The past.

When we checked out of our beautiful house by the sea, our proto-crypto dream house, it was raining. The wetsuits we had draped across the fence were newly wet. Our bags, full of the things we’d packed and the things we’d bought, jenga’d into the boot of the passenger van. And off we went.

St. Ives, this was the last day of our acquaintance.

Our plan was to drive to St Helens, on the outskirts of Liverpool, with a stop in Bath to see the Roman baths. This would be roughly halfway between St. Ives and Inverurie, our Scotland home for the next two weeks. What could not been predicted was mayhem on the motorway. This, combined with what can only be described as an avant garde Sat Nav, took us through the highways and the hedgerows and the byways of the southwest of England, and roughly doubled our estimated time to destination.

We drove past signs for an event called the Buddhafield Festival. This event lasted four days in the Blackdown Hills of Somerset. My son in law, our intrepid driver and my interlocutor for the journey, since I sat next to him (riding bitch, as my daughter pointed out)—and even though this involved sitting in the middle seat on the front bench, it ended up being one of the best parts of it all, since now we, my son and law and I, had a shared experience of, if not trauma, then at least an unanticipated—if not nightmare, then at least a super long van ride in a close space—with unpredictable teenagers in the back. Plus, one of my daughters is traveling while pregnant. So. Anyway, you know: the recipe for how great relationships are born!

What was I saying? Right: my son in law wondered who the acts at the Buddhafield Festival might be.

Buddhafield Festival, for your information, is not a music festival, despite being within hurling  distance of Glastonbury. No, according to its website, it is “a joyful gathering of around 4,000 people, celebrating community and connection with the land. Song, dance, arts and crafts, yoga, live music, meditation, and play blend together without drink or drugs to create a loving and life-affirming space. There will be Buddhist teaching, workshops and ritual, under sun and stars.” Perhaps it was because  we were packed into a nine passenger van, we noted with some smugness that the sun and stars were in rather short supply. Poor Buddhafield festival goers: instead of seeking enlightenment, they could have been like us, packed in a van, driving the hills, dales, and one-track country lanes of southwest England, wending their way toward Bath, with no realistic or reliable sense of when they might arrive. If ever. Talk about your nonattachment.

We did, finally, make it to Bath, which took us just six and a half hours as opposed to the three hours it was supposed to take. We fell into a Pret a Manger and ate all the food they had left, basically. Because our group is large, some of us drove in another car, so we reconnoitered outside the Pret, and readied ourselves to march on to the baths. 

Two of my daughters, who had been in the other car, reported that their Sat Nav had taken them right into Glastonbury. ‘We were all, oh, hey! We’re in Glastonbury!’ said one of them. The other said, ‘We saw the Tor.’

OMG, the people: the Glastonbury Tor has been (laughably, probably, but shut up) marked on my Google Map of Dreams for ever. Why did OUR Sat Nav not take us through Glastonbury? Instead, when we passed it by at some distance, I said to anyone who cared (no one), ‘Glastonbury is over there,’ and gestured toward the West. ‘The Chalice Well is over there. The Glastonbury Tor is over there.’ Gesture toward the west.

‘Did you take a picture?’ I asked. Reader, I think you know that the answer was NO, they did not take a picture, and thus I found myself so annoyed/disappointed/in a fit of pique that I had to turn my back on the whole group for one entire minute.
  It was drizzly in Bath, as it had been drizzly all day. The youngest of us was four, the oldest of us seventy-five. Variables, thus, included attention span, predisposition to be interested in the distant past, basic heed to be paid to things like ‘don’t touch the water, it’s not treated’ (for your information, this heedfulness/heedlessness does not map easily onto the age/maturity spectrum of our group—we had a lot of rulebreakers), need to have a thing purchased at the gift shop, &c &c. Still, despite or maybe even because of our prolonged journey, most of us found the experience beautiful and edifying and, simply, a look into another entire world, which happens to be our world, too.

The historian and I took a moment to think about our previous trip to Bath, twenty years ago, my memory of which is hazy: I remembered being down at the level of the baths, looking up, and seeing the line of sculpted figures, and beyond them, the medieval era buildings. I remember the sense of descending, physically descending, in time, to see how our world is built upon the past. I remember the way the water smelled—faintly metallic, steamy, earthly. 

To see it with these people. To see it now. To have the sense, in my body, that the life I am living now is built upon the past.

Rain on the water

Figures of three saints, but eerily echoing a Celtic form.  

  

My women.

After a Pizza Express dinner, where our server was so witty, cheery, and attentive to our mad group that I felt he deserved, like, a Guggenheim grant or something for his hospitality, we clambered back into our respective cars and drove three more hours to our Travelodge rooms in St. Helens, where we all fell into our beds and slept as if we had journeyed for days, for miles and leagues and eras and millennia. 

The way, way back.

Tonight, we saw A Poem is a Naked Person, Les Blank's long lost film about (sort of) Leon Russell, made back in the heyday, in 1974, which was when I loved Leon Russell. Lots of people did. He was a session musician in Los Angeles, working with the famous Wrecking Crew and playing sessions with an amazing array of people (George Harrison, J.J. Cale, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra). He had a pretty great solo career for about ten years, after which it slowed down quite a bit.

Apparently Blank and Russell had some creative--and personal--differences, which meant that this film never was released until now. It was a gift tonight, to listen to the music again, in filmed studio sessions and in concert. A reminder of what a powerful performer he was. I saw him once in the 80s, with Edgar Winter (remember, RH?), in a small club in the mid valley. He was still great at the piano and in good voice.

A boy in my Mormon ward gave me a copy of Carney because it was his favorite album, and we were flirting a little bit, and maybe kind of were together for about a half an hour or a month. I listened to it constantly. I still have it in my limited collection of LPs from that era.

Nothing, nothing like music to bring back everything you felt, everything you were, when you were young and you knew nothing, and a boy gave you music as a gift, and forty years later you are still that girl, listening to an album in the dark.





Here's Rita Coolidge singing 'Superstar,' written by Russell and Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett (that's Russell's piano):

On children and the past.

I ran across this photo as I was trying to do a little straightening in my study. There it sat, atop a box atop another box, under my table, a stray little rectangle. Two of my children, my oldest and youngest sons, taking a nap after church.

I remember when they were both younger, the oldest being such a kind older brother to the younger. Their closeness in this picture reminds me of that. That couch was a nap magnet, and the youngest boy, long and skinny but still small, could easily lay across the back cushions and fall asleep.

I had them. I had them as infants and for the years they were children and then young men.  And now, they are grown, and belong to themselves.

A friend and I were talking recently about having children. Her little boy is just a year and a half. The years when they were small I have only in memory, which is flickering and incomplete. I am grateful for those little bits of the past, honestly. It's never over, either, but there are moments that are over, so I'm grateful for the surfacing of a photograph, which can remind me of long Sunday afternoons when I was thinking about what to make for dinner, when they fell into sleep and I could see them at rest, with their own dreams and with each other.