Title : Spare Some Change
link : Spare Some Change
Spare Some Change
The wind here was seemingly gale force, the sort where one almost feels as if your legs will be swept out from under you. Add in the rain that came in drizzles but combined with the wind felt like sleet, and that we were walking atop a cliff-like island, and suddenly the wind felt a bit more threatening as if an ally of the chomping and hungry-looking ocean just below. But we were back in England, birthplace of my wife and even with the thirty-one hours of being awake, a place that felt quite refreshing. The cooler air and crashing waves of this coastal town was a nice escape and change from our home which was still stuck in its drought and heat combo. Being here, our windbreakers being put to the test, we felt as if we had gotten a privileged early admission ticket to fall.Plasticized money circa 2015 |
This rugged persona of sorts was exemplified by the pedestrian crossing lights which stopped the buzzing autos and buses that came from the opposite side (look right, then left vs. the other way around although I'm sure that more than a few Brits and old age pensioners --as we seniors are politely coined here-- have the same trouble when coming to the U.S.). I timed the crossing lights -- 6 seconds. Go on, git. Heaven help that rickety old man with a walker. "I used to see old ladies dragging mini trolley carts around all the time, " my wife mentioned as I lugged both of my massive 2 liter bottles of fizzy water back to our room; "I wonder what happened?" After barely making it across the street myself, I was afraid to offer my own theory. Of course everyone seemed to walk quite briskly here, from the always-barefooted surfers (the town of Newquay is now an official stop in the surfing world competitions and come August, draws 50,000 people in its own right, this despite my never seeing the waves much larger than four or five feet and the water appearing as frigid as the arctic) to the elderly who sometimes appeared close to being blown away on those gusty cliff trails...which our host told us has happened, although I am still not sure if that was meant in jest, as a cautionary warning, or if he felt that my wife and I were looking a bit frail.
And there is something about that British accent, each variant pretty much the same to my Americanized ears but distinctive and geographically identifying to my wife's way of hearing. Still, a charming lass or lad seemed that much more innocent once they spoke as if they were children of the polite bus drivers we encountered; a quick nod, a slight smile on the lip, and a small glimmer in the eye softened even the hardest heart, I felt. And it seemed pervasive in this part of the U.K. When a car driver rushed by a few of us crossing the street, one in a wheelchair, all I heard was a slightly sarcastic "thank you very much" (I was tempted to think that it had to be an American tourist driving although there was no hand gesture so perhaps not). It was good to be unwinding, as if I had been placed in a zen shopping mall. Stress and rushing were futile, even as people walked around me or gathered in front. Perhaps it was the cold, or the wind, or the place we were staying, or the people we were meeting, but I couldn't help but feel that it was just the way it was. Tradition. Comfort food. Calm. Tomorrow would come so why rush?
Author Paul Gruchow wrote about this looking back, this hanging onto the old ways, in his book Grass Roots: Nostalgia, we believe, is a cheap emotion. But we forget what it means. In its Greek roots it means, literally, the return to home...the clinical term for homesickness, for the desire to be rooted in a place. This desire need not imply the impulse to turn back the clock, which of course we cannot do. It recognizes, rather, the truth --if home is a place in time-- that we cannot know where we are now unless we can remember where we have come from. The real romantics are those who believe that history is the story of the triumphful march of progress, that change is indiscriminately for the better. Those who would demythologize the past seem to forget that we also construct the present as a myth, that there is nothing in the wide universe so vast as our own ignorance. Knowing that is our real hope.
Little was apparently going to change here even if you saw it happening in front of you (such as the launderettes going up to $6.50 per wash...yikes!). The soup would always be tomato or a version of it, a bisque or a bit of basil thrown in; the eateries would all close at 3 and open at 6; the darkest beers would always be the ales ((still no porters or stouts, dang it...but it's much the same in the U.S.). Like the ins and outs of the tides presenting a massive stretch of sand then erasing it all away like watery monks it was sun, sand, surf then wind, rain, cold...repeat, then repeat again, and again. But then again I was now older and looking at all of this through different eyes, perhaps not seeing the frustration of the younger generation who maybe felt stuck like farmers in a world of older ways down in a locked-in corner of this small island. Or maybe like me, they themselves were now ready to settle down and had returned to raise their own children and teach them the old ways, somewhat evidenced by a beautiful young mother with an even more beautiful 5-month old daughter who busily chatted with us as she breastfed her baby in the hotel restaurant, embarrassing to my wife and I but not to her OR her mother sitting next to her. This was the country, and perhaps that was the secret. Get out of the city, the hustle and bustle, the technology and always-on attitude. Slow down was what I was hearing; and it appeared to me that it was taking me a trip across the Atlantic to discover that...
And there is something about that British accent, each variant pretty much the same to my Americanized ears but distinctive and geographically identifying to my wife's way of hearing. Still, a charming lass or lad seemed that much more innocent once they spoke as if they were children of the polite bus drivers we encountered; a quick nod, a slight smile on the lip, and a small glimmer in the eye softened even the hardest heart, I felt. And it seemed pervasive in this part of the U.K. When a car driver rushed by a few of us crossing the street, one in a wheelchair, all I heard was a slightly sarcastic "thank you very much" (I was tempted to think that it had to be an American tourist driving although there was no hand gesture so perhaps not). It was good to be unwinding, as if I had been placed in a zen shopping mall. Stress and rushing were futile, even as people walked around me or gathered in front. Perhaps it was the cold, or the wind, or the place we were staying, or the people we were meeting, but I couldn't help but feel that it was just the way it was. Tradition. Comfort food. Calm. Tomorrow would come so why rush?
Traditional bangers and mash in a pub |
Little was apparently going to change here even if you saw it happening in front of you (such as the launderettes going up to $6.50 per wash...yikes!). The soup would always be tomato or a version of it, a bisque or a bit of basil thrown in; the eateries would all close at 3 and open at 6; the darkest beers would always be the ales ((still no porters or stouts, dang it...but it's much the same in the U.S.). Like the ins and outs of the tides presenting a massive stretch of sand then erasing it all away like watery monks it was sun, sand, surf then wind, rain, cold...repeat, then repeat again, and again. But then again I was now older and looking at all of this through different eyes, perhaps not seeing the frustration of the younger generation who maybe felt stuck like farmers in a world of older ways down in a locked-in corner of this small island. Or maybe like me, they themselves were now ready to settle down and had returned to raise their own children and teach them the old ways, somewhat evidenced by a beautiful young mother with an even more beautiful 5-month old daughter who busily chatted with us as she breastfed her baby in the hotel restaurant, embarrassing to my wife and I but not to her OR her mother sitting next to her. This was the country, and perhaps that was the secret. Get out of the city, the hustle and bustle, the technology and always-on attitude. Slow down was what I was hearing; and it appeared to me that it was taking me a trip across the Atlantic to discover that...
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