Noah going through the barrier at King's Cross
The Divinity School, taken by Noah
To which answer Noah would swish and flick his wand, levitating us or turning us into—what was it?—water usually. Then majesterially we would move on to the next site. To my delight, more than once the progress stopped at one or another of the marvelous ancient, wood-paneled Oxford pubs. (You’ll notice, by the way, that Noah has already been sorted, via the Pottermore web site, into Hufflepuff.)
As you can tell, in recent weeks Noah has become a Harry fan. Dad, of course, couldn’t be prouder. We watched the first three movies on the MV Explorer, usually in the late afternoon, the magical (ha) happy hour time, sprawled on the bed with drinks and packets of weird chips from around the world (roasted chicken, paprika, sweet pepper, steak, chutney, and something from South Africa called curry bunny)—all this right before I had to go off to my evening hour in the Writing Center (I tried not to drink too much). The problem with introducing a five-year old to Harry Potter is that you can’t really get that far. The fourth through last stories get scary, and Noah doesn’t do scary very well. He peeks through his fingers and asks me to sit with him.
Also a Noah photo
Oxford is for me a magical place, most certainly. I instantly fell in love with England when I visited in 1979, aged 16, with a troop of high school students. I have lived in Oxford for about, oh, two-and-a-half months of my life, first in fall 1988 when my former wife and I had student work permits and endeavored to have an Anglophiliac adventure, and later when I had a small grant to look at old books in the Bodleian for my PhD dissertation. The place is full of ghosts for me. I showed Susan and Noah where I used to live, took them out to places that had once been familiar walks:
The Bodleian Library
Radcliffe Camera
Waving the wand in the Bodleian Quad
Christchurch College on a gorgeous day
(Scott’s takeaways: everything is about five times as expensive as it used to be; the place is polluted with KFCs and Starbuckses; the general complexion of the populace is far more international; but the essential eternal Englishness of the place remains very vital, in the English politeness and reserve, in the gorgeous (and gorgeously named) villages and in the history-drenched cities, in the fabulous pubs and food.)
We had a wonderful time—mostly. Nothing really (not even the wonderful cask-pulled ale) could temper the reality that our adventure was ending and we were shortly to be heading home. I was regularly a burden to myself and others, most certainly. I am writing this, in fact, on a Virgin Atlantic 747 headed (I almost wrote “steaming,” but this is roaring or charging) homeward. Our feelings are mixed and intense, or at least mine are. I don’t do well with transitions (note earliest blog entries). This is a tough one. Work looms. On Thursday Noah has his goodbye ceremony from the SSU Children’s School, where he has spent three-and-a-half marvelous years. In the fall comes kindergarten. We can’t wait to see our families and friends. But we’re coming back changed. Our ties to the routines of previous years are looser, and we have little interest in lacing ourselves back into them in the same constricted way. We have become adventurers. We’ve done without so much that seemed so important before, and we haven’t missed all that baggage. Who will we be, by virtue of these changes, in the place we call home?
We spent two-and-a-half days in or around Oxford in total, and also two full days in London. There we taught Noah how to navigate the London underground. On previous visits to London, my days have been full (too full) with museuming and monumenting. On this visit, we didn’t set foot inside the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. There was, admittedly, a forty-five minute blast through the British Museum, which is as ridiculous as it sounds. Mostly we walked.
On the grounds of the Tower of London
Noah’s favorite things were a great playground we found:
And a replica of Sir Francis Drake’s flagship, the Golden Hinde (a replica I had seen in the eighties when she sailed into Humboldt Bay).
Sir Noah Cameron Drake
We also hung around with our friends the Scotti-Everett family; Noah got some final time with his dear friend Jude.
Hello? Hello?
Near the National Gallery
Shaun the Sheep
Last farewell to a good, good buddy
Back in Oxford, we rented a car and took a drive. Almost flipping a coin, we wound up a half hour north of Oxford at Broughton Castle, a lovely old manor house with fourteenth-century bits, set amid gorgeous springtime countryside.
Wearing an English Civil-War-era helmet
Stunning English country
The very last thing we did before returning to our B&B to pack was attend evensong Eucharist at the Merton College chapel: thanks to the opportunity for a little quiet and meditation and to hear a magnificent choir sing Taverner, the best of all possible things to do to complete our journey.
—+—
Flash forward. Now it’s a week later, and we’re home and settling in. Today is my 52nd birthday; yesterday was Mother’s Day, and we got to go down and see my folks and Susan’s mom; today Noah is back at the Children’s school at SSU—almost as if nothing has happened. Honestly, our Semester at Sea adventure is seeming right now like a dream.
This is not the last blog entry. I have at least one more to do, on some highlights of our shipboard time. Perhaps another covering some ports I haven't reported on. But England was the last port.
But the voyage was real. Every now and then I get a wave of grief and loss for our ship and for our dear friends. We really have changed and grown by virtue of the adventure—Noah especially. I think he crammed about two years’ worth of social development into four months. He’s a real boy now. Susan and I were noticing that the only vestige left of his infancy may well be his preferred sleeping posture: knees underneath, butt in the air. More than a quarter of Noah’s life with us before college is over. I can hardly believe it.
We loved our voyage and feel so incredibly lucky to have been able to embark upon it. But here’s the final take-home: a sea voyage makes a great analogy for life, as I’ve written. But the truth is that a sea voyage is not life. After the voyage, the adventure continues. There is no reason why the rest of life can’t be just as much an adventure—indeed it is a mistake to see it as anything other than an adventure. That’s our biggest learning. All of us are adventurers, voyagers, sojourners. Nothing we see, even if we’ve seen it a hundred times, is unbeautiful, unexciting, even unexotic. There is no call whatsoever to live with polluted eyes--eyes unable to see the spirits animating the world. The mistake is in domesticating into our habits and into our comforts. Everything in the world, including our backyards, is an exciting new land to explore.
Here is the final photograph I took in England and the final photograph I took on our Semester at Sea adventure. We’ve just left the Merton Chapel following the evensong service. Susan and Noah, and I with the camera, are making our way to dinner through the old streets of Oxford—and beyond that on to a new adventure, whatever it might be.
