The Patience of Job

Dear all,

My ray of sunshine has arrived. 

My dear friend, Elizabeth, has arrived in England and not a moment too soon.  Literally. 

I got the guest room ready and I organized day trips.  Finally, after months of planning J took the day off to drive to Heathrow (two hours away) and collect her.  He called with status reports: her plane landed, baggage claim assigned.  Then nothing.  No more updates.  Finally, I called him assuming they’d be on the way home, but still no Elizabeth.  A little worry set in.

More time, more pages over the airport intercom.  No Elizabeth.  Now near panic.  She must have been pulled in immigration, I thought. What could she, the mother of five and a soon to be grandmother have smuggled into England?  I chuckled (I swear, only a little and very quietly) at the thought of her being roughed up while jet lagged and quite possibly without lipstick, by some scary immigration officer.  J, bless him, was searching endlessly to get information.

Well, wouldn’t you just know?  I put the wrong date down on the calendar.  Sometimes I do the darndest things.

This brings me to admit a fact that I have been denying to my friends and family on a regular basis for over 17 years:  J is a saint. I now admit it:  J is for Job.  

It is a bad week for me when I have to apologize twice in one week, but it has happened.  One fit of PMS insanity and the other, sending him on a wild goose chase at Heathrow.  I hate when I do that.

Glad he is the forgiving type. 

And so happy to have Elizabeth by my side.

With love from England,

T-Ann

The Promise of Another Year

Dear all,

The kids are now entrenched in school.  M and S continue at the senior school (college) while R enjoys his final year at the Junior along with A who is now big enough to have weekly spelling tests, the bane of my life. 

R is Big Man On Campus but it comes with a price:  studying for his Common Entrance Exam in June in order to be accepted into college.  R has never taken much pride in the academic side of his education.  He does, however, possess Nobel Prize winning social skills, which he continues to hone every time the teacher’s back is turned.

M is for once, off to a great start.  This is the first year in his entire school career where I have not had to attend an emergency first week parent/teacher meeting.  I am missing those conferences just a bit.  It was always exciting to see teachers’ eyes bulge and their hair stand on end when they described M’s legendary lack of organization, as if I mightn’t have been aware.  When they managed to pull themselves together, they would insist, without exception, they’d have M sorted by the end of the year; I’d nod my head solemnly in gratitude and solidarity, hiding my amusement and doubt.  M organized by the end of the year?  Good. Luck.

So M has turned over a new leaf.   He mostly shows up to class on time.  Often he turns in homework. Relatively few illegible assignments are returned.  Kudos!  Yet for all those successes, he admits that he rarely brings the right books and folders to class but let’s face it, it’s good to have goals.

S, on the other hand, is one of those people who love the promise of a new school year: the scents of new books and autumn in the air.  Her academic load gives me a stomachache:  Math, History, Religious Ed, Physical Ed, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, English, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek.  And my only goal week after week is the same:  keep up with the laundry.  Also, for fun, she takes Mandarin two days a week at lunchtime, but she thinks this might prove be too much.  Ya think?

With love from England,

T-Ann   

The Wall

Dear all,

This summer was, as I have mentioned before, a bit long though we were blessed with a visit from our 13-year-old Prairie Crossing neighbor.  Each and every one of us was thrilled to have him with us.  He is like a part of our family and, in fact, when we moved to England, I felt deeply that I had left a child behind I missed him so much 

We took him to very important places in England such as Cadbury World and Weston-Super-Mare, a seaside town with a proper grand pier.  Sadly, two days later, The Grand Pier burned to the ground in a matter of minutes. 

J and the boys dragged him around London.  What a trooper N was, throwing up on the lawn outside Westminster Abbey and nearly passing out at the Hard Rock Café while fighting a forty-eight hour flu.    You can always count on a good time when you visit us.

The homesickness was palpable in our house for weeks after N returned to the USA.   Then we endured the Olympics, which came on at 3:00 a.m. and annoyed R to no end because they only interviewed British athletes and the coverage did not include US teams. So those were a wash.

