The Big O

In London there is great concern over their future.  But they love their history.

Throughout the opening ceremonies every quirky reference, every Royal mention, every obscure rugby scene was met with hoots and howls of recognition and appreciation.

Living in London you respect the quirkiness of their cleverness, even if at times you feel you aren't quite in on the joke. Watching the opening ceremonies with 30,000 people in Hyde Park was like sitting with a host of interpreters as they laughed and loathed each reference.  And if you eavesdropped just a bit, most of it made sense.

But this is modern day Britannia, not the place of Shakespeare or even Dickens.  So when Kenneth Branagh read an extended quote from The Tempest, finishing Caliban's speech:  "Ready to drop upon me/that when I waked/I cried to dream again."  The guy next to me yelled:  "F*ck Yea Bill!"

The town is bathed in sunlight and awash in pride over the Olympics. The media is caught up in the Team GB spirit which is why Mitt Romney got pummelled for even suggesting they weren't up to the task.  The country is in a double dip recession, the city is reeling from banking crisis to banking scandal and they want something to cheer about.  And right now there is no place more cheerful than London.

At Home...Temporarily

We are pattern-seekers.

I woke up on a Monday and walked Abbey Gardens to Abbey Road, to Langford to Loudoun to Grove End to St. John's Wood tube which took me to London Bridge.to King William Street, to Eastcheap to Philpot Lane to Lime Street.

I woke up the following Monday and took Burning Tree Court to Burning Tree Road, to GreenTree to Fernwood to Democracy, to Old Georgetown Road, to Edson to Rockville Pike.

They are both commutes.  One is faster than the other.  One involves a car, the other my legs and a Tube.

We had spent the previous weeks and months preparing the children for their re-entry.  Only in the wee hours of the night was there time to imagine what life back home would be for us.  All our friends implored, "nothing changed."  And on a grand scale nothing did.  But we changed, didn't we?

In a few days you are back in a rhythm, a routine of work, letters to camp, weekends, workouts, lunches, and meetings.

But as the days inch along the notion that nothing changed was a realization, not a warning.  Part of why we left was the change, we were eager to come back as changed people, do things differently, not as the same lemmings who left.


There was no comfort in "no change."  There was disappointment.

And then after a particularly industrious week of meetings downtown, up and back on the Metro, instead of the car.  After drinks with friends.  After a business trip and some meals at familiar places, the comforts of home.  You realize the phrases you'd been repeating to the kids, the concepts of resilience, challenges, mountains and molehills may have actually been a mantra for ourselves.

You are resilient.  Life back home was pretty good.  You're gonna be OK.

Penultimate

We left London in stages, the final one yet to come.  But for the last 10 days in June it was just me and the youngest.  A gift really.  We had 10 breakfasts and 10 swim practices and 10 nights of homework and 10 walks home and 20 play dates and a weekend.

There were tears when Mommy and the others left.  But then there was the build up to the end of school, the final projects, the last dance.

A couple nights after the others left as I was putting her to bed it started to sink in:  "So Josh and Jessie will never sleep in their beds again will they?"  No they won't.  "They'll never be in this house again?"  I closed the door to the two empty rooms and didn't open them again.

Midway through the final stretch she and I were home from swimming, having dinner and doing homework and I said something to the effect of how nice it was, getting all this done, nobody else around.  But she gave me a look.  She knew.  It was weird to be in a half empty house.

And as the final days ticked down each night she put up a brave face, kissed me goodnight.  But I could hear the tears through her pillow.

One night around eleven I went into her room.  Even two floors away I could hear her sadness.  And I stood by her bed and she looked up with red cheeks and in her eyes she was asking me what had she done wrong?  And I had no answer to the question of why it hurt so much when she did everything right.  She embraced it from the start, did everything we asked and yet, it hurt the most.

And then there were going away parties and the last everything: Last swim practice, last bus ride to Queen's Grove, last dinner with Olivia, Maddy, Darcy, Georgia, Franny, Lior.  And the last trip to Westfields.

And then the last day of school.  And she sat on the steps waiting for her bus and drinking Perfectly Clear, her fave morning beverage.  And she looked up at me and said:  "Daddy, I wish I could just bottle the air."

On the final night she wanted to go to the High Street and get Gelato Mio.  Her wish was my command.  And then we walked home and watched the tourists stop traffic as they tried to get their pictures on the Abbey Road cross walk.  And then, just like a tourists, she borrowed a pen and wrote on the wall, thanking this place for the best year of her life.

Heartbreaker

I am 13 years old and riding in the back of a beat-up relic somewhere in Eastern Maryland.  I am in the middle seat, on either side of me are Ronnie Schwartz and Eric Nederlander, my roommates at nearby Don Budge Tennis Camp.  I am holding a Mickey's Wide Mouth, my first beer.  The bottle is green and in the shape of a barrel.and feels like a grenade in my hand.  We are headed to the Merriweather Post Paviliion, July, 1981, on our way to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.  Our counselors are in the front seat pounding their hands on the dashboard in rhythm to the cassette playing "You don't have to live like a refugee.."


It's 30+ years later and my 12 year old jumps out of a cab in London to meet her middle-aged father at the Royal Albert Hall to see Tom Petty on his first European tour in 20 years. The place is populated by aging rockers wearing concert t-shirts that are older than she is:  the Rolling Stones 1982, the Who 1980, Tom Petty 1981.  Instead of a Mickey's Wide Mouth we sit in a small bar in the basement of the hall eating popcorn and drinking sparkling water.  Surrounded by diehard fans, mostly American, she asks in a loud sweet voice, "Who are we seeing again?  Tim Perry?"  This gets more than a passing glance from the rest.

