The Practical Free Spirit

1. Being in a foreign country, even one in which they speak my native language, forces me to see.  It shines a light on the world around me, but even more important, it opens myself up.  Whatever I’ve been trying to ignore, whatever I’ve been trying to leave behind me unexamined, well, there it is.  I return to the U.S. a different person from when I left.

2. The day we leave, we decide to get a cab after all because it’s raining, and slogging to the Tube with all the luggage and the wet only to squeeze into the steaming commute-time train sounds distinctly unappealing.  Plus I barely slept the night before.  Our cab driver talks to us the entire drive to the airport.  He is worried about the foreign embassy workers who won’t pay their parking tickets.  It’s mostly the Arabs, he says.  He’s been to Florida and Disney World, and he wonders if California is the same.  It’s not, I say.  Then it begins to snow in light swirling flakes.

3. It’s maybe one in the morning as I enter the large square room laid bare by its strong fluorescent lighting.  I instantly want to back out and run the other direction, but I’m an adult now and I have to deal with things like this.  I sit in the dentist’s chair in the otherwise bare room, noting how there is absolutely no high-tech equipment in sight.  No, wait, there’s a box that looks like a machine of some kind.  Until I realize it’s an old PC vintage 1998.  Not reassuring.  The assistant, wearing baggy white clothes that remind me of the gangster rapper wannabes at my high school, looks like he’s not more than eighteen.  He tells me, without knowing anything about my case, that it will either be a root canal or an extraction.  I laugh nervously and try to make a joke, only to realize that he is completely serious.  Those are the two things that happen in this room.  The dentist holds the X-ray up to the light, does a bunch of fast talking, tries to make me feel stupid and small, but luckily I’m too stubborn for that.  No way do I need a root canal in the middle of the night with old instruments and two assistants who cover themselves from head to foot with plastic bags.  I wonder about the sanitation.  I leave.  My cheek doesn’t swell up horribly the way he said it would if I didn’t get treated, so I feel pretty good about that decision.

4. Shiny twinkle lights adorn every shopping area in London.  Oxford Street is a steady stream of shoppers, already laden with paper bags on every arm, prominently emblazoned with big brand names that even I have heard of.  A sidewalk vendor sells crepes.  We stop and I have my favorite, with apricot jam.  My leather gloves are covered with stickiness by the time I am finished.  Shiny red ornaments, grotesquely over-sized, hang from the ceiling at the Covent Garden market, and a large green reindeer, two to three times as tall as me, stands to one side with a red ornament nose.

5. Thanksgiving night, we are going to the theater.  We stop off at a nearby pub and both order fish and chips.  I eat my chips with gallons of ketchup.  It feels like just another night but I’m okay with that.  I’ve been doing the “five things that make me happy” exercise pretty faithfully lately, so I’m very aware of just how much I have to be thankful for.  Back home I will have pie and think Thanksgiving thoughts.  I just have to decide between pumpkin and cherry.