While touring a castle in Scotland, I walked into TWO rooms with the same William Morris Willow wallpaper we have in our house back home.  The sight of the wallpaper made my insides hurt.  I missed my house.

Ex-Pats often experience a little known phenomenon we refer to as Hitting The One Year Wall.  It’s when the charm of living abroad has evaporated.  When you miss people who understand that when you say ‘windbreaker’ you mean ‘jacket’ and not beach paraphernalia.  Or when you say something gives you the ‘willies’, you are not faced with looks of horror and mothers making mental notes to never let their child play with the little American boy.  Ditto the phrase ‘Just blow it off’. 

The Wall means you are tired of paying $12 a gallon for gas and $5 for a can of refried beans. Tired of the weather, tired of the five guys at the butcher’s shop staring at your boobs while you order up pork and leek sausages, tired of calling their sorry excuse for band-aids ‘plasters’, tired of hearing Michael Jackson on the radio, tired of the metric system and Celsius. But mostly, I’m tired of trying to figure out WTF is so intriguing about Posh and Becks.

I think, although I am a bit overdue, I may have hit The Wall.   And God knows, there better be dark chocolate, Merlot and really good music on the other side….

With love from England,

T-Ann

The Royal and Ancient

 Dear all,

Our reason for visiting Scotland was simple:  J desperately wanted to tick off one of the boxes on his To Do This Life list:  Play St. Andrews Old Course.  We scheduled the trip with our friends in order to watch the Jacques Leglise Tournament-a tournament of Europe’s next golf stars-and scam free meals. Our friend, The Really Good Golfer, was the captain of the Great Britain and Ireland team as they took on continental Europe.  Not only did J play the Old Course, another fine links course and a 1920’s hickory shaft course, but we were wined and dined by The Royal and Ancient, golf’s first ruling club and Britain’s version of the United States Professional Golf Association.

The Really Good Golfer is a humble gentleman.  He is arguably the finest British amateur golfer.  He has played with some of golf’s legends and has played in the US Masters three times.  He has received four crystal highball glasses for each hole in one he has made at the Masters.  If you are thirsty at their house, you’re as likely to be handed an old Ikea glass as one of his Master’s glasses, although only three remain as one was dropped years ago by one of the kids at dinner. The guy is seriously humble. 

So not only did we get to hang out with Europe’s talented new golfers we were treated to receptions filled with some of the world’s oldest money.  This is the crowd where the Du Ponts run as does the Cartier family and the Lacostes.  And now the Pierces? 

The Royal and Ancient Club is the stone building they highlight when you watch the British Open being played at St. Andrews.  Most people who work for the Royal and Ancient and certainly the course keepers at the Old Course have never been inside the prestigious club, but there we were, inside the club drinking wine in beautiful glasses etched with the R and A logo.  Such a shame my bag was too small to nick any. 

The reception was held in a room only recently opened up to women.  Portraits of royal and/or long deceased R and A members hung on the walls.  The ceiling looked like a Wedgwood ashtray, for lack of a better description, painted in Wedgwood blue with fine moldings defined in white.  We were invited into the secretary of the R and A’s office and out onto his infamous balcony for drinks while people down on the Old Course and walking around St. Andrews stared up at us wondering if we were royalty.  Or maybe thinking that we were a bunch of stuffy old gits.   Same thing.

There were a few speeches, which allowed me time to check out the women’s dresses.  It was a bit disappointing as the women were overall an amazingly frumpy lot.  One, however, from my vantage point behind, was quite elegant.  She was in her mid to late seventies.  Her silver hair was cut in a bob and she wore a hot pink very tight dress.  No underwear.   Bless her, I thought.  But, oh my, when she turned around!  She obviously burned her bra a lifetime ago and never looked back.  Wow.  The sight left me speechless, but The Wife lost no time voicing her concern that those aging, sagging, bra-less boobs might have put all the young, handsome golfers off sex. 

