The Case for More

There is an electronic sign in Trafalgar Square counting down the days until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London.  Today, with the sun shining down, there are 137 more to go.  The countdown is a build up for the city, but for me it represents time running out, as it coincides with our planned departure from our year abroad.

In late summer 2011 our house was a boiling cauldron of overflowing angst about what London might bring.  The night before leaving I video-taped the children and uniformly they were scared about one thing:  The first day of school.  My wife wondered aloud what she would do once I left for work in the morning.  I was nervous for them since I felt the burden of dragging them along on this adventure.

And now six months later the kids can’t remember what the first day of school was like.  And my wife is out of the house before I am most mornings.  So I’m guessing her running/hiking/ art history/photography/museum tour/pub crawling groups fill out her days.

And so with everyone settled into a routine of friends, teams, birthday parties and sleep-overs the question arises, why leave?  We went through the trouble of immigration and Visas and schools and housing and then immersion, all for one year?  Like most things in life it’s about expectations.  If you expect to stay one year it’s hard to get your mind wrapped around two.  If you expect to go home in 12 months you plan a certain way:  Your expenses, your family, your career, your pets.

But if your life is subjectively better with less stress, less driving, fewer headaches, more freedom, more family time (cuts both ways), less criticism, more days of pure adventure and enjoyment, why end it?

The argument goes that if you are here for a year, it’s like a long vacation, but if you stay it becomes home, with stresses like anything else.  If you miss one year of school you can pop back in.  If you miss two years, you come back out of sync with the rest of your friends.  If you miss the first year of high school it’s an entry point making re-entry tougher.

We took a big risk coming here and it worked.  Are we taking as big a risk in year two?

All the negatives for staying relate to what might happen to the children should they be out of their lives for more than the allotted year.  For the parents the negatives are softer.  There are friends and family that are missed.  And we’ve seen the struggle when there is a crisis back home.  But the day to day is richer and in many ways more fulfilling.  And that’s hard to walk away from.

As Chekov wrote:  “Any idiot can face a crisis.  It’s the day to day living that wears you out.”

Abbey Road

You can't live where we do, in the Northwest Section of London, and not become fascinated with the cult that is the Beatles.  You can walk by Abbey Road Studios at any time, on any day, no matter the weather, and see people doing one of two things.  Either writing on the wall that surrounds it, which they repaint every three months, or waiting.  Waiting for traffic to clear so they can take their shot.  The money shot.  The same shot of the Beatles on the cover of the Abbey Road album, crossing the famous walk.

But that's as far as you can get, no piercing the black gates from the street to the inner sanctum that looks like a normal house on a normal street in a residential area.  But for the 80th anniversary of the studio they were letting in a lucky few, Willy Wonka-style.  But instead of chocolate I paid 75 quid for my golden ticket.

At 7:00 PM on a Friday the line stretched out past the gates but soon I was walking through the lobby filled with pictures of music history and into Studio 2 where I spent the next 90 minutes learning about the history of this place.  Even though they discuss the 30 years leading up to the Beatles, it is John/Paul/George and Ringo who made the space famous.  Lots of big time artists have worked there since EMI opened it in 1931.  But the surrounding area is suffused with Beatles.  It's not just the iconic street corner or the St John's Wood tube stop with the Beatles coffee shop, or the memorabilia store a mile up the road at Baker Street where you can buy Beatles cuff links.  The people who come to pay tribute to the band have a distinctly late 1960's feel.

The 50 or so people who joined me in Studio 2 are told that the Beatles were not welcomed inside at first either.  "The music was OK, but they won the hearts of the execs through their personalities."  They weren’t just fun, they were light, witty and smart.  Clever as the Brits say.  And you see it in the outtakes and studio shots of them enjoying the process. 

The studio itself is unremarkable.  There is very little to suggest the specialness of the place, it's just a big room and long beige draperies with stains of white paint from what looks like the work of a sloppy handyman.

We sit in red leather chairs, the same chairs you see in nearly every picture of the Beatles.  They were purchased in bulk because the previous chairs were wood and they squeaked, ruining many a take.  I sit in the corner, in the spot where Paul conceived and played Blackbird.  You see where Ringo sat, his cigarette stand brought in for the occasion.  And what you understand is that there is nothing in this room that gave inspiration, they brought it with them.  In this big old room they dragged their guitars into closets and storage rooms, hallways and backways, and even into the control room, testing every sound, every echo, every twist.

They were kids in their 20s and the sounds that are now iconic were just them trying to find something new.  You can sit and listen and hear them evolve into the performers they would become.  They were just friends trying to be creative together and it became magic.

