Today is Sunday and I work a 16 hour shift. It’s raining and dreary and I’m sitting at a desk in an office until midnight tonight. I have a stack of around 300 index cards that I have to memorize, 3 chapters to read, a paper to write, and a photo assignment to submit and I don’t really even know where to start. Other than that I have a lot of things on my to-do list to keep me busy… except I have zero dollars and seeing as how most of them call for money-spending….. it’s turning out to be a list of no-go’s.
None of this really bothers me. I’m pretty indifferent to it all, actually.
I’m not complaining in the slightest, in fact. I say all this as a means of leading up to the fact that in spite of it, for 20 minutes today I was happier than I have been in months.
Sitting at work I realized that My notecards for abnormal psych were at my apartment and I needed to ride my bike over there and get them. My supervisor gave me the go-ahead, so I left.
Walking outside and retrieving Hildegarde from the bike room, I noticed that it had gotten quite a bit chillier than when I rode to work. On the ride I also noticed that everything sort of had a calm wisdom about it. There were no pickup trucks rumbling down the street. No camo adorned methheads in front of the crackhouse I pass every day. The rain was sprinkling slightly, the cool wind was breezing past me, and for a second even the smell was the same.
I was in England.
I was back to those days when (if I didn’t have show-jumping) I would ride my Murry bike though Ely (Even though I wasn’t allowed to), go into pubs and watch football matches with old men who treated me like a grand daughter. I would go to Waitrose and the Gift box and look at all the things I couldn’t afford to buy. I would ride down to Watersides to visit the swans and feed them ice cream cones and look at the boats. Ride my bike past the Almonry just so I could smell the best cup of tea in England. And of course I went to my cathedral. I like to think that she misses me as much as I miss her. I would walk by the marble tombs and statues and have silent conversations with them. They were part of the cathedral. They were family. They had seen thousands upon thousands of stories unfold. I hadn’t seen anything. I was 11.
I realize that this makes me sound like I had no friends. Don’t worry. I did. We played soccer, and tennis, and skateboarded, and watched Buffy the Vampire slayer pretty much everyday. We thought we were the coolest people in the world. We wore high heeled boots with jeans because we thought that’s what hot 11 years did. We crushed on 8th graders who wore Calvin Klein “Be”, and played light as a feather/ stiff as a board in tents in the backyard. We played on a field that later turned out to be an Anglo-Saxon burial ground, complete with treasure and a king buried on his horse. Those were the days. I miss them.
I need to go home.
Needless to say, on the bike ride to and from my apartment…. I dawdled. I dilly-dallied. I quite possibly might have even Lolligagged.
…but eventually I had to leave my Anglo-Lolli Land and go back to work… where I am now…. still not doing homework…
My cathedral