The best part, aside from The Wife and I holing ourselves up in the ladies room while she filled me in on Royal and Ancient gossip (literally-did you know Prince Andrew is gay?) was being escorted into the Members Only room by The Really Good Golfer.  

As a member, he was free to go in and bring J, a male guest. But The Really Good Golfer, as I said before, is quite a gentleman and he also possesses a great sense of humor.   He opened the door for his wife and me so that we entered the room first and there we stood, however briefly, alone in a men’s only room. 

The room was everything you’d want it to be:  the carpets were plaid as were the curtains framing the leaded windows.  Walnut paneling.  There were worn leather chairs occupied by equally worn, impossibly snobby looking men. There was a moment of surprise on each of the men’s faces as they looked up to see two women with great big smiles on their faces.  Then, all in turn, there was a stiffening of the backs.  Jaws dropped on cue, each man unable to form words.  Then came red faces and clenched hands on leather club chairs.  I suggested to The Really Good Golfer that it might be time to leave, but not before the giggles had set in.  How obnoxious these men were!  How obnoxious The Wife and I were hooting all the way out of the room.  I just wanted to shout, “I HAVE MY PERIOD!” or maybe lick something on my way out just to ensure that the Haz Mat team had to be called out.  

With love from England,

T-Ann

Even Prisoners get Paroled

Dear all,

Our dreary English summer is turning into a grey and dreary autumn.  While we have had some wonderful moments this summer, some that I will share with you later, I mostly have been holed up with four bored children the whole wet summer.  That is, until J and I escaped for five days to St. Andrews, Scotland.

I love Scotland.  I mean it.  I am completely in love with Scotland.  The craggy shoreline, the sea, the mist, the sunshine, the rain, the people.  I have had some sort of conversion, a bit like the first time I ever roamed through Vermont.  An instant homesickness for place I’ve never been before. We have traveled so much, but I rarely drive through foreign towns and villages and think to myself, ‘Wow.  Lucky you.  You get to live here,’ but that is exactly how I felt about every Scottish person we passed.

J and I drove up from Cheltenham.  We headed north and put Birmingham and Manchester behind us before 9:00 a.m. By the time we entered Cumbria, England, or The Lake District as it is called, we were ready for a break.  Cumbria is Beatrix Potter country.  We exited the motorway following signs for a rest stop and drove through a heavily wooded, winding road which lead to glass and stone walled lodge nestled in between mountains with a deep pond running right up to the glass wall.  Honestly, it was as if any number of Beatrix Potter’s characters would come padding over to us.  So spectacular was the setting, we hated to leave. And this was just a rest stop!

We drove further north and entered Scotland.  I was a bit disappointed.  It just looked so much like England.  Then the landscape began to turn.   The tidy green grasses slowly grew more stark and yellow.  Then we wound around a bend in the road and there it was:  the heather.  Mounds and mounds of purple hills and mountains fading into the mist.  Why does anyone leave Scotland I wondered and that was before we even got to the sea.

We made our way through Glasgow and around Edinburgh and drove up the east coast through tiny but proud villages of weathered grey stone buildings and cottages with bright blue front doors (Scotland’s flag is blue and white).  Grandmas walked with grandchildren in record numbers.  Scotland is like Ireland with a more grand past-not quite as humble and with better roads, but it is not as painfully cute as our part of England.  Rugged and refined.  I like that.

Our first sighting of the sea coincided with the first golf course we spotted.  The smell of the sea along with freshly cut grass was intoxicating.  The air was thick.  We rolled down the windows and breathed deeply.  The air in Scotland is so pure and clean; it almost feels sharp in your lungs.   London leaves your boogers black and in Cheltenham, I do not dust so much as wipe black grime off stuff.   It felt so good just to breath in Scotland.

By the time we arrived in St. Andrews, the golf Mecca, I was smitten. 

More to follow,

With love from England,

T-Ann