To my disappointment there is a warm up band who isn't even introduced.  I only learn their names because they are selling Jonathan Wilson t-shirts at the stand.  I thought we'd be home by 9, but the Heartbreakers don't come on until then, Petty in a three piece suit moving in cowboy boots like he's walking across an icy lake, but the voice and the guitar riffs don't disappoint.  At least they don't disappoint me.


At 10:30 we are home eating chicken wings over the kitchen sink and she tells me she thinks it will be fun bringing her kids to a Justin Bieber concert one day.  "I think it would be fun to bring them to see who I liked as a kid.  Maybe I'll take them to Usher too.  Well, no, he's already 40, by the time I have kids he'll be dead." 

434,880 Minutes

Sixty percent of the family headed home for summer planning, camp and far off teen-tours.  They left 302 days after arrival.  There was symmetry, there was arc, there were tears.

On August 19th I found a middle child who hated the blank walls of her room, crying on her bed next to a pile of un-opened duffel bags.

On June 15th I found that child sitting on her bed beneath a wall of paper butterflies, the room stripped bare, a pile of fully-baked suitcases in the corner, crying alone about how hard it was to leave.

I found the son who wanted two years from the start, wanting more.  He was standing alone in his room, stuff everywhere, as if not packing would make the clock stop.

And the wife who couldn't bother with emotion when we arrived, her only concern her children, their school, their adjustments, their activities.  I found her behind large sunglasses and without mascara having solved her tear duct defect as she said goodbye to her London life.

Il Capo in Firenze

My friend has been to more Bruce Springsteen concerts this year than I have been in my whole life.  I'm a fan mind you, been to a dozen concerts, but I've never been to the Stone Pony, I've never driven more than a couple hours to see him, and I can't remember the first time I heard Rosalita.

I asked him what he loves about the shows, why he still goes and he said it's no longer just about the concert "it's about who I'm with."

Springsteen has been around long enough to be generational.  People can trace their life along the tours they've seen. Everything from the bootleg their older brother introduced them to, the first time they brought their wife, assuming they didn't meet at a concert, to the time they dragged their kids to the insanity.

But for me it's still about the selection of those 30 or so songs he plays and where they take me.  Yes, I'll remember Florence and Stadio Artemio Franchi and the way the Italians sang words they didn't know, the way most Jews chant prayers on the high holidays.

And I'll remember the rain and the sprint to the car, and the aborted McDonalds' run, and the three pizzas Joe found for us at midnight and how we ate them as they closed the hotel bar and the sauce spilled out of the slices, which I ate Tony Manero-style, onto my new Wrecking Ball t-shirt just above the Born to Run album cover.

It isn't because it was Italy, or even Florence a place where I have only good memories.  Or that we went with friends on the spur of the moment on a weekend when we had a million other obligations, but in the end it was because of Bruce.  When I am at a Bruce Springsteen concert I am an 8th grader at Birney Middle School the week The River album came out.  I am a freshman in the Markley Dorm at Michigan listening to Born in the USA.  I am at the Sammy house singing Jungleland at midnight with 20 sweaty guys and girls who I'd give anything to have a night out with again.  I am a senior in college trying to convince my poetry teacher that No Surrender is poetry.  I am newly married and shopping for our first house when Ghost of Tom Joad came on the radio.  I am on the train coming home from New York listening to the Seeger Sessions.  I am driving home from Deep Creek with three sleeping kids in the back seat listening to E Street Radio when Bruce explains the origins of the song Freehold.

A Bruce concert doesn't take me someplace new, it brings me back to all the places I've loved.

"Well, we busted out of class,

Had to get away from those fools

We learned more from a 3-minute record, baby

Than we ever learned in school."

The Queen's Jersey

Jerry Seinfeld had a joke about modern sports.  He used to say that with all the players changing teams, "You're actually rooting for the clothes, when we get right down to it.  You're standing and cheering for your clothes to beat the clothes of another city."

It is only slightly broader than that.  Often you are rooting for your town, your home town, your roots, your sense of place.  That is why we cheer for our home town team long after we left.  In England your football team is chosen before you are born.  It's generational, it's human, it's mythic.

We saw two displays of it this weekend.  The first lasted four days, the second lasted four hours.

The four day weekend of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee had everything British, from the Royals, the weather and the wave.

"Proud to be British" screamed the Telegraph, "All for one" cried the Metro, the television anchors were criticized for their giddiness,  the Daily Mail could be converted into a souvenir tea towel.

The four days were filled with pouring rain, cold temperatures, impenetrable crowds, concerts on the Mall, parties on a every street and one million people came out to see the Queen wave from her balcony.  Why do they do it? Country pride. It's their Queen, their heritage, their country, their team. And some day it will be another Royal, same jersey, different person.

Taking the Eurostar two and a half hours East and we found ourselves at Stade Roland Garros for the best match of the French Open.  But it didn't start out that way. At first the world's number one Novak Djokovic made quick work of hometown favorite and Frenchman Jo Wilfried Tsonga, who lost the first set six to one.  But then something happened that gave Tsonga the strength to push on until he had the world's number one down to his last point.  And that was the crowd.  They cheered every time Tsonga won a point, every time he took a drink, every time he got a serve in, every time Djok hit the ball wide.  On that day and that court everyone was French.

The enthusiasm for Tsonga was no different than that for the Queen.  They were rooting for their flag, for their colors, indeed, for their jersey.