“Lately it occurs to me/ What a long strange trip it’s been…”

Well, not ALL things, but it’s definitely the end of our time here, and the end of an era. Driving through St. Helena to rescue our niece from her college campus (and our alma mater), we just *happened* to see this guy taking down the sign for Peters Video, a place we frequented in a Saturday Night Ritual for a couple of years with one of the faculty kids when we were in college. Said faculty “kid” is now 6’7″ and a college senior… so it’s probably okay for that era to be over.

But still – a moment of disquiet, when things end.

We’re beginning to feel like Emily saying goodbye to Grover’s Corners in Our Town. With apologies to Thornton Wilder: Goodbye, Sugar, who barks every time we come over. Goodbye, Salads of Greatness and Destiny, with ripe tomatoes and avocados and artichoke hearts. Goodbye, Napa Valley, and the new mustard flowers poking up bravely between the vines. Goodbye long reaches of sky and wide vistas. We’re going back to the sandstone edifices of Glesga city…Oh, California, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you…

Okay, we’re not really that mushy. But close. It’s especially hard for D. to change gears between being Here and There; in the U.S., he’s considered an adult, and makes decisions on his own, some of which people think are huge mistakes, and over which they take him to task vociferously. There’s the give-and-take of adulthood, and a sense of agency and responsibility to get things done. That’s not been our experience in the UK. There, he’s not only considered a student, but a child, and he’s buried under decades of “this is how we’ve always done it,” and “that’s quite an idea, son, but we’ll just keep doing it the way we know it works.” Progress — at the University, which was established in 1451 — and in the workplace, where he’s kind of regarded as the eccentric American. It’s a hard reboot, as it were, to go from Here to There. It’s a wholly different state of mind.

Glesga, as it sounds in Scots Gaelic, has been calling us back for awhile now. D. bought a BART ticket last Thursday on the way to Southern California, and got a ten pence piece in his change. He only figured it out when he couldn’t make it fit into the machine again and said, “HEY! This isn’t a quarter!” The BART official told him to keep it as a souvenir. Yeah, right. On the same trip, the guy who watched him taking pictures — and thought he’d comment, one tourist to another — turned out to be from the Borders — in Scotland.

That Glesga place has a long reach.

No matter how many weeks we spend here, it’s never enough. We’ve discovered a sad truth: that you cannot squeeze your whole past life into six weeks. To all the people with whom we meant to have tea or meals or catch up with what’s been going on for the last ten years — to all the people who wanted to see us because of high school reunions this year, etc. etc. — sorry. We just didn’t have the time or energy to make the effort. Life goes forward, and sometimes all we can do is hold on for the ride. We’re grateful to the people who’ve fed and housed and entertained us for the last few weeks… knowing that the usual run for guests is three days, not six weeks, everyone has been remarkably tolerant.

LATER…

And that ride just went E-ticket; the dreaded 2 a.m. phone call from the neighbors in Glasgow has come. We expected the freezing weather to produce the results that we feared — water, water, everywhere, and poor neighbor Lesley is out a kitchen AGAIN. Ah, the joys of Georgian buildings and semi-modern plumbing.

The one thing we couldn’t foresee is that it wasn’t because of the freeze — it was because of us not flushing the toilet for six weeks. The wastewater runs on the outside of the flats, and apparently our bath was a place for ice to build up (brrrrrrrrr) and it blocked the pipe. Or, something did. And now, the firemen broke down the front door of our flat, the tub’s been ripped out, and T’s main concern is that the neighbors see just what a state the house was left in after packing and trying to do laundry and wake up to take a cab at 3 a.m.. Yes. The world now knows: we’re not always very neat.

::shudder::

That’s what’s awaiting us when we return – lots of mea culpa flowers, making nice with the neighbors, perhaps letting Lesley use OUR kitchen, and lots of workmen. AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!! None of our flats in Glasgow are ever going to be workmen free, and were so hoping… Well, possibly we’ll get a new tub and shower out of this all, if not a fully new bath suite. Thinking optimistically.

While we shudder to think how long that’s going to take, we remind ourselves that it could have been worse. It could be a new furnace we’re looking at — which, given the Baltic temps in Glasgow just now, would take much, much longer.

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Meanwhile, T. has been slightly bemused by her nomination for the 41st NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Youth Literature. Mainly she’s bemused by the word “gala,” being included in the festivities and the pre-show hoopla. The word “gala” means to her gold lamé dresses, the living-dead celebrity reporters like Joan Rivers, and red carpets. She’s not big on anything but sweats and a good book, so the gala thing is all a bit much to her (sorry to A.F., and all of our Vacaville buddies who thought we would rush right down for the live-broadcast awards show in February), but it truly is an honor to be nominated with such a great group of authors, and she looks forward to sitting down to read all of the other books (four in all) in her category.

Right after the whole plumbing thing gets taken care of…