The studio sits in the same spot where it was bought at the start of the century, in a place where neighbors still complain about the noise.  But EMI knew what they were doing, they wanted it far from the trains and noise of the city.

It was the last place Glenn Miller played before dying in a plane crash over the English Channel.  Amy Winehouse spent her last days here as well.  But it is Beatles' memories that bring people from all over the world.  It's why they stand outside and write and weep, fully iPod plugged in wondering how the magic was made, what went on inside.

And after spending an evening in that place I still wonder how they did it.  But I no longer wonder about the place.  Because I now know the magic came from inside those four boys, not these four walls. 

 

Off the Path

Tell your kids to “get off their path.”

That was the message from this 75 year old CEO I went to see.  A Brit who ran public companies on three continents said we are all born on a path, and all too often we stick to it.  “A banker’s son is born in Boston goes to Princeton, to Wall Street and to Florida where he plays golf and dies.”

He told me of a young man who came to see him asking for career advice.  The freshly minted graduate came to his office with a report card full of A’s and a specialty in Geography.  He asked the new graduate:  “Where is the Irrawaddy River?” And when the young man fumbled and guessed wrong, the old CEO admonished him: “Go do something!  You’ve spent all your time in a classroom.  The Irrawaddy is in Myanmar (Burma) and I know that because I swam across it.”

He questioned the rush to leave school and get a job, commenting that young people believe they are entitled to a job upon graduation.  “And now that the jobs aren’t there, they’re angry." 

“Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains,” is his favorite quote.

Sometimes your children go off their path, and then you wish they hadn’t.  That is the emotion every time our son hits the Rugby pitch.  The season is a demolition derby of broken bones, concussions, bloody noses and torn ears. 

When the final weekend arrives the theme of my pre-game pep talk is victory is walking off the field under your own weight.  Tennis tryouts are a week away, a sport where I see a brighter future.

But he is fifteen and like everyone his age, he is indestructible.  So when I lose his jersey under a pile of sweating boys, I gasp  When I see a large man/child run off, his first stride atop my son’s barren ankle, I want to jump the fence. 

When I hear a “pop” after his wind is shaken by a shoulder to the gut, all I can do isturn my head.

The tournament ends with a second place finish and an overall healthy corpus.  And we move on watching him take these detours.  Hoping these risks allow him to walk his own path, even with a small limp.

The Lion

I now know that Lyon is not French for Lion, even though the Lyon Tourism Council has adopted a giant red lion as its logo.  Is that just to confuse non-French speaking Americans?

Lyon is beautiful on a chilly, sunny Monday morning.  The city bills itself as an island between the Rhone and Saone rivers.  I really think it’s a peninsula, but I am reluctant to tell them.

To be there on the day The Artist won top honors at the Oscars is to be reminded of the tremendous pull of hometown loyalty and the regard in which the US is seen.  Their version of CNN showed a non-stop loop of the Academy Award speeches by the various French victors and everyone was talking about what a great day it was to be French.  “This has never happened before, five awards.”  On this day they were all French, but usually they are Lyonnaise.

The inhabitants are fiercely loyal.  When I mentioned that Lyon was the third largest city in France, showing off my Wikipedia knowledge, they snapped back that you can’t trust anyone from Marseille.  “Marseille is only bigger because they include the suburbs.”

They are quick to characterize everything as either very American or very French.  It’s an hour flight from London to Lyon.  I could have taken the Eurostar train to Lille and then on to Lyon, a four-hour journey, but instead I flew.  “America is a flying culture, not a train culture like us,” they told me.

Coffee in Lyon is espresso.  If you ask for an Americano they point to the Starbucks down the street.  If you ask for an Americano after telling them you are allergic to dairy, everything you say is discounted and you are met with a harrumph, in French.

The old part of town is filled with narrow streets with openings on two sides so you can move from street to street via the open doors.  These are relics from the days when Lyon was known for its silk trade and they carried the long pieces of silk through the streets and had speedy access to indoors when the rains came.

The French revolution destroyed the industry when many were sent to the guillotine and most of the skilled labor fled.


Lyon, like much of Europe, is another town filled with religious artifacts, and non-religious people.  Although the 8^th of December is their festival of lights when everyone puts a candle in their window to thank the Virgin Mary for saving the city from a deadly plague in the Middle Ages, Churches have as much meaning as museums.

On a lunch tour between meetings they proudly show off the churches and religious landmarks.  When I ask about Church attendance, they ask, “Why go to Church?”

