Adventures in communication.

This morning, an abbreviated version of my morning's work accomplished, I strolled to the city centre with my friend. We had a specific mission ahead of us: to purchase mobile phones and kit them out for international calling. I dislike tasks like this so much that even as we entered the city's market square, I could feel my apprehension rising. "Do you want me to do the talking?" he asked. No, no, I said, I can do it just fine (somehow it had been our plan that I would do the talking, perhaps because I had done the research). I just always expect something to go horribly wrong.

Nothing went horribly wrong; we just worked with a sales representative who was so new to his job that his nametag read "Visitor." The transaction took at least 30 minutes, I'd say, and for most of that time, we stood at the counter twiddling our thumbs and/or pointing out amusing things around the store. (Why, for instance, do our top-up cards say that they expire in 12/99? Are they actually good until the end of this century?) (Who thought it was a good idea to name a headset Smokin' Buds? Or, for that matter, to name the headset's company SkullCandy?) Finally, Visitor the Salesman said, "That will be £39.98, please," and we both just stood still on the other side of the counter, confused as to what was happening. I had priced these packages at something much more like £20; where had all this extra cost come from? Suddenly I realized the problem: he'd rung us up on a single bill, despite the fact that we'd given separate addresses within the college. This difficulty turned out to be an eminently surmountable one, as did the fact that my bank card is not of the "chip and pin" variety that has become ubiquitous here, apparently rendering old-school credit cards obsolete.

To reward ourselves for having taken the plunge into mobile phone use with our delightfully low-tech phones, we headed off for lunch and drinks at The Pickerel, a beautifully blue pub in a part of Cambridge I hadn't yet visited. And then to Magdalene College, across the road from the pub.

Magdalene has the distinction of having been home to Samuel Pepys (say: peeps), who is (in a way) one of the Cabinet's greatest heroes. Pepys took his degree from Magdalene in 1654. From 1660 to 1669, he kept an increasingly voluminous diary, which is now housed in a Library named for him at his old college. (I feel a bit like Luisa from The Fantasticks: "Every day something new happens to me!" It's difficult not to walk around here with an enormous dopey grin on one's face. And so I generally don't try very hard.)

Signs instructed us that the Pepys Library is now closed. And my guess is that not just anyone can go handling the diary's manuscripts even when it's open. But I now have one more place on the agenda for this year's Grand Tour of Rare and Astounding Things. And perhaps my doctorate and autobiography chops will come in handy when I turn up there again.

After we acquired stamps, we took a leisurely but stately stroll through my friend's own alma mater, another of Cambridge's very venerable colleges, and did so under the auspices of his status as an alumnus. Especially while I'm still finding my comfort as a member of this community, rather than as an outsider, it was exceptional indeed to be able to walk in blithe confidence past the "No Visitors Allowed" signs as we made our way back to our own lovely home.

Even if we don't have dahlias here.

* * *

How could I have forgotten to tell you that as we walked through town we saw a startlingly low-key run on a bank? Across the street from where we walked, a long, thick queue of people seemed to be waiting for something. "Is something happening with the coffee?" my friend asked, since they initially seemed to be queueing around Costa Coffee. But next door to Costa is Cambridge's branch of the bank Northern Rock, which (though we didn't know it at the moment) was having a cataclysmically bad day. Having gotten a bailout from the Bank of England (lender of last resort), the bank faced queues all over England today as worried people showed up to empty their accounts and put their money into other, safer-seeming banks. Northern Rock shares lost 30% of their value today. Now, I've learned that the bank was writing mortgages worth six times their holders' incomes, a figure that (given the costs of living here) makes me catch my breath. Everyone in the queue we saw seemed reasonably cheery about it, which almost made us think that we weren't seeing what we were in fact pretty sure we were seeing. But we were indeed seeing it.

Grazing.

In my college, we sign up for dinner by 2 p.m. on days we want to eat meals. (I have yet to eat lunch at my college; I know it's an entirely different crowd at lunchtime, so I'll have to check it out at some point.) There's a posted menu, so I consult it before I decide what to mark: H for "hot" or V for "vegetarian." I'm not a committed vegetarian. But I don't feel a great need to eat meat every day, or even many times a week, if there's a good vegetarian option on offer. Tonight's option was meant to be spinach frittata, which sounded delicious when I was signing up (after a heavy--but also delicious--beef dinner) on Tuesday.

But when I went in after the soup course to pick up my entree, Pat (who runs the kitchen with briskness and cheer) said, "He's getting yours right now." Trevor (who's the main chef on duty at night) was hard at work at a griddle at the back of the kitchen. After my dinner companions headed back to our table, I made conversation with Pat and Trevor while he continued doing whatever it was he was doing (I couldn't see). For one thing, I finally thought to ask Pat whether it's a problem that I'm sometimes a vegetarian and sometimes not. "I don't care," she said. "You can order whatever you want." "You can choose whatever you want," Trevor agreed. I told the story about getting stuck in the boot on Sunday, and Pat and I talked about the staggering array of brands at John Lewis (which, it turns out, is set to open a massive store in a new mall that will open in downtown Cambridge in about six weeks--who knew? it's all happening about half a block east of what have become my usual haunts and paths).

And then Trevor presented me with a gorgeous, fresh omelet made with fresh grilled vegetables.

