In Oxford

We have emerged from the tunnel of time zones and sky to London, then Oxford, where we check into a modest guesthouse on Iffley Road. Then we wander the blustery streets in that strange transitional trance, wired but exhausted, and meet our daughter at the pub near her house.  She wears a black and silver scarf and a chunky line-up of bracelets, and her hair is pinned up to reveal dangling earrings shaped like leaves. She looks exotic and startlingly beautiful, and I suddenly see her as though she is someone other than my daughter, perhaps because that is exactly what she has become.

I thought Boston was far. Now taking a walk together or sitting across from her at a table like this demands all the time, expense and complexity of a transcontinental and transatlantic journey, and I see no sign of it changing anytime soon. Indeed she is as happy as I have ever seen her, and what mother wouldn’t want that for her child? She writes about Oxford in lyrical, luminous prose; its literary ghosts enchant her, as do its libraries and legends, as does its light, and the honey color of its stone buildings. She is astonished to have stepped into this dream and become a part of it. I try to look at the city through a lens like that, but its magic registers on me only in glimmers, and at times, particularly in the wind and the damp, I just feel lost. But of course, I am neither young nor newly in love. 

(“I grow old…I grow old…I shall wear the trousers of my pants rolled.”)

On this day there is sunshine and cinematic clouds and it’s windy and chilly but all the girls are defiantly underdressed, many pedaling along on their bicycles in tank tops and summer skirts. Students in subfusc hurry to exams; confetti litters cobblestone streets, and here and there we step past the remnants of a post-exam trashing of flour and eggs. I stop to marvel at a bed of bearded irises in a shade I have never seen, an almost black sort of aubergine. A russet-haired boy stands in front of a door painted cornflower blue. `The sky is still light at 9 p.m., a disorienting but beautiful sort of whiteness.

We sleep the sleep of the exhausted and confused.

The next morning is rainy, but breakfast includes a Chinese gooseberry and lemon marmalade, and we go to the Botanic Gardens where the colors are saturated and burgeoning beds of bearded irises are bejeweled with beads of raindrops. It does my heart good to see people hovering over flowers, pausing to marvel. It is in the garden that I come to terms with the divergence of our lives, my own and my daughter’s. It's an epiphany of sorts, and I try to explain to her afterwards that it hasn’t been easy but I am letting her go, a rhetorical statement to someone long gone. 

I tell her I am happy for her and ready to revisit some dreams of my own, and I chatter nonsensically until Monte says, “Leave it to Mom to say whatever happens to pop into her mind at any given moment.” 

But that isn’t why I stop talking. I stop because I realize that I am trying to convey an experience for which there exists no translation to a person in her twenties.

Dinner with our friends that night, including Mr. Harbor, who has heard that we are planning a trip to the Lake District and brought us a map and two old books of black and white photographs from 1951, with pastoral views of dirt roads through mountains, grazing sheep, stone bridges and cottages. He cycled there as a boy with his father, and it holds many fond memories for him.

The prevailing conversation is downright frothy and includes a lively discussion on the pronunciation of saws, source, sores, sauce, and sausage. But Mr. Harbor is preoccupied, for he is dealing with hard times. He is nattily dressed in his suit and vest but he has no appetite, and there is a great sadness emanating from him. 

“I know it isn’t easy,” I say to him, in a well-intentioned if lame attempt at sympathy.

“It surely isn’t,” is his only response. He is 89 and too gracious to mock me, but I am beginning to know that I don't really know.

New topic: He has heard that I am going to Italy in a few weeks. “I went to Italy once,” he says. “In 1957. Padua. I didn’t like it very much. I came back early.”

I ask him what his favorite trip was, the best place ever, the place where he was happiest.

 “Right here,” he says, pointing to the Lake District books. And perhaps for a moment he is a young man again cresting a hill, descending into green, everything in front of him. 

Afterwards we walk with our daughter through the quiet streets and hug her good-bye at the door of the house she calls home.  

Comments

[LV]

Your recent writing has been so sad, but you have done a great thing in allowing your daughter to live on her own terms. I wouldn't exactly call it letting go, it's letting her be free from the guilt that always comes with leaving people you love for other places and people you also love. It's a terrible guilt for a young person to carry when they're trying begin their adult lives.

Let me know when you are back from your travels - I'm planning travels of my own and could use advice on Italy in particular.

[Lisa]

I love this post. Three decades ago, I stayed at a friend's house on the Iffley Road after digging. Each day I'd walk into town, passing right by the field where Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile. Oxford is wonderful. The light, the river, the old stone. Your daughter will grow in magical ways. Your post makes me miss my younger days! Thank you for the connection.