Country Living

I tried to rub the ache out of my shoulder wondering its source, messing with the kids, that one lap across the swimming pool?  Later in the morning my daughter emerged at breakfast asking if I had gun bruises as well.  It wasn’t the breast stroke, but the recoil from the previous day’s shoot that gave me an upper body Charlie horse.

I always admired the people who lived by the natural calendar.  Who understood it was Springtime by the way the birds acted or the trees bloomed.  Following a day of shooting it was a fly fishing guide who told me the song of the swallows overhead suggested Spring was here.  The way the toads jumped or the goose trying to mate with the swan, all suggested, much more than the mild temperatures, what was happening in the world around us.

Our cab driver called Hampshire the 45-minute community because it’s 45 minutes to London, 45 minutes to Heathrow, 45 minutes to Stansted.  It’s part commuter and part pure country.   One of the hotel workers told us he had only been to London 3 times in his 76 years.  Once was to see Phantom of the Opera.

While the ability to tell the time of year by the mating calls of the swallows was impressive, and the ability to shoot two clay pigeons as they zig zagged across the sky was skillful, it was the ability to tame the Falcons in a feat of patience and bravery that outpaced them both.

The world of Falconry seems pre-historic.  These birds of prey have no loyalty, no love or companionship.  The women are bigger than the men and mating occurs when the women accept the male’s advances, rejection is met with death.  There is a purity to the relationship.  You cannot cajole these animals, you cannot buy their affection and if you cross them they will never trust you or anybody else again. You cannot impose your will on them and these characteristics made them popular among the Kings in the Middle Ages.  Living in a world of sycophants they appreciated the obstinacies and rules of nature by which the falcons lived.  According to our Falconer, “God has not created a faster or more perfect creature for flight” as they are clocked at 210 miles per hour, making them the fastest creature alive.

(As an aside, at the Hampshire Estate I did feel like an extra on Downton Abbey)

The Falcons soared, the fish bit on everybody’s line, but daddy’s, and the pigeons tried to out-run our gunshots.  I hoped part of the impression on the children would be a realization of life and death in the country and how these activities were once survival, not sport.  If you couldn’t fish or shoot, you wouldn't eat.  But as with most things, education came from an unlikely source. It was the side pocket of the Falconer that drew in the children.

We were asked to hold a piece of yellow fluff to feed the Falcon after she approached on call.  But soon one of the children noticed how the Falconer would pull the yellow from his satchel before handing it to us.  When they realized his pockets were full of dead baby chicks that he picked apart, the kids were grossed out, the parents closed their eyes, and my wife was happy to be a vegetarian.

After shooting pigeons and catching trout, after lectures about the risks of life in the country, it was the cracking baby chicken legs that finally led to the lesson of the weekend: “Dad, I am NEVER eating chicken nuggets again.”

Charity Toast

Would a charity event in the UK be different than a charity event back home?

In the end the differences are just changes in protocol.  When they say black tie, they mean black tie.  So I am running down Oxford Street at 6:45, like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, to rent a tuxedo for the first time since my senior prom.  My tie options included a bow tie, a skinny black, a wide half Windsor, but beggars had to choose when I told her I needed the tuxedo, not tomorrow, not in June like everybody else in line, but in 20 minutes.

A thousand people packed into a ballroom at Grosvenor House and I am seated next to a Member of Parliament, OK, we’re not in DC any more.  Mr. Stephen McCabe runs for five year terms, represents Birmingham Hall Green and Birmingham Selly Oak, has 75,000 constituents and needs to raise 30,000 GBP for his re-election run.  As a member of the British Labour Party he is on the outs, but he still had plenty of stories.  Most interestingly his tales of meeting Bill Clinton and his strong Scottish Accent, which in a poll was voted the most trustworthy of accents.  He said in a field of Brits it helped him stand out.

Unlike charity events at home there is no fee for entrance, instead it is more like a High Holiday appeal where the table host passes out pledge cards and you can’t leave until you fill them out and give them back. 

There are a series of toasts and presentations.  The usual “thank yous” by board members, a prayer by a Rabbi and then a toast to the Queen, which I was quite excited about.  Everyone grabs their drink, stands and raises a glass and says, “To the Queen,” and sits down.  That’s it?

The Toast to the State of Israel was a bit longer and then the Chancellor to the Exchequer George Osborne spoke movingly about growing up in a Jewish area and always wishing he had a Bar Mitzvah.  And so the Ambassador to Israel stood and gave him a fountain pen with a letter that read:  Dear George, congratulations on your bar mitzvah, it was wonderful.  Please use this pen in good health and don’t seat us next to the Michkin’s again.”