As far as I can figure, I was the only person to put in for the vegetarian option, and so rather than make a whole frittata and have it go to waste, he just threw this omelet together when he saw me coming in to get my food.

Here is yet another of the many reasons I love my college. I know that this kind of attention is due in part to the fact that most people aren't here yet, and so I'm not expecting it to continue in quite this way, come October. But I love, beyond my expectation, how friendly everyone in this place has been. When I got locked out of the main college building last night in the aftermath of our Wednesday night Formal Hall fancy-dress dining event, it was actually the college president's wife who finally came to let me back in. It's just like that. People keep their eyes out for one another.

At dinner--before the omelet's grand revelation--I turned to my neighbor friend and said, "I could look this up, but I know you know the answer, so: what's the deal with the cows across the river from King's?"

"Well," he said, with a flourish that I have come to recognize as characteristic, "when Henry VI built the college in the fifteenth century, all of that land was commons, and people grazed their animals on it. And so he decreed that that part of the land would remain commons, and cows have grazed there ever since."

Yet another reason to love this place.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will acquire a mobile phone, which is such an expected part of one's personal arsenal here that I've actually been frowned on a couple of times (say, by my doctor's office) for not being able to provide a mobile number. If all goes very well, I may also ride out of the day on a bicycle rented for the year. I'm starting to feel a desire to get further afield faster than on foot.

It was this kind of day here today.

Locked in, locked out.

The first time I went to Oxford, back in 1996, I was stunned by how excluded I felt. (I know now that it was a sign of my incredible privilege that that was perhaps my first experience of feeling utterly locked out.) Here, all over town, little doors open up vistas into the most beautiful courtyards and gardens and quads and cloisters you can imagine, even more beautiful than Oxford's. And little signs just inside the doors tell you "No Entry. College Closed to Visitors." I feel less excluded this time, simply because one of these colleges is my own, and once I have a university ID card, more of them may be open to me. And by virtue of my research, Newnham College--the one with these patinaed gates--will (I hope) be open to me, at least within reasonable bounds, within a few weeks.

"I was so glad to register with the surgery," my neighbor-friend told me the other day, "because I'd only seen Newnham from the main road before, and from there, it's fairly unremarkable. But from Newnham Walk, it looks like heaven in there." I verified this the next day when I trotted down to the same surgery and registered myself with the National Health Service.

Newnham is important because it was the second Cambridge college founded for women, back in the 1870s, and it was the first one to be founded near the men's colleges. I stood and stared at the gates for a long time the other day, wondering whether they are, in fact, the same gates that were pulled down by male undergrads and alums on the second occasion (in the early 1920s) when there was a vote about whether or not to allow women to take degrees from Cambridge in addition to pursuing courses of study. Though the women (who weren't able to vote at all, not being Cambridge alums) were not granted the right to take degrees during that election, Cambridge men stormed the gates anyhow. In the 1890s, the first time the women weren't granted that privilege, the college was somehow able to protect its property, but the passage of 30 years had apparently emboldened the next generations of voters. (When the vote came up a third time, in the 1940s, women were granted the right to sit exams and earn degrees with no trouble at all. Go figure.)

I love the prevalence of sunflowers on the gates. Sunflowers were an incredibly important symbol in the American suffrage movement because Kansas passed a state referendum in 1867 to allow women to vote, and the Kansas state symbol was the sunflower. I don't know whether or not that's why these sunflowers are here, but I suspect it may well be.

When I stroll out into town, past the colleges with their open-but-closed gates and the hordes of people whizzing by knowingly on their bicycles (all with the most enormous bicycle baskets you can imagine), I've come to put a certain look on my face, a half-smile and a twinkle that belie any sense I might have of not completely belonging here. Cambridge was half the place that led Virginia Woolf to wonder, in A Room of One's Own (which she delivered here, at Newnham and Girton), whether it's worse to be locked in or locked out. I figure that I'm in the best of both worlds right about now. And will be even more so within a few months.

Illuminated.

Today, I took an afternoon walk to the city centre and beyond, still in search of table lamps. On my outbound walk, I saw something I'd never seen before: a woman perched on a bicycle, just riding along while her male partner held both handlebars, pushing and steering. She was elegant and effortless (literally), sitting there with both feet on one side of the bike, almost as though she were riding it side-saddle. They carried on an earnest conversation as we passed one another. Because she didn't have to do any of the work of propelling the bike and thus only had to maintain her balance while she was pushed along (which couldn't have been that easy, to be sure, since she wasn't holding on to anything), she was completely focused on his face.

I finally found a good store for buying lamps and pretty much everything else, which was a relief. Now I can stop thinking about whether I'll ever find lamps that I like and can afford. Alas that one of the two I wanted had to be special-ordered, something I learned only after I'd spent some 30 minutes pairing bases and shades to make the small and lovely lamp I was able to bring home.

What I hadn't anticipated was how different light bulbs are here, and how relatively low the maximum wattage is in standard home lighting. Though the lampshade I selected is rated for a 100W bulb, the maximum for the lamp itself is 60W. In fact, I saw only one table lamp that could take even 100W, a bit of a shock for the woman who usually rocks a 150W reading lamp in home and office. (My solution here: burn more lamps at the same time, hoping for a cumulative effect. Hence the prolonged search for lighting. It's only partly about decor.) So, I went to the light bulb display, seeking a 60W bulb. I had to be sure to look for a golf ball type bulb. I also had to look for a bulb with a BC (or bayonet cap) base, as opposed to an ES (or Edison screw), so that I wouldn't have to make a return trip to exchange a £1.50 purchase. I know that at Lowes I regularly shop a whole aisle of bulbs, so it's not as though I'm saying that something about the English and their bulbs is particularly strange. It was just strange to me this afternoon, in a way that was unexpectedly staggering.

