Various London trips

took this photo in 1995
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My love for London started in 1985, when as a 9-year-old I lived there with my family while my father taught university. I attended fourth grade school there in Hampstead Heath, a neighborhood I now know to be rather upscale but at the time seemed dark and gritty with a city edge I hadn't known previously. Winding streets and night falling early.  On one side of our tiny flat, a loud train bellowed through the night, and on the other, All Hallows' churchbells. My sister and I had an amazing new breadth of freedom, walking to school ourselves for the first time after years of claustrophobic bright yellow busses, stepping over snails on the sidewalk and stopping in the corner candy store with strange coins to buy ourselves exotic sweets.

2003, in a restaurant, near the flat we were staying, in covent garden
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I now view that time as the best year of my childhood, with unprecedented highs and lows. New phrases spoken in an embarrassingly-acquired British accent, large green parks and woolen dresses, the fast clangy underground tube, ever- stretching escalators, and climbing the stairs of the double-decker busses, looking back. The look on my baby sister's three-year-old face. Holding her hand, flashing my bus pass, then hers. Milk bottles with a thick layer of cream on the top and scrappy fights with bullies on the concrete schoolyard, British history lessons, solemn and echoing museums, swirls of pigeons, architecture that seemed beyond ancient, and, and this is probably the most important: for the first time I was really getting an understanding not just that there were other cultures, other realities in the big wide world, but that I came from somewhere too. I now had some perspective, through a child's eyes. Wondering about the different ways people think, the things people do, words people say, customs and habits and living spaces and body language and what they cover on the news, and why. All of it:  why?  Over and over I answered the other kids' questions about 'the States' -- whether I'd met Mickey Mouse (nope), whether our house looked like Dynasty (no again), why we didn't use the word 'trousers' (no idea).

On one side of our tiny flat, a loud train bellowed through the night, and on the other, All Hallows' churchbells.

earls court
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It was a fabulous, life-shaping, terrifyingly exhilarating experience.  All children should have the opportunity to travel. (See my St. Louis entry for more on that!)

A decade later, I organized myself during a college break to go back. Stayed in Regent's Park and fell in love with London all over again, this time from different angles. Visited Gospel Oak and Camden and all the places we played when I was young, but wandered the city more fully. Got lost, made new friends, re-acquainted myself with the tube. In just a week it was confirmed; I was an anglophile. I  made sure I returned the following year to study abroad. I moved into my Shepherd's Bush flat just one week before the tragic death of Princess Diana-- quite an intense time to be in London, to say the least, especially as a foreigner. I did my best to stay as quiet and respectful as I could (unlike some of the Americans around me, like another student who was bopped over the head for his rapid-fire photography during the funeral processional!).  Studied in Notting Hill Gate and Ladbroke Grove, and left again, mournfully. Researched visas and dreamt of someday living there for real.

tube interior
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Since then I've returned every year or two (sometimes more often in a period when I was in a long-distance relationship with a Brit), experiencing the city from different neighborhoods, different seasons. And spent a few months working there, realizing that life in London as a student is quite different from life as a worker. But still, I loved that city.

The last time I was there was Autumn 2004...I was there for two and half months, staying in a flat in Swiss Cottage near St. John's Wood, working teaching college poetry classes and as a theatre director with rehearsals in Westbourne Park, where one fateful day I took a bad spill in Meanwhile Gardens park and shattered my leg. Was introduced to the National Health Service (and no, it wasn't free for me, contrary to popular belief, though certainly less expensive than a long hospital stay in the US). And so, after a major surgery and one lonely week in the hospital, with thirteen screws and a metal plate holding my leg together, and then after convalescing in a hotel and then a friends' flat for two more weeks until I was cleared to fly internationally again, I finally returned home to spend well over a year recovering from this serious accident. I had to give myself shots in the stomach of some sort of blood thinning medicine to prevent fatal blood clots on the plane, and wasn't allowed to use crutches yet so was wheeled around the airport by wheelchair. (Believe it or not, this story only scratches the surface of my misadventures in London, but I won't get into that now.) The point is that I haven't been back since, even though I've had theatre pieces produced and friends to see and so many aspects of the city I've yet to experience. Perhaps that leg trauma gave me pause. Perhaps it's time to see other parts of the world instead. But I know my love for London, and in fact the United Kingdom at large, is strong. It's just a matter of time before I find my way back.