And a good day to revisit the wonder of how the world has only two words for tea: Tea if by Sea, Cha if by Land.
Back home in Michigan, the morels are up. I want to tell Summer to hold back until I get back.
Feeling a bit lighter as we're are halfway through our trip and the countdown to home is ON.
And when I called my mom for Mother's Day, I heard India and Pak have a ceasefire! I'm so relieved!!
I'm a bit of a ninny when it comes to navigating my way on the Tube and around London. I'm so thankful for the students who have the knack for it and help seamlessly.
But today was one of our days to head to Oxford, and I know my way around that city SO well. We had our lecture in a seminar room at Pitt Rivers Museum, which a student aptly called "hodgepodge museum." I mean there are cases generically titled "the human form in art" stuffed with artifacts from disparate eras and areas. Our lecture was with the wonderful Will Allen who gave us the nugget that is today's post title. When advising people on immigration data, he said he always tries to give them a story to take away.
I had to do a fair amount of in loco parentis-ing today and hope it was helpful. Later, I snoozed off on the bus to students good-naturedly arguing about video games and then dreamt about them. In my dream they were racing each other down the sidewalk and laughing hard and my father watching them from the other side of the street with me, asked me in the indulgent, tender way he has if these were my kids. I guess they are.
Pic: Our class on the steps of the Sheldonian Theater. It is the center of Oxford (and where my diploma ceremony took place!) but the building is important to our class for another reason. It is where Chimamanda Adichie's deservedly viral talk The Danger of a Single Story was recorded.
Our class went to Metropolitan University for a talk with Sunny Singh today. I had the same soft argument with Sunny as I've previously had with Big A. Sunny and Big A think Ta-Nehisi Coates is being lionized for "doing the bare minimum in speaking out against genocide" while I'm grateful that when so many continue to be silent, he's using his platform and risking his career.
If I'm all cosmopolitanism this and kumbaya that, Sunny leads with a reckoning of "enslavement, colonialism, and genocide." She was dropping truth bombs and later I had to check in with students who were visibly upset and trembling. One of them said that it just hit them that their taxes would always fund genocides they didn't believe in. Devastating.
Later a nice meander through Altab Ali Park, Bangladeshi Brick Lane, and Spitalfields Market to round off our morning of multicultural London.
Pic: A bonus song at the end of Six, when the cast encouraged us to take pictures. It's a weird energy to check out a musical when you're homesick and worried about so many things in the world. But also, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with myself while stranded halfway across the world, doing my job like everything is normal. It's my mom's birthday and I had a nice chat with her--can't say it helped my homesickness or my worry.
Afternoon lectures today at the University of London via colleagues River Baars and Lola Olufemi. River's lecture was about British Asian Youth Movements (AYMs), and as promised, they "seamlessly" integrated the supreme court decision about Palestine and the biological definition of woman into their lecture. Students were blown away by Lola's radical revisioning of time and multidirectionality. "I feel like my brain grew three sizes," I heard someone comment.
In our morning session we connected the cosmopolitan threads linking a bunch of stuff from Eddy Grant's dancehall hit "Electric Avenue" and the Brixton Uprising to Stokley Carmichael/Kwame Ture sparking the Black resistance in the UK. The cross-cultural solidarities amongst everyone "politically black" in the UK is particularly heartening with British Asian Youth Movements supporting everything from Black Lives Matter to the Bradford 12. Today's post title is one their lasting slogans. But I like the one they borrowed from The Children of Soweto too: Don't Mourn; Organize!" I know that'll play in my head the next time I'm worried about the world.
Pic: A mural at the top of our street with the words "No child should be a part of war. Ever." I expected to get homesick and sad next week, but I'm--inexplicably--already there. AND after I wrote that, I found out from a text DV sent me just now that India and Pakistan are at war. I called my family, and they tried to calm me by saying the south is usually safer. But also that they're having "mock drills" today to prepare. It all feels so surreal.
I usually have students declaim some of the famous landmark poems at the landmarks. Some of what we read for today included: Louis MacNeice “London Rain,” William Wordsworth “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge 1802,” William Blake “London,” Robert Bridges “Trafalgar Square,” D. H. Lