The Rapture
So May 21st was supposed to be the date of The Rapture, but nobody knew the exact time, especially for people like me who were traveling through time zones. Certain cynical friends of mine were planning to start looting around noontime, for example. I was just hoping it wouldn’t happen while I was on the Eurostar so I wouldn’t bang my head in the Chunnel :) What a weird event to predict – if it could be done. Would you clean your house or not clean your house? Run up your VISA card? I heard about a guy who makes a pretty good living making money off suckers who buy into these doomsday prophecies – he’s an avowed atheist, so the people shelling out the money know he’ll be left behind – and he promises to take care of people’s pets after their owners have been snatched away by God – at $150 bucks a pop, no refunds. I wonder if people show up the next day to pick up Rover and Fluffy, or if they just hide and pretend God took them.
I took two trains before the Eurostar,time enough for a coffee and a croissant in the train station so I went to the little cafe and ordered the "special" of the day (a coffee and croissant) in French, and the waitress behind the counter pretended not to understand my French (with that Schnauzer-with-head-cocked-to-the-side, as if picking up the whine of a distant fart, and made me repeat it (what is this, Switzerland? You only sell four items here....) The espresso was incredibly strong -- the first sip made all the hairs in my nose shrivel and vaporize, the second sip gave me a full-body shudder, and I didn't take any more sips because I was hoping to sleep sometime again in my lifetime, so I just put the cup down.
The Eurostar was a little pretentious – no big deal on the “French” side – they just take your passport and stamp it, bored, make you take a few steps and they make a BFD before you pass over to the “English” side, where they have grumpy personnel who make you fill out forms for Customs and want to know where you’re staying and give you the hairy eyeball if you aren’t from the European Union.
The difference between first and second class on the Eurostar is immediately apparent – people are on their laptops and peeling bananas and plugging in their phones to charge them up so they can play with their apps, just like in first class trains – but something happens to people in second class. The woman next to me skins her stockings down to her bare feet and throws the dirty stockings on the floor, and across from me I watch in disbelief as a young girl massages some sort of hair treatment into an older man’s scalp for ten minutes. What is this? Somehow I have ended up in these peoples’ living rooms/bathrooms. These personal matters can’t wait until people get home? It’s not as if anyone would mistake me for an international supermodel either – but there’s a difference between making yourself comfortable for a three-hour train trip and just plain skank. When the refreshment cart comes by I am definitely ready to entertain a glass of chardonnay. Maybe that’s the point of all that drinking on trains…to blur out other people’s hair treatments and dirty toenails…!
Previously, the Eurostar used to dump you out at Waterloo, where you could buy a ticket to Bristol and be done with it. They’ve since improved things so that now things take much longer and are now a huge pain in the ass. Now, they dump you out in into a gigantic station full of stores and restaurants and people milling about, and you now must hump your bags to the opposite end of it, and catch the Underground to Paddington Station, complete with multiple layers of stairs, as if they never calculated that anyone would be arriving with luggage (A train station? Who would be arriving with luggage??), where you can catch a train to the other side of England. It’s all very complicated, and I needlessly change trains at Oxford Circus (I have time, while waiting on the subway, to text Sean our favorite joke from Wayne’s World: Oxford Circus: What a shitty circus.) Finally, they make you wait until the very last minute to tell you which platform your train will leave on so the very last bit is a mad dash to make the train. It’s a very sick person running the system, I’m sure giggling and drinking and watching the whole thing on monitors in between his sessions with his psychiatrist. The best part has to be watching the folks as they pull into the station – because the doors are made in such a way that you can actually slide the windows down and stick your entire head out – which just has to be dangerous at some points along a train’s journey, but nobody stops you. (…and the last thing he saw was that unexpected pole coming at him – wham! – as the train pulled into the station….)
I have been trading Rapture text messages back and forth with certain friends I can joke about that with all day (You been raptured yet? Yes! The signal’s pretty good up here in Heaven…Actually, I’m in midair and I grabbed the next door neighbor just as I starting going up and am trying to decide whether I should drop him…etc.) Just in case this really was the”last night of the world,” we would both think of the same Bruce Cockburn song – Nicky I are both Bruce fans – we met through an internet fan list devoted to him, so we have already agreed that we should drink champagne or something fizzy that night to celebrate:
If this was the last night of the world
What would I do?
What would I do that was different?
Unless it was champagne with you?
Aside from Bruce, on the surface, you might not guess that Nicky and I would have much in common. She wastes nothing in this world, leaves a gentle footprint on the earth, recycles as much as she can, bicycles everywhere possible, homeschools her kids, bakes bread from scratch, lets her hair go to the color it wants to be naturally and doesn’t even have a driver’s license. I’m the evil side of her carbon footprint: the not-so gentle giant on the other side of the planet who eats animals, drives a car four miles to pick up a pizza that I could have made myself with fresher ingredients, dyes her hair, buys bread with chemicals in it and throws it away if it gets moldy. I buy fruit that goes bad in my house before it gets eaten or made into banana breads, despite my best efforts. I teach at a college where some of the kids want to be there and some of them are bored and only show up because their parents make them go. I vote and I recycle but I don’t always vote every line item in every election and my guy doesn’t always win and I don’t recycle everything and I don’t compost every item that comes into my house. I like watching Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly, and the fact that FoxNews irritates people so much makes me want it to stay around as long as possible. You would think that someone like me would drive Nicky crazy, would be the type of person that ruins the entire world today.
And yet, I did not need to call my brother Bill to ask him for advice on what to bring Nicky – I knew exactly what to bring. When it comes to books and music, we are of the same mind. The minute I stepped off that train and she hugged me, we both cried, and it was like no time had passed since our last visit. I just love her. Each time I see her, from the moment I meet up with her until the moment I leave, a current opens when everything that flows between us is understood – there isn’t any “what the hell are you talking about???” with Nicky. She is also one of those rare and wonderful friends I have come across in the world who can make me laugh until I snort.
