Legal in London
On February 4, I got up at 3:30 in the morning and put my firstborn on a plane to London, where she was going to spend a week in a hostel with her roommate Stephanie before boarding a flight for Accra, Ghana, for her semester abroad at the University of Legon. This was not an easy thing for a mother to do. I am, of course, immensely proud of her: the way she worked out all the details, the finances, everything. But I tend to worry about little things, like clean water and bedbugs and malaria. Her roommate was going to Senegal, and leaving a day earlier from London. I didn’t even want to think about her navigating Heathrow by herself, let alone Africa. Sure, she went to Japan for a month when she graduated from high school, but that was a chaperoned, preplanned trip.
And this is more than a month. She will stay until June 15 - unless, she tells me the Saturday before she leaves, she decides to take an internship over the summer. At any rate, she will celebrate her 21st birthday on another continent. She tells me with blustery pride that as soon as she gets on that plane to London, she will be legal for the rest of her life. An odd collocation of space and time.
Of course all the things I worried about she pooh-pooh’ed…up until a day or two before she was to leave. On the drive to the airport, the conversation was all about clean water and bedbugs and malaria. And now I must be reassuring, though I am no less worried about such things than I was. You will manage, I say. And she will, of course. Her dad and I watch her get on that plane, and then we go back to our separate lives, and we wait.
The hostel in London is not nearly as dirty as she feared it would be, given that it was so cheap (thank you Jesus), and there is Internet access, so she posts in her journal. She knows enough about London to be suspicious of cabs that are not black, but when they arrive so late that there is no tube and no official cabs running and no way to get to the hostel, they take their chances with a nice man who shows them a lot of official looking papers, and get where they need to go. “Honestly the only reason I believed him was because the font on my oyster card and the font on his id were the same. Funny thing, details like that.”
Maggie’s had problems with crowds every since she went to a Franz Ferdinand concert at the Xcel Center and had a scary experience in the mosh pit, but she seems to be able to deal with the “underground crush” without getting freaked out. She goes to the National Gallery and sees a favorite picture, Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (“it’s just eerie. I love it.), as well as “Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting with the twisted skull thing.” Anybody who can identify that one for me wins a prize. Although she has announced her intention to clean up her language some so that family can read her blog, she remains somewhat cavalier about her spelling. And I don’t think she is thinking of her grandparents when she comments that she walked the length of Hyde Park and “my ankles are pissed at me,” or when she describes what a British version of Avenue Q is like:
They changed A LOT for Britian--including my favorite line of the song "Schadenfreude" (happiness at the misfortune of others) in which Gary Coleman is listing off situations in which you feel good that other people are doing dumb things: "Watching a frat boy realize just what he stuck his dick in". Unfortuantely they don't have frat boys here, and so they changed it to "a drunk guy" which just wasn't nearly as personally satisfying. Ah well.
The cost of things in London - eight bucks for a one way subway ticket, for example - is alarming, even though they’d been prepared for it. She notices that stores have second story display windows in London, because of the double decker buses. Neither she nor her roommate is impressed with modern art at the Tate, calling her time there “kind of a scavenger hunt titled ‘Find a piece that doesn't seem stupid.’" In her final entry in London, she describes going out to look for a market and ending up with her roommate in “a kind of not-so-good part of town.”
The odd part isn't that London had a bad part of town, but that both of us mentioned that we felt more 'at home' there than anywhere else. There was just something about it that seemed like the Midway, and that just felt better. Of course, it was daylight--at night it would have been a different matter. It's interesting the things that make us feel at home that we don't think about until it's not there--and it's not really even a concious thing.
And then she gets on another plane.