Before we left for Paris, we had reached a family decision to take the Eurostar train to London instead of traveling further in France. We’d compare two major European capitals. It would be a great experience for our daughter. My husband was interested, since he had spent little time in England. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to return to London. It had been twenty-five years. I had waited too long. So long that any return trip would always be too soon.
When I was last in England, I had felt very much at home. A year of living in London, traveling regularly to Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere throughout the UK had left me feeling like a local. The next year, a month-long follow-up visit seemed like a return to the old home place.
But England was no longer home. That priceless cache of experience I had accumulated piece by painstaking piece–all that familiarity, all that intimate knowledge of a place and its people–it had mostly vanished. Staying away for two and half decades will do that. Now, I’d be just another middle-aged tourist mother traipsing from site to site, attempting to decipher an unwieldy map.
The whirlwind of mixed-up memories that spun around me in the garden below my old Paris dorm room had been daunting enough. I was afraid London would stir up a contrast even more uncomfortably extreme. Could I face yet another collision of the current me with the student me from half a lifetime ago? Of course I could face it. But I doubted very seriously that I would enjoy it.
I understood with new clarity how my father must have felt when we stood on a certain medieval bridge in Germany. As an eighteen-year old fresh out of high school, he’d been stationed in Regensburg with the U.S. Occupational Forces after World War II. Before long he was seeing a beautiful German woman in her mid-twenties. She’d lived in an apartment building on the other side of the bridge. He’d become like one of the family, welcomed by her mother and her small daughter. When his overseas service had been cut short following the sudden death of his father, he’d never said a real goodbye to Anna-Marie. He thought he’d return shortly. He didn’t.
Sixty years later, he was in Regensburg again at last, accompanied by his wife, daughter and granddaughter. Did he want to cross the Stone Bridge and see if anything remained of the old buildings he remembered? No, he didn’t. It was all too much. Too much time past, too much change, internal and external, to wrap one’s head around.
A sixty-year wait for a return trip is certainly too long. A lapse of twenty-five years wouldn’t be nearly as overwhelming, would it?
