LAYERS OF LIFE

 

There are all kinds of options for exploring London, including walking tours that will take you through Shakespeare’s London, or the streets of Dickens, or to places where ghosts are thought to linger.  I did a private walking tour of London yesterday.  It was the ghosts of Beth past.  There were several bona fide sightings of me.  First at 19, gawking at an urban wonderland so far beyond anything I’d experienced that I might as well have been on a Star Trek mission making first contact with the residents of Alpha Centurion or Blizelspek Prime.  It was the summer after my freshman year in college, and I’d agreed, on a whim, to go to the UK with a dorm friend, her brother and his best friend.  I’d never met the guys and my friendship with the girl was new.  But I conned my parents into buying me a ticket and off I went.

I’d been feverishly in love with England for years, the England viewed through the lens of every historical fiction novel I could lay my hands on in the Grants Pass Public Library, a building that housed the literature that fed my hometown of 12,000 in southern Oregon.  The Readers Digest was Tolstoy in Grants Pass.  Needless to say, I worked my way through all of the historical fiction offerings and back again during my teen years.

London at age 19 was a blur.  Everything about a city was new to me, and London was a city on an epic scale.  The flash of cars and buses, and the throngs of smartly-dressed men and women making their way with casual ease down the crowded streets, making me keenly aware of my backpack-stuffed college clothes which were, themselves, remnants of high school chic.  London impressed as a series of patterns:  vertical heights of buildings, swirling whorls of people, darting cars, rumbling buses.

Then I returned to England to do graduate work and in my early 20s.  I had fled the United States with raw sorrows wailing and biting at my heels.  I was determined to put a continent and ocean between me and these banshees and to invent a new person, one whose world was entirely different:  built on my singular experiences, where admission was granted only to me.

There’s a special love for the places that help form you, and I was putty in London’s hands.  I learned its confident ease, the shortcuts and alleys that allowed me to walk, map-free, urban-savvy, with no hesitation, from place to place.  I was in my 20s, and on my own, and accountable to no one but me, in one of the great places of the world.  Any glance could be returned, any plan changed; it was freedom and ease, the electric thrill up the spine, and I was part of it all.

Now I am back and it’s different as it couldn’t help but be.  Both the city and I are less edgy, me to a much greater extent than London.  Where I walked before loose-limbed and sure in my body, I now walk with some of my attention cast inward, in surveillance of myself, my mind’s eye a security camera to see what thief might be prying open a window or door into my house of health.  If my body back then was a chic, modern and attractive one-bedroom apartment on an upper floor with a great view, it’s now more of a Victorian with occasional plumbing problems, sagging floors here and there and a paint job in need of a touch-up.

I miss the other me and her lithesome comfort in her body, the way she went from one place to another at a whim, on a lark.  London brings her back as does no other place.  It ignites a cellular memory, as well as memories of the other, emotional kind.

Still I realize that people change, cities change, life changes and London is a metaphor for that as are few other places.  Amid the bristling new, youthful buildings that glisten at night, catching the flash and dazzle of the streets, are lovely Victorians in rows of red and gold brick beauty.  Sprinkled among them are stunning medieval edifices, gorgeous paens to earlier times, to strength, and endurance.  Still found are buildings from the 1100s, from times shortly after William the Conqueror’s triumphant march to London.  Hidden in the earth below all these structures are remnants of Roman mosaics, and peeping out among the buildings are remaining bits of the Roman wall that once enclosed the city, that marked its circumference and established its safety zones.

All of these times co-exist in the shiny, youthful London of today.  As do my times, too.  Still present among the various layers of me.