It is dark outside so we take a taxi to her house – which is a wonderful luxury, because Nicky lives at the bottom of a hill, which she is used to, but I am picturing wildly careening wheelie luggage running away into the night. We sit down with a bottle of Prosecco, and although I didn’t think I was hungry, the olives on the table mysteriously disappear and we talk until well after midnight.
It is, unsurprisingly, NOT the last night of the world after all, so the following day I discover that Nicky has a juicer (of course she does…! Of course I don’t! maybe I should think about getting one…and I look through her vegetarian cookbooks while she turns fresh things into breakfast). I have a chance to do some laundry and then hang it outside (not even a possibility in Columbia, where you are NOT ALLOWED to hang wash outside…there is a contraption called a “soctapus” which is shaped like an octopus that keeps your socks together while they dry on the line). We took her kids (Pearl and Robin) with us to Glastonbury. The subject(s) of the day were horses (Pearl) and Scooby Doo (Robin).
Nicky and I had gone to Glastonbury before on a previous visit – we’d gone to the hippieville part of town and I had bought pipes for my smokey friends. Nicky told me if I was stopped at Customs to say I thought they were whistles and I had bought them for my girlfriends to use to protect themselves on their way home from church (snort). On this trip, we looked in the charity shops (what we would call the consignment shops), before heading our way up Glastonbury Tor to the remains of the castle. Later, Nicky and I went out to a pub and to an Indian restaurant with Tonia and Penny. It was great to see Penny again -- Penny was the wild one – she and I had gone out before on a previous trip to celebrate her becoming a grandmother by getting her a nose ring. She still had a very modern maroon hairstyle. She was now contemplating a tattoo when she turned 60. She left on her bike, looking 16. Nicky and I walked to the bus stop – I felt more like 60. (Note to self: go to the gym next time before visiting friends in Europe.)
The following day, I discovered that I do not speak English. After eating breakfast, when asked if I wanted anything else, I said, “No thanks, I’m good,” to much hilarity from the others at the table. (Once I discovered this, and tried to say something else, there was so much disappointment over not using the Americanism that I was stuck with saying “I’m good” for the remainder of the stay.)
We went to see Nicky’s parents, a 10-minute walk, according to Nicky (a 5-minute drive, for the Average American, just fyi :), and Pearl could not believe that NOBODY wanted to play horses, so I gave in and she was the horse, and her green raincoat was the reins, and we “rode” all the way to Nicky’s parents. (I learned an amazing amount of details about horses while I was there, incidentally.)
Later, after seeing some old friends Dave and Helen at dinner, we went to the Nova Scotia Hotel, where upstairs they had an open mic night, where musicians could sign up to play two songs each. Nicky was one of two women who played that night – there was a surprising number of Leonard Cohen songs, several Irish ballads sung a capella, and a few original tunes. I thought Nicky was going to play two of the new songs she had written for her upcoming CD, but she surprised me with the first song, which was the song she wrote for me, New York Sky. I was glad I had some tissues with me, so I didn’t have to cry into one of my socks :) I made two videos of her performances with the feature on my camera. Some of the guys who played were good, a few were great, only one or two were just so-so. Of course I thought Nicky was the best one out of all of them – if only because she played her own stuff and not covers. You go girl :)
The last day, we went to the city of Bath and met Nicky’s niece Elaine in a very classy tea shop – different in that it was more Moorish than chintz, and the selection was like choosing from a wine list instead of a selection of Earl Grays and Chinese Green Teas. We shopped (both of us zeroing in on the miniature shop) before going to the art museum to see the Peter Blake exhibit (the guy who did the Sargeant Pepper cut outs), and marvelling at the enormous beehive hairdos on some of the women in the paintings (you could hide a marmalade sandwich in there...snort) having lunch, and sitting in the park to soak up the sun like a couple of cats before heading back for a final evening of trying out hairstyles from Audrey Hepburn’s film Sabrina, drinking gin and tonics to celebrate Bob Dylan’s birthday, uploading my videos to Facebook, and listening to Emmylou Harris.
There's a picture of me and Nicky in my FB profile pictures of the two of us from one of those photo booths in Heathrow back in the day -- we tried to take another picture of the two of us in the train station but we couldn't stop laughing so all we got was the multi-chinned Why Is My Head So Big? Why Am I a Balloon with Hair? Why Am I a Skull With Teeth? picture this time :D
All that Bob Dylan the night before might have previewed blood on the tracks, but it was a cow on the tracks that delayed my train the next day (lol), and eventually I had to leave :(
But not before meeting up with Nicky’s sister Chris in London – which was a nice break before catching the Eurostar to Paris. Tea in her garden, and then a walk to her tennis club where we had lunch, watching guys play tennis on grass courts (something I’ve seen on TV but never in real life – I’ve only seen clay courts back home), and window boxes of flowers spilling over, and a relaxed discussion of kids, the vacation she and Gordon had taken to the States, Maeve Binchy books we both liked – it was really nice to see Chris again. I’ve slept on her couch many times going back and forth between Nicky’s and getting to London to Heathrow or going back to Paris, and I was glad to see her, and to eat cake in her garden before getting my train-brains together again. What was that routine? Yes: get on this platform. Take that train. The subway. Don’t go to Oxford Circus this time (what a shitty circus). Back to that crazy huge station. And back across the entire thing to the other side where the Eurostar lounge was. On this side, on the British side, it was like an airport, complete with a bar and food. You could relax, watch the board, see how long before they wanted you to queue. Time enough to just sit and text people. And relax. Because this time, I was going to go to Paris.
Which, sometimes, can come pretty close to a rapture :)