It began to rain while we ate, and the pub became a refuge until the sun returned a half hour later.  It was, as pubs can be at their best in such weather, a good place to sit and watch the few walkers tread by under hoods and umbrellas.  

When we left, we kept between Rose Alley and George Street, where the latter brought us to a chocolate shop Denise needed to explore.  

You will think that food was all we toured, but you would be only half right.  Our explorations led us over bridges, by gardens, on overlooks and in small closes where the ancient buildings hid their grim past.

Over the next days, St. Giles, the Parliament Building, the Queen's palace (Holyrood), the Botanical Center, and the Portrait House.  In between, a trip to the aforementioned old books stores, where I buy a copy of Muriel Spark's Complete Poems (who knew she wrote poems?) and find, upon opening it, this apt comment in its preface, in which she describes that though she wrote mostly in prose she had always thought of herself as a poet, with a poet's inscrutable relationship with the word:

'Edinburgh Villanelle', for instance:  what did I mean by 'Heart of Midlothian, never mine'?  There is a spot outside St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, my native city, which marks the "heart of Midlothian'.  I have fond memories of Edinburgh.  My pivotal book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was a novel about Edinburgh.  I have no idea what I meant by those words in the poem 'never mine'.  And yet I meant them at the time.

Perhaps Ms. Sparks had once had an afternoon like mine?  Here is my journal from a visit to St. Giles Cathedral, which, along with the Parliament building, inspired me most about the city.

I find St. Giles in the middle of the Mile.  Up a ramp and around to the entry, the dark stone nearly melting into the sidewalk surrounding St. Giles, I came through a blue glass partition and thought, ah, here is a place rooted in memorials to heroes of all sorts and to philosophical/literary thinkers.  

Plaques and reliefs on every wall, statures and inscriptions read like a history of Scotland and its honor of men and women who leave us or themselves with something to found a life on.  This is a church which is also strongly re-grounded from its initial Catholicism to the Reformation Presbyterianism, so that the very design of the inside of the building has been shifted architecturally. 

 At first, as I walked up the main aisle, I couldn't figure out why something seemed off kilter.  The main and naves had been originally built in the balanced way of Roman churches, but the Presbyterians, wanting not to frame their worship in that repudiated structure, turned their gazes 90 degrees to put a flat-table altar to face a modern organ, nave to nave.  The whole shift was like seeing the place lying sidewise.  They were, of course, beautiful organ and beautiful nave.  I went round looking at every "page" of that historical tribute.  

The treasure of St. Giles, however, lies in the small close elegantly and elaborately carved Thistle Society Chapel, where the Queen became queen and Knights have been inducted since.  

Its ceilings, even beyond the symbolic emblems, were intricately carved and the rises above the council seats amazing for work done in the 1910s.  I spent nearly an hour there and then went back with Denise after her tour to consider its fascination again.  It was on the sidewalk outside, looking down in the lowering light of mid-afternoon, that I saw the Heart of Midlothian that Spark writes of.

Edinburgh is, after all, a bookish town.  At night, looking at the offerings of the bookshelf near the fireplace in the apartment, I found Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel. Tired feet made the sofa and a good book the best tour of the moment, and soon enough I came to a passage on page 9 which stood out like a beacon:

...the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial [as why and how] and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed EUDAIMONIA or human flourishing.

Human flourishing:  exactly what happens to me as these travels unfold, one by one, each leaving me opening and drawing out new nourishment (not really the word I want, but close).   Now that I know Eudaimonia, I have a word for what I am about these days, indeed for the whole traveling year and perhaps, I hope, longer.

Where I’ve been

Welcome to another travel posting, after four weeks overseas, this time to Scotland, Wales, a few days in London, then on to Spain.  It’s been an interesting time (may you, too, live in interesting times, as the fellow says), and so I thought that I would this time write you straight from my journal, which I kept nearly every day, so that you can get an on-the-spot view of things.  Be warned that I do go on and on about a day.  Pictures, of course, will accompany prose; some days, perhaps to your relief, my pages might be all photographs.  Here is the beginning: Edinburgh.

I.

On the train, after a long sleepless night and an equally long morning sorting out train tickets, we ride out of Manchester Piccadilly on the crowded 12:35, to arrive in Edinburgh’s Victoria station by mid-afternoon.  It’s too bad, I think, that we can’t simply transport ourselves, instantly, from home across the ocean without the draining air travel…cramped, uncomfortable, dragged queue to queue along corridors that seem like science fiction props.  So different than train travel through a country, where the ride over the changing landscape becomes part of the journey.

