Now Boarding

Well, almost.

About five years ago, a young Olivia White hopped across the pond on a high school class trip. She made the mistake of sleeping exactly zero hours during the flight and spent her first day schlepping through London with a group of approximately 25 other students and dosing off in public places, including a park near Buckingham Palace and the steps in front of a museum. Though she later redeemed this poor tourist behavior and would go on to see Hamlet at the Globe (on opening night... on Shakespeare's birthday), spend a lazy afternoon at a quaint pub in the countryside somewhere near Stonehenge (where she witnessed her principal drink a beer and was dumbfounded), and romanticized a life of disciplined academia through the stony archways of Oxford University, her sampling of English life was yet incomplete.

Four years later, she is sitting in an Intro to Poetry class in Canton, New York, just a few miles south of the Canadian border in the oldest building on the frozen arctic landscape that is the St. Lawrence University campus in the winter (and spring). She reads a Wordsworth sonnet ("Composed upon Westminster Bridge") about the sun rising over the city in the hazy morning hours. It's a moment the poet savors in several stanzas, and it's simply lovely. In the early time before people stir and bed sheets are pushed aside and feet shuffle through a daily routine, the morning is Wordsworth's. He keeps company with the Thames and the rising sun. Olivia is comforted by his awe of what is really relatively ordinary and feels a vicarious security in his contentedness. She wants to go there. She also, apparently, in this profound moment of contemplation, adapts the pretentious tendency of referring to herself in third person*, which indicates a victory for the flowery liberal arts agenda.

In any case, maybe I won't find the serene privacy of Wordsworth's London in it's current 21st century bustle, but I'm excited to discover a similar charm and perhaps find a bit of personal space in my own moments of awe.

I'm boarding in about an hour for my return trip across the pond. I hope to learn from my previous mistake of not sleeping on the flight over, though I have a feeling the nerves come complimentary with the boarding pass.

Anyway, cheers from (almost) across the pond.

*This is the only and last time I will do this.