Sometimes, even when I don’t see Dr. Marvin, I imagine she’s here. After all, I’m not wise enough to have these thoughts on my own, you know. It takes stimulus and imagination… and things I just don’t usually get from 8 to 5 working as a technical writer.
Today, I’m looking at the wallpaper on my desktop. I try to change it out to keep myself from getting too bored. Today, as most days, it’s a peaceful setting in the UK.
I like the UK. A lot. Enough to ponder moving there if I ever make the right connections. So far, no luck with that. Anyway, today, I’m viewing a pastoral scene in Yorkshire. I lived in Yorkshire at one time, many years ago, and it sort of stuck with me. Like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth.
I spoke with Thom the World Poet once, who is also an anglophile. It’s a strange connection we have to the earth, the hills, and even the weather of England.
“Oi cud nevah liv theah,” he told me once in his thick Aussie voice. “The weathah.” Yes, well, it is what it is. I understood the darkness and dankness of a typical Yorkshire day. But, here I am, looking wistfully at the green meadows, stone fences, elderly barns, and cattle-dotted fields.
I wanted to be in the picture so badly.
Like that one episode of Night Gallery where a Nazi war criminal wishes he was in a peaceful fishing scene on a lake in the mountains. Except he got his wish and got put, instead, into a picture of the crucifixion.
Perhaps I shouldn’t wish to be in the picture… but it is always so hard to pry myself from staring.
Once, a long time ago, Magical Michael stopped mid-sentence and gasped, “You were British in a past life! I saw it!!!”
I looked back to the hills and meadows, and I knew that at some point, I had been.
I gather up the mists and memories, and I pull my arms around them. I gird myself with them when times are tough and I’m sitting at my desk trying to accomplish tasks that provide me with just enough money to pay my bills and buy a ticket back… back to…
“What?” asked Dr. Marvin.
“Oh, thank God you’re here,” I said. “I was starting to get a bit depressed.”
She just smiled with that gorgeous Cheshire cat smile of hers.
“Why is England so important to you?”
“I’m not sure,” said I. “Partly because I started my married life there, perhaps. Partly because I’m interested in the history and culture. Partly the beauty of the place.”
“But that’s not all of it,” she said.
“No, that’s not getting to the crux of it.”
“Which is?”
“I think I’m English,” I said. Then, I told her the story about Magical Michael.
“I suppose there may be something to that past life stuff,” she nodded.
“It feels that way. It feels like for lifetimes I was there. I loved her, I fought for her, I died for her.”
Then, I told Dr. M. about the time when I was driving along and heard “Rule Brittania” on my radio. Such a wave of national pride overwhelmed me at the time. So much so that it scared me.
And the time I was riding the train from Gatwick, smelling the rich earth, passing by homes and gardens, knowing that my feet had deep roots in all of it.
Somehow…
It was like a memory I couldn’t quite recall.
And that’s all I wanted to tell you this morning. That sometimes, I miss England so badly it hurts.