Walking home with one of my two lamps purchased and bagged, I came up behind yet another pair of people walking a bike. This time, a teenaged girl pushed another teenaged girl's bike, while that girl perched on the bike and told a story. Two sightings of this arrangement have left me wanting to hire a bike for the year (something I'm considering anyhow) just so that I can then find someone to push me around on it. I want to hear the kind of stories that get told during that kind of ride.

Where's your wife?

Oh, magpies. I had literally forgotten all about magpies. Somehow, I don't remember their having been around during any of my research trips; the last time I recall watching them was when I lived in Devon twelve years ago. As they've started flocking into my college's courtyard--perhaps because our resident children were in school today?--I've started seeing them again.

(See him? These are the chimneys at the top of the building I face when I sit at my desk.)

Last night after dinner, my new neighbor-friend and I swapped magpie lore. "When you see one magpie," I said to him, "aren't you supposed to get someone else to acknowledge having seen it, too, to be sure it's really there and that you're not mad?" He hadn't heard that one. "But," he said, "I do seem to remember that when you see an odd number of magpies, you're supposed to greet them by saying, 'Hello, Mr. Magpie! Where's your wife?'" But if you see an even number of magpies and you say that, then you're in for years of horrible luck."

Because I could only see one magpie in the yard from where I was sitting, I called out, "Hello, Mr. Magpie! Where's your wife?" Obligingly, he stood to verify that the magpie did exist and that I wasn't mad. But he couldn't see it. "Clearly, you're mad," he said. "It's not a problem," I replied. "We've known about this for years." He's now alerted me to even more magpie lore.

This morning, a single magpie once again walked into the yard. "Hello, Mr. Magpie!" I cried. "Where's your wife?" And then a second magpie walked out. Damn, I thought. Many years of bad luck, coming my way. But then there was a third magpie, and so all was well. And sure enough, when I checked my pigeonhole in college, there was a slip alerting me to the fact that I had "one parcel (large)" waiting for me at the porter's lodge--my $69 box! And so it is that tonight I will sleep under my beautiful mama's beautiful quilt. It has changed my entire space, as I knew it would--that's why I mailed it over.

On my way home from my second trip (this time, with phone number in hand) to the surgery where I am now a registered patient (and beneficiary of the National Health System), I saw my last magpie of the day, painted on a construction barrier.

Do you know Josh Rouse's "Sweetie"? You should.

Stuck in a boot.

At 3 p.m., I'd have sworn to you that I would be wearing a particular pair of half-zipped black leather boots for the rest of my life.

Continuing my weekend of getting to know my new town, I set out today to find the Grafton Centre, Cambridge's shopping mall. On my way there, I stopped in at Next, enticed by a window display of homewares (or, as they're called here, homewear). Suddenly I was being enticed on all sides by displays of relatively inexpensive clothing. And then there were the boots. I did not bring my heeled dress boots, figuring that I would hunt down a pair here. I found a pair in my size and proceeded to try them on--only to get the zipper stuck halfway down my calf.

Now, even by U.S. standards, I have a fairly wide calf. By British standards, I have an enormous calf. That hadn't seemed to be a massive problem as I was putting these boots on--though I suspect I wouldn't have wanted to wear them for long. But somehow, as I was unzipping them, part of the leather facing for the zipper got chewed into its teeth and refused to budge up or down. Embarrassedly, I spent probably ten minutes trying to gentle the facing back out of the zipper so that I could remove the boot and flee. Finally, I called in a salesgirl for help. She called in another salesgirl. I eventually pulled my foot out of the half-zipped boot, and the second salesgirl disappeared with it to find someone who could fix the zipper.

At this point, it crossed my mind that I should flee while no one was looking, just in case the "you break it, you buy it" rule were about to be invoked; the last thing I was interested in today was paying £55 for a pair of boots with a stuck zipper, particularly since the boots didn't fit all that well to begin with. But I stayed, hoping that everything would work out. And it did. Though I fancied the first salesgirl was eyeing me askance for the rest of the time I stayed in the shoe area, trying on flats and other non-zipping shoes.

I did eventually make it to the Grafton Centre, winding my way there through the city centre's strange, twisty streets and across one of its lush green spaces, Christ's Pieces--which is distinguished in part, in my mind, by the fact that its landscape design includes small decorative plots of corn surrounded by assorted flowers and greenery. Corn! As park decor! Indeed, even before I reached the mall, I suspected that the walks there and back would turn out to have been the best parts of the outing--not to denigrate the mall, where I finally purchased an umbrella and the cardigan I'm likely to be wearing day in and day out for the next two months at least. (Though I was reminded forcibly, once again, of how expensive almost every single thing is here. I want to buy a table lamp for my flat. Just a table lamp. Maybe two. This is the kind of thing I'd go down the road to Lowes for, if I were in Ohio. But here I am (I think) stuck with department stores, which means I'm looking at some fairly hefty prices. I may have found a good one today for £15. I may have to go back later in the week to check it out again. But everything else--most of it not very nice anyway--was pushing £30 or more. And, for those of you keeping score at home, the pound is running about $2.03 right now.)

The best things that happen to me here, so far, happen on walks, not at destinations. Today, just for instance, I saw the King's College cows again, grazing in their part of The Backs, across the Cam from their college. (See how big the cows are in that picture at the top of this writing? Click it and see. Those are punters going by on the river, just behind them. I'd guess the punters are about ten feet behind the cows.) And only moments later, I heard the distinctive cry of a baby bird and looked down to see a moorhen and its chick in the little stream beside me. Once again, I rued not having a stronger zoom lens.

But you can, I hope, see both the parent (at center) and the chick (climbing up behind the parent, working on eating in the reeds on the bank). There really are babies and young ones everywhere here.

Of all my fruitless searches.

There was a moment, at about 6 p.m., when I thought that I'd missed the grocery store's closing time and would actually be forced to eat in a restaurant because I had no food in the house. It's been a long time since I've felt that little sinking in the pit of my stomach--that feeling of having mismanaged things badly enough to leave myself with nothing to eat. Fortunately, even though the other shops were closing up, Sainsbury's was still open--and bustling.

Even more fortunately, they were selling umbrellas.

After having spent the morning and afternoon reading my very strange Thomas Hardy novel, I headed out in the late afternoon to acquire some more basics. A power strip. Ink (finally). Milk. A Handbook of British Birds (the better to identify the moorhens that run through The Backs, the green spaces and gardens that stretch along the west side of the Cam, across from the colleges on the river's east side). And an umbrella. Today, I even began my errands by searching for an umbrella, since I've managed to come home without one for two days in a row. Store after store, I searched high and low, finding only one place that carried them--and finding that place's selection damnably weak and overpriced. Finally, as I was about to give up and just buy some groceries, I rediscovered the umbrella display at the door of the grocery store.

Then things got weird. I know that I selected an umbrella. It cost £5. It was in my shopping basket. And yet somehow, when I got halfway home and realized that I hadn't put it in my grocery bag with my other items, I also realized that I hadn't seen it on the conveyor belt. Either it disappeared from my shopping basket--which would be downright bizarre--or I left it there when I put my things on the belt. Or, inexplicably, I never put it in there to begin with.

It was that kind of day here: there was some oversleeping and some disorientation (at one point, I woke up facing the wall and started to panic because I couldn't think of anywhere I should be waking up to utter blankness); there was a lot of reading; there was a lovely walk to town and a stroll through the local Arts and Crafts Market; and then there was a frustrating and frustrated search for a very basic item that, in my own country, I'd be able to locate with no difficulty. Because we have enormous stores that carry everything, instead of many specialized stores. I will be glad for the specialized stores during the majority of my stay here. Today, they just pissed me off.

On my walk home, listening to my bottle of rioja clinking against my bottle of olive oil, I stopped to watch the moorhens chasing each other. They have long legs and enormous feet, and when they run they resemble little children running headlong with their hands clasped behind their backs. In fact, they looked not unlike the child I saw racing his father to meet his laughing mother on the Garret Hostel Lane bridge this afternoon. What I hadn't anticipated about this year is how much proximity I would have with small children, or how much I would be gladdened by their being around--even when they're screaming, "Come here! Come here!" or "Shut up!" The college's children play all day long. I suspect that they, too, may be realizing that their summer is nearly over.

Tomorrow I will try again for an umbrella.

You're all right, my love.

Yesterday, as I was returning from the library, two workmen were dismantling something atop this building, at the corner of my street. When I stepped to one side to try and get out of their way, one of them said to me in the undertoned way I've experienced so many times in this country, "You're all right, my love."

Today has been a day for realizing just how much about England is very familiar to me, after twelve years of being here intermittently, and just how much about my sense of landscape aesthetics--of how to see a landscape at all--has grown out of my time here. I read Alain de Botton's marvelous The Art of Travel (2002) in the days leading up to my journey, and I finished it just before we began our descent into Gatwick. Near the end of his essay "On the Exotic," de Botton summarizes ninteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert's idea that national identity should be assigned "not according to the country of a person's birth or ancestral origins, but instead according to the places to which he or she was attracted" (96). I can remember coming home from England in 1996 and feeling as though I'd been transplanted to some alien planet; I can remember coming back from visiting my brother in 1999 and feeling intensely doubtful (and not a little confused) when the passport control official in Philadelphia greeted me with a cheery, "Welcome home!"

England is not, and probably will never be, my actual home country. And in many ways, it's no better (or worse) than the U.S. It's different. But many of the ways in which it's different are very congenial to me. I love the pedestrian-oriented nature of much of this country. I love that it would actually be an enormous pain for me to have a car here, rather than the other way around, and yet that I can walk to everything I need (and probably to most, if not all, things I want). I love that there are buildings here that predate the eighteenth century--and that the city centre, at least, is densely built enough that it can't be modernized beyond recognition or individual identity. History is visible here in a way that it simply isn't in much of the U.S.

I love specific brands that I can get here. I love that I can get not only Nescafe Gold Blend in almost any size I want but also a grocery store knock-off of Gold Blend that's every bit as good and half the price. I love that English milk and yogurt don't upset my stomach, so that I don't have to pay triple the price for special milk just to be able to eat cereal. And I love that people will call you "love" pretty much everywhere: even though part of me feels as though it should perhaps bristle when I'm called "love" or "my love" by a random man on the sidewalk, more of me appreciates those little fillips of consideration.

For some reason, I awoke extraordinarily early today. When I realized by 7:15 that I was not going to fall asleep again, I also realized that I should take advantage of being awake for morning light, which I don't typically see. With my brief morning routine over, I headed out for a walk--and decided to explore the strange road/footpath that (according to Google Maps) disappears somewhere west of here.

No one was around when I set out. I walked westward past the rugby practice field that borders my college, then watched the asphalt path get choppier and choppier. In not much time, I reached a barbed wire fence that could have been with me in mid-Ohio.

And yet on the other side of the path was a mix of fruits familiar and strange. Another member of the college had alerted us to the presence of edible blackberries along that walk (though anyone who's seen The Good Girl is, I suspect, unlikely to be too cavalier about eating strange blackberries). But no one told me about whatever this fruit is:

After awhile, I reached a stile whose very presence seemed to portend glimpses of cows in the further field sometime this year, though there were no cows this morning:

And it was right about this time that I realized that though I could in fact see a continuation of my path, I didn't feel like walking any further without having alerted someone, somewhere, about where I was and what I was up to. I turned around and headed back toward the asphalt, there in the morning haze. By the time I reached my room, it was only 8:15 a.m., and I still seemed to be the only person awake (though I know that I wasn't; I'd actually seen some of our resident families eating breakfast in their flats' kitchens even before I set out).

Though I did get through some reading (and furniture rearrangement!) this morning and afternoon, my chief business involved getting to know the city centre (and chiefly its bookstores) more thoroughly. Strangely, bottles of black ink seem to be less common here than I'd have expected, and I'll be damned if I don't keep forgetting to buy an umbrella while I'm out shopping--an absence of mind that's going to come back to bite me soon if I'm not careful.

I've decided that one problem I'm experiencing with my pictures in the city centre and of the colleges is a direct result of my almost never having both hands free while I'm shooting. Tomorrow, I'm going to endeavor to perform only one task at a time: grocery shopping or taking pictures, for instance. And movie-going. And, possibly, dining out--because though my college's food is wonderful so far, the kitchen is closed on weekends.

It's feeling more and more like home already. I'm all right, my love.

Changed priorities ahead.

As my coach left Gatwick airport and entered the M25 yesterday morning, we passed a road sign reading "Changed Priorities Ahead." Even in my sleepiness, I recognized this as a sign of great import.

All of Tuesday's and Wednesday's travelling went as smoothly as anyone could have desired: I managed to get an unnecessary connecting flight removed from my itinerary; my bags turned out not to be overweight; I saw them both come off the plane in Charlotte and thus knew that they had accompanied me at least partway on my journey. I had many hours to spend in the Charlotte airport and devoted that time to such matters as purchasing a pair of headphones equipped with a microphone and then downloading and learning to use Skype. The airplane food was fine; the airtime was adequate for a moderate amount of sleeping; the passport control man looked at my passport, said, "Oh, you're an academic visitor, are you?", noted where I was going, and passed me through (proving that the visa was good for something after all); I caught my bus right on time; I slept for three hours; I took a taxi; and then I was here.

All settled in, well-rested and well-fed, I ventured out to the library early this afternoon. On my way there, I reflected--as one inevitably does, on just arriving in or returning to England--on the terrific nature of this country's signage. Witness:

When I discovered this sign on the wall of my college this afternoon, I looked around for its raison d'etre and couldn't find it. To all initial appearances, this sign is a random memento mori, there on a brick wall along a sidewalk. (To his credit, my new neighbor-friend, upon our return from grocery shopping, thought to look around the corner and discovered another sign, this one more clearly positioned at the gate to an electrical or mechanical space behind the wall. But I love the fact that this one remains apparently referentless. Also that Death is, in this image, an enormous Arrow to the Heart.)

I was so taken with the Danger of Death sign that I did not capture the Calmed Traffic sign across my road. You will likely see it in the future.

Another English classic:

I actually cut short my photographing of this sign when a passing driver whistled or yelled or did something or another rude, all because I was taking a picture. It is still very much tourist season in Cambridge, and my anxiety about seeming like a tourist (why? why would it matter? because tourists are so often loud and obnoxious and inconsiderate of the actual residents of a place, and because I don't want to be any of those things.) has made me a little bit shy about dragging the big camera out of the bag and peering at this new world through it. And in any case, I spent a gorgeous chunk of the afternoon inside this building (or rather inside the building of whose tower this is the top--the University Library), where my camera was locked in a locker while I prowled and crept around a new warren of shelves and stacks and tiny submarine-style stairways.

And so I wasn't taking pictures then.

Early this evening, though, I headed out to the grocery store. Now, this is a thing I can barely believe. I don't mean to sound gushy, but I'm going to: here's what I see when my footpath to the city centre reaches the footbridge that takes me over the Cam and toward what's called Senate House Passage:

You don't have to try very hard to imagine why I'm so excited to be here, and why I think I'm about to get some of the best work of my life done. That's Clare College (parent of my college) in the foreground, with the spires of King's College Chapel behind it.

When I return from the grocery (which has its own wonders, with some of which I have long been familiar and with some of which I am newly acquainted [cf. the wine aisle, stocked to the gills with inexpensive tempranillos]), here's what greets me just before I head back into the alleys and passageways that carry me to the footbridge. First, King's College:


Then, within the passage, a tower topped with sundials (there are six), part of Gonville and Caius (say: keys) College:

Why that random sliver of roof in the left side of the image? All I can say is that my framing and composition have taken a hit in the past couple of days. As I told my new neighbor-friend, I feel as though my eyes have to re-learn how to see things here. It's no exaggeration, and I've spent the day wondering whether or not I should walk around without my camera for a few days, just looking. But then there are already images that I haven't caught that I regret--the evening sun against the buildings that square off the Market, for one, or the weird plays of light in the alleys and crooked streets that make up this city. It's the right place for me right now: things are quieter and calmer here (at least for now, since the university isn't in term for another few weeks), and I, in turn, am calmer (though perhaps not quieter) too.

Last night's twelve hours of sleep might have something to do with that feeling of calm, too.

Here, I am here.

So far, it's not very glamourous. But the glamour will commence shortly. As will the pictures--of my flight, of my surrounds, of random architectural features of my surrounds. You will love it.

Bye bye, Ohio.

My mother has given me memories of my very young self, saying to departing things in a particular, mournful way, "Bye bye, [thing]." Example: "Bye bye, tree" (to the Christmas tree). I can't remember what else I parted from that way--probably planes, buses, the garbage man, my blanket when she washed it, my father, my mother, the daylight, my books, my youth, the moon. Now I am saying again and again (just to myself, because the small plane that will take me to the big plane is delayed, and I don't think that my boarding gate companions would appreciate my vocal stylings), "Bye bye, Ohio. Bye bye."

A family in the boarding gate is crying and crying, a scene that I haven't seen much in airports since we stopped being able to accompany passengers down to the gate. And a young man near them just said, "I'm about to cry." I find myself wondering what I don't know about what's happening here. I think that these men might be en route to Iraq, but I'm thrown off by their not being in uniform. But one of them--the one who just said he's about to cry, who's obviously saying goodbye to his girlfriend--has a tattoo that reads USMC. I have to say: this scene puts my departure into a totally different perspective. And I find myself really glad, for these people's sake, that our flight has been delayed for awhile.

If Charlotte has free wireless, I may pop in later with tales of the day. Otherwise, you'll hear from me again when I've reached the other side.

***

Oh, Skype...

***

So here's the thing: it's qualitatively different to go overseas now than it was the last time I left for a year (which was, to be sure, twelve years ago). Then, my whole family stood within view the whole time I walked down the jetway in Indianapolis, and we knew that even phone calls home would be almost prohibitively expensive. Thirty minutes ago, I was on the (one-way) computervideophone with my beloved Lexingtonians; thirty minutes before that, I was chatting over iChat with my parents; thirty minutes before that, I spoke with my favorite Chicagoan friend for half an hour and spent only $.60 because we were speaking through the computer. And as soon as I have an IP address in my new room, I'll be able to start calling people just as though I never left home. It's reassuring, and not a little bit strange.

And that's not even to mention the mind-blowing weirdness of being able to choose whether or not to liveblog one's own progress toward another country.

We are coming up on general boarding, so this time I'm out for real. "Maintain control of your carry-on baggage," I have been admonished for hours. Sometimes it's not so easy.

Last minutes.

I was okay--if a little harried--as the day went on, and as I gathered things up, squeezed them into the corners of various bags, and as I raced through doing the dishes and drying them and putting them away and folding the last load of laundry and packing the sheets away into the linen closet and rolling up the area rugs and cleaning the bathroom. And I was okay, though veering sharply toward melancholy, as two of my dear students arrived and saw me off by helping me finish the things I needed to do in the apartment. And I was okay, if a little oblivious (probably because a little oblivious) as I rode off the hill in the back of my excellent friends' car, with my year's worth of clothing and miscellanies in the trunk. And I was better than okay through a lovely dinner with my excellent friends and my flaming-sworded friend and her excellent husband and my excellent novelist friend and his excellent wife. Excellence all around. And then it hit me, finally, that I won't see them for months, that I will shortly be going off by myself. I have known this all along, of course, but I've been in a curious state of not-feeling about it. And I am okay still, and more than okay. But dark fields away, my friends have gone to bed, and their dog doesn't know yet that I've gone for a long time, and that brings a sadness that excitement wont slake--even though, as this room's ceiling fan dings gently (its pull-cord bouncing against its metal lightshades, like a boat's chain chiming to its hull), that excitement is stirring still.

Preparing, preparing.

Now, granted: I didn't have the best high school physics teacher who ever lived. Far from it. But I believe that the laws of physics that I learned dictate that pieces of matter--such as, say, the luggage strap one uses with her rolling suitcase to ensure (she hopes) that it won't disgorge her belongings everywhere in some airport's back room--don't just vanish. And yet, and yet.

Fortunately, as packing-related problems go, this one is non-existent.

Also, and more importantly, today was my beautiful Mama's birthday. Happy birthday, beautiful Mama, mother of my heart.

Throwing filaments.

There's everything and nothing to say: I am packing up my life, which also means that I'm figuring out what that means right now. Most of me is just ignoring that it's happening at all. I mean, it's all fun and games until someone actually has to get on an airplane. Then it's still fun, but it's not all games anymore.

***

I suppose now you'll all tell me that you already knew this: it's a lot easier to pack suitcases when you're just putting in clothes and shoes, instead of clothes and shoes plus research notes plus books plus more books plus how many more books are you planning to take? It's looking as though I'm not going to have to jettison any of the clothing I hoped to take, nor any of my cameras or lenses. And it's looking as though I may be buying yet another ergonomic keyboard once I get to England--depending on what I can finesse from here on out.

Where $69 will get you.

I am becoming an inventive packer. This afternoon's innovation: using my department's scanner, which has a document feeder, to scan my research notes into .pdf files and save them on a flash drive. I have now transformed several pounds (and many square inches) of paper into megabytes; tomorrow, I will keep this up. Many years ago, my parents bought me an all-in-one printer that has saved me many a time in my teaching career; there's nothing like having a photocopier in one's own house when it comes to class preparation. And I remember having tried to use its scanner to scan research materials into a computer in order to take them to Chicago one winter--but having given up because the whole process was cumbersome and totally ineffective. But HP has come a long way in creating fast, reliable document scanners; once I figured out my process, I was off and running, feeding article after article and essay after essay--and then handwritten scrawl after handwritten scrawl--into the machine. Tomorrow, I will mail two small boxes of books at the international priority mail flat rate, which turns out to be not so much more than the very slow M-bag rate. My goal now is to get the weight of my luggage into reasonable territory--somewhere it's not really used to being, not on research-related trips.

But this afternoon also involved shipping the first box off. Now, with $69 in postage affixed, a cardboard box is making its way toward the eastern seaboard, bearing within it eight crucial items: my Red Hot Mama quilt; my 1930s reproduction quilt; my favorite (fuzzy black cashmere) sweater; three miscellaneous sweaters; one pair of red Mary Jane sneakers; and my green winter coat. When I plunked the box down on the postal counter, Postmaster Chuck laughed at me, just a little. When the postage came up to only $69, I was relieved--happy, even. It's a small amount of money to pay in order to be able to keep using these things, especially the coat. And especially, especially the quilts.

In this case, $69 keeps me home, even once I've arrived over there. That's no small thing. (I feel as though I should be on a Mastercard commercial: here's what's priceless.)

Also priceless: Friday night dinner with my Gambier family, and a walk out into the cool night, all in our early-autumn bundles (some of them borrowed), for ice cream. Encountering my favorite village child, tearing up the road on his bike, apparently alone. "Spencer?" I called out. "I'm not Spencer," he called back, "but I'm Spencer's next-door neighbor!" "Then I should say goodbye to you!" I called back. His parents approached, catching up with him. My excellent friends had stayed down the street, talking with one of my neighbors. This Gambier is one I love: people go out for walks at 10 p.m., and children can ride virtually alone on a dark street without (much) fear. The bookstore is not just a source of ice cream but also a hub, a hum.

Roadside delights.

I don't think we had enough starlings last night. I don't want them to have gotten overshadowed by our finally having seen the eagle.

On my way to Columbus for pre-departure errands today, I spied a sign at the side of the road: "Kitten Very Pretty." Cows cozied to one another in all the fields; the weather was cool and breezy today, and most of the cows lay about on the ground. Not far from here, a younger, smaller cow nudged and nuzzled the face of a larger cow who stood still and accepted this attention. Chickens wandered around in a yard. Pleasures were few, and of a different sort, once I reached my destinations and started rounding up my necessities, but the trips to and fro were good for my ongoing stocking up of what I'll soon be leaving.

Sightings!

First, because I fell asleep last night before I could remember to post him, an old friend:

Now: this evening marked Try No. 4 in the ongoing quest to rediscover the Kilduff Road eagle. As we stalked up and down the road, into the quarry and back out, beside the beautiful barn and then past it, to the edge of the bridge and then back again, my Clevelander student told me that yet another person had told her today, "Oh, yeah, I've seen the eagle." Everyone (including me, you'll recall) had seen it, it seemed, but that fact did nothing to bring us closer to our goal of seeing said eagle ourselves.

As we stood near the quarry, we spotted an oncoming swarm of starlings, and to me this was some kind of revelation. It was a tornado of birds. It was the sky come to seething. I could have wanted them back over and over, even knowing what a nuisance they can be on the ground.

Three waves swept over us, west to east, before they were gone.

The third wave took a different tack, detouring off to the west again before heading east just as we were about to cross the bridge one last time and go home.

And then, after we spent some long, idle time lolling about on the road, talking through what's happening in these first days of my student's classes and these last days of my being here, I saw a large, dark bird drift into the trees beside the river. We shifted so that we could stare down the river--toward where we saw the heron last night--and I joked that I would not be willing to forge into the trees in order to try for a better look. Finally, we decided to try one more walk toward the quarry, in the hopes that the dark bird would turn out to be the eagle--and would turn out to want to shift to a less shady resting place.

Suddenly--and now, I'm not even sure why it was that either of us was turned around when it happened--the eagle was flying over our heads, out of the woods and across the road and toward the woods further downstream. We both flailed in our excitement. I'm deeply grateful that my camera turned out to be set almost to where it needed to be. Almost. Had there been time, I'd have lengthened the exposure so that his head's white feathers would be more visible. But considering that I could have gotten nothing, I'm pretty pleased.