We are going north through Preston, Oxenholm (gateway to the Lake Disrict, of Wordsworth fame), Penrith, Carlisle, Lockerbee (I remember that with a shudder, and then Bharati Mukherjee's searing story, "The Management of Grief", based on that tragedy).  Towns are interspersed by sheep pastures, different than those in France but with the same low hedgerows and wide, hilly green pastures.

We share seats with a family from Beauly, in Northern Scotland, above Inverness—they have two trains and an hour’s car ride until home, albeit through beautiful country.

We spend the trip talking travel with them across the table.  They, the Williamses (father, mother, sister and brother) are returning from a vacation in Tenerife, on a school break, but upon divulging this, Isle [e-la] shrugs and admits that next year, after having holidays for a few years there, they might look farther afield.  They have never been to the US, so we think of places (besides Disneyland, their first thought) that would be good for a couple of young adolescents and their still youngish parents.  They are clearly fond of the outdoors, good travelers and interested in where we have been, too.  We find a plethora of destinations in this country…Philadelphia, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Northwest, and New Orleans, for example…that wouldn’t disappoint them.  As always, in the civility of trains abroad, stories come out; even the children take part in the sharing, listening to possibilities and adding to family lore.  I give Isle my card and promise to host them if they decide North Carolina…sea to mountains…becomes their goal.

II.

The AirBnB at 12 Lady Lawson St, up the hill and down another from the castle, is a great find in a fine neighborhood for walking Edinburgh.  There are always landmarks in sight, so finding one’s direction takes only a day (or two).  The apartment, on the first floor (which means second floor in Europe) of a well-tended 100 year old building, with its light-filled lounge, two bedrooms, small but well-equipped and kindly stocked kitchen, and narrow bath will do us just fine.  It does mean climbing two flights of ancient, worn stone stairs, partly without rail, so we will have to learn to take our time on it. The heating system is a puzzle, by turns cooling and roasting us with seemingly no rhyme or reason. 

  

Looking around, I think to myself, why doesn’t someone actually live here?  The location swerves easily down the hill to the Grassmarket, and the small Sainsbury Local on the upper corner serves to pick up stock items for breakfast, carry out, and wine.  It isn’t the Sainsbury I first encountered in London, like France full of specialty things among the ordinary on each shelf…cheeses from the near country, smoked fishes of all sorts, dozens of each kind of vegetables and fruits…but this little one is fine for us travelers.  

Then I catch sight of not one but two used bookstores up the street.  Aha.  Danger ahead.

Anyway, unpacking and settling in brings us to dinner hour, and as we are hungry we set out to explore our options, hunting at first for a good pub where each of our separate Britain experiences has taught us has the best and less expensive food, informally served and comfortable among strangers.  But to our surprise, we find much of the Grassmarket area catering to more college-kid and sports stuff...burgers, chips, endless pizza...til, retracing our steps, we come to Petit Paris, a genuine French restaurant we like the looks and the menu of. 

  

At the one small table left free, we are greeted by a man clearly in charge, and one youngish waiter, appropriately French.  Maitre d’ is the owner, who tells us that he is from the 6^th in Paris—St. Germain was where he grew up; this small, almost invisible place among the sports pubs, absolutely redolent of a Paris bistro from kitchen to cuisine to service, bears him out.  

There are so many choices we would like to try, but finally I choose a sea bass on vegetables in a light marinade and Denise—I envy her that, too—lamb stew.  (Sorry:  no photos, as we are too hungry to think of taking any.)

We split a salad and a crème brulee, tempted by the dessert ordered by our tableside neighbors, a young couple from Ireland who have escaped from family for a weekend on their own.  We are so full we can hardly move even if we wanted to.  Frankly, I would go back there every day, if there weren’t a whole city to explore.  

On the way back to the flat, we shop for goods for the flat, plan the next day’s walk and call Ada, in Glasgow, who has been expecting to hear from me and who gives out reams of suggestions for Edinburgh sites and restaurants.  We are sorry to hear about Clive’s extended hospital stay (worrying me about whether our stay there next week will interfere with his recovery), but Ada seems to look forward to the promised day of his return and to welcoming us.

Bed is so comfortable under the soft, warm comforter that I read only a few pages of the Welsh story I brought with me before I sleep almost instantly.

It’s morning as I finish this, looking out the bedroom window where an old brick wall, interesting more than reductive, faces me from across the lower roof of an equally old building.  A fine start to our trip.