Perpetual Summer

June 1^st doesn’t mean the same thing that is used to. For 45 years as a teacher and 17 as a student, it always signaled the closing chords of a long academic-year symphony and the promise of release into summer’s freedom. Now that my whole life is a perpetual summer, it’s simply another day. And gloriously and gratefully so. 

 

This time last year, I was biking through Slovenia. Now, with the recent France trip already feeling like a distant memory, I’m in the small village of Iffley outside of Oxford. Yesterday, another tour through this unique University town, walking the crowded streets past C.S. Lewis’s house with its Aslan the lion door knocker, past a few processions of gowned graduating students, a peek into the extraordinary Natural History Museum packed wall-to-wall with displays of dinosaur bones, writing implements, textiles, musical instruments and more. All the evidence of the importance of culture—art, literature, crafts, music, science— in the human experiment and the irrefutable fact that we all—every person from every time in every culture— share the same propensity to make things both useful and beautiful. 

 

Before entering a formal tour of the Bodleian Library, friend Margie and tour guide extraordinaire gave us the fascinating background, from Henry the 8^th to Thomas Bowdler and beyond, all information the formal tour guide gave in her own theatrical style. This extraordinary library, of which we saw just a few rooms, houses over 13 million books. The books range from ancient Greek and Sanskrit texts to yesterday’s best-sellers and include books written on cheese and ketchup packages, magazines and journals, e-books and more. No books are ever taken out and can only be read in the library by those who have a card, either because they’re Oxford graduates or shown that they have a particular research project. There’s an agreement that every book/ magazine/ journal published in the U.K. is guaranteed a spot in the library and once a week, a truck pulls up with some 1,000 new publications. Extraordinary! Since my book Play, Sing & Dance is published by a Schott in London, there’s a chance my book is included. (Margie and Paul have to look it up to see if that’s true or not.)

 

From there, we went to a small exhibit about the history of British Radio, looked at an original manuscript by Bach, browsed a bookstore and walked to Margie and Paul’s house for a delicious soup dinner and non-stop convivial conversation. 

 

And so ended this part of our three-week travels. Karen and I have a full day of leisure today, a true Sunday of rest and tomorrow we travel to the Cotswolds to hike around a different part of this beautiful country. Next Saturday, I’m back in my traveling music teacher mode giving a workshop in London while Karen flies home. For me, more London time, then Austria, then Ghana. I’m happy to settle into a routine back home in San Francisco, but travel stretches out time so that a single day can feel like a month. These past three weeks have felt like a mini-lifetime and remarkable to think I have five more weeks like this ahead. And then a whole different six or seven weeks in San Francisco, Memphis, Carmel Valley, Michigan and three places in China. 

 

I’m just about to finish reading Graham Greene’s delightful book Travels with My Aunt and just read this passage talking about a settled, domestic life and travel:

“You lie awake at night thinking how every day you are getting a little closer to death. It will stand there as close as the bedroom wall. But if you travel as I do, you won’t be edging day-to-day across to any last wall. The wall will find you on its own accord without your help and every day you truly live will seem to you a kind of victory.”

 

Such travel can happen also at home, both in your imagination and the things you do, but there is no question that traveling as we are has certainly pushed those bedroom walls far away, opened the windows to the morning birds singing in a lush green garden inviting me to partake of life like the schoolchild I once was leaping into the waiting arms of summer.