After he passed us by, he landed in the top of a riverside sycamore and perched there for the rest of our time on that backroad. We waited patiently for awhile, hoping that he would decide to fly back acros sthe road, but he seemed to have gotten comfortable. Or--and we certainly entertained this possibility--he was simply mocking us, up there on his perch. This latter idea seemed plausible to us; perhaps he's been watching us all week.

In any case, seeing him was an unexpected ending to what had seemed as though it was going to be an eagleless outing--though not a birdless one, as we'd already totaled up all the flying wildlife we'd seen (the starlings, ducks, geese, last night's mystery bird, last night's heron, a group of crows, many mourning doves, many other Miscellaneous Small Birds). "I'm keeping my promise," my student said as we approached her car. "I promised him that if he let me see him, I wouldn't keep coming back and bugging him." It seems a fair enough deal.

The steady accumulation of small events.

As we're crossing the bridge, heading back to the car after another unsuccessful attempt to find the eagle, we stop to look at the birds we can see. Ducks appear, swimming eastward with the current. A mysterious reddish animal swims along, then disappears altogether. "What's that bird?" she says, looking down the river. I look, and sure enough, a heron stands there in the middle of the river. And so I take its picture, hoping that the zoom will give us a better look at the far bird we cannot reach.

And it does help.

Tonight I'm tempted to anounce that I'm taking a little hiatus from words, but that's mostly because I'm so blasted tired.

Meeting the accountant today was very much a right move, as was heading back out into the county to search for that bird, even though we didn't find him.

I am saying some mighty prolonged goodbyes. I'm also starting to look forward, with ever-greater intensity, to my new landscape.

Is it you?

When 7 p.m. rolled around, my Clevelander student and I ventured out once more to find the eagle. Tonight, she came prepared, armed with directions from my department's resident bird-watcher. We parked the car and went peering up into trees, seeking a nest anywhere--to no avail. With the tiniest bit of trespassing, though, we espied a dark shape atop a huge hill of stone.

Moments later, it flew away (and seemed improbably light as it swept off its perch--though it does look eagleish here). And so: this image was the best we could do today. We will try again tomorrow.

Perhaps--and really, it has to be said--we're training to be more eagle-eyed ourselves. Perhaps this is the other meaning of eagle-eyed: to be eyed so as to see the eagle.

It was in fact a day of ongoing, low-key transformations. Tomorrow, I see an accountant for the first time in my life; I find this prospect strangely intimidating. I am finally finishing reading some books. I have finally begun making small stacks of things I will need to pack, and remembering the weird magic tricks that make a daily life's worth of stuff squeeze into two relatively small containers.

Things in general move on at their usual slowly swifting pace--part of the reason that our time spent walking up and down a dusty Ohio backroad was so welcome tonight.

That elusive eagle.

I've worn myself out again; it seems likely that I'll keep this up until I'm on another continent in just over a week. Today's surprise: finding out who else will be there over the course of the year, including someone nearly my age who works in my historical period. Now the trip is becoming real. Other people are also packing and preparing--other people will be there working and writing--though when they'll all show up, I have no way of knowing. A frisson of first-day jitters--appropriate enough, given that classes start here in about seven hours--as I find myself thinking, will they like me? will people want to eat dinner with me? will I want to compete with them? will I feel worthy? That frisson passes (it has grown tiresome after all these years) and is superseded by the more appropriate one: will I be able to pack all the things I want to take? That answer is almost certainly no (and rightly so), but I'm going to make a valiant effort.

This evening, I took a break from trying to finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I like but have had enough of by now, and ventured out with one of my Clevelander students to try and spot the Knox County eagle. We had no luck, even though we tried to give him a lot of time to manifest: I took some pictures of random details; we parked the car and took a walk (against a strange rural Ohio sonic backdrop of maybe-gunshot and small explosion-type-things); I photographed the sunset; we sat in a parking lot. Alas, no, and so we ended up at Friendly's. We will try again tomorrow night, when I also hope to pay a visit to the low-lit prairie. I am beginning to gather up my places and pack them, too. They're easier to manage than shoes and research notes and sweaters.

I plot my clothing for the flight over: will have to wear the harness boots, as they are too heavy either to pack or to ship. Will have to wear jeans, because the plane will be cold. Will need a pullover of some sort, because the plane will be cold. Will have to layer, clearly.

Tonight's low temperatures here will be nearly the low temperatures of the place to which I will soon be going.

I have going on the brain and yet am still holding on tight to being here--though I did finish cleaning out my office this afternoon. There are all these books still to be read, these notes still to be made, these tasks still to be finished before I leave. Or so it seems. In reality, most of them will simply go with me and get resumed Over There.

And I owe you (some of you more than others) two good, long stories about ways I was surprised this weekend--first with one of the weirdest mystery trips of my life on Friday night (weird not because of the destination but because of the utterly bizarre route that led us there) and then with the arrival of not just my parents but also my brother in Gambier yesterday. My stomach has gotten a workout with all the eating and the laughing and the being forced to ride around in a car with my eyes clenched shut. And I now know that this apartment can contain a party--and that its kitchen is actually far better suited than the one in the old house for that party-inevitability, Kitchen Standing. But these are stories for tomorrow--unless, of course, something happens tomorrow that (as befits the Cabinet's name) calls my writing in another direction.