She
strolled down Catte Street, feet steady on the cobblestones, and smiled at the harpist
outside the Bodleian. She stopped to chat briefly with a friend (who was
weaving a small skein of visiting family through the tapestry of Oxford’s main
attractions) and recommended the Pitt Rivers Museum; she herself had just come
from an early-morning visit to the dinosaurs there. Turning down the High
Street she glimpsed the lacy Magdalen spires in the distance and sighed happily
– almost home. That morning she had walked past the “new” Manchester College
Clock Tower – briskly, in order to create a little breeze past her temples –
and had noticed for the first time the carvings on adjacent sides: “It’s later
than you think . . .” and “. . . but it’s never too late.” How very true that is, she thought. How apt.
If I read
that paragraph in a book, this would be the point where I’d throw the book
across the room, because Life isn’t like that, right? Life is real, life is earnest (please don’t
tell the other Oxonians that I’m quoting Longfellow) and this is all very fine
but we’ve got shit to do.
It turns
out that’s not how it works.
That was me this morning, walking from museum to
museum, ducking into a shop for tea, greeting a friend met by chance in the
street in front of the Bodleian Library. It was me, it is me, and that was just one
of the thirty-one mornings I’ve spent on this glorious adventure. And believe
me, I am nothing special – I’m a little awkward, a little impractical, spend
too much time thinking about chores and not enough thinking about miracles, and
did I mention kind of middle-aged and round?
My life,
though – that is really special, and
I don’t mean in a Vintage-SNL-Church-Lady way. Last night I walked along to the
New Building (c. 1733) to do some printing, and when I got back to my room (which
is one of two on the ground floor) I met my temporary “neighbor” in the Guest
Room (reserved for visiting former students) next door. He was a delightful
British gentleman in his late seventies, and we fell to chatting about his
years at Magdalen. It seems he, too, had read English Lit here, along with
History; what was the course I was taking this summer? (I’m studying The
Inklings, a clutch of famous Magdalen writers whose members included J. R. R.
Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.) By Jove, what do you know about that . . . when he
was here, Lewis was one of his tutors!
I wish my
biographers to note that I did not
revert to full-on Yankee Native and screech, MotherFUCKER, are you KIDDING me right now??? I didn’t, but it was a near thing. Fortunately
I have been here long enough to absorb some of that British Stoicism you hear
so much about, so I merely thought
the above, smiled, and said, Oh, how
interesting! Turns out that phrase is the “On” button for interesting
British septuagenarians, and as a reward I got several minutes’ personal
reminiscence about The Master from one of his students.
WHO HAS
THINGS LIKE THAT HAPPEN? THINGS LIKE THAT DON’T HAPPEN!
But they
do. They happen. All the time. The thing is, you have to be ready.
I’m a
middle-aged woman finishing up a 37-year Bachelor’s degree. A lot of my
colleagues (the same ones by whom I was a little intimidated in an earlier
post!) are “college-aged” and go to Ivy-League schools, but they have cramps
and bounce checks and fight with their Significant Others just like anyone else
does. We all have this in common: We do things.
We do things. We climb the tower. We hop on
the train and go take a look at Paris. We sketch and we write and we travel and
we take a job with the Scottish Parliament and we look behind every door that
isn’t locked, and it doesn’t matter if our joints hurt or our friends don’t go
or our hearts hurt or our pockets are empty, because these are things that
people can do, and so we do them.
The world
is here for everyone. It may be that the only difference between Oxford and
your local college (or whatever is your version of What Only Privileged People
Do) is that you don’t realize you can
go to Oxford. Maybe Oxford is more complicated, but it turns out that the reason you’ve heard about Those Things You’ve
Always Dreamed About is that they were
set up in order for people to be able to DO them. Learning to sail, owning
a horse, being a doctor, hiking the Appalachian trail, writing a book – these are
things that people do.
You’re a
person.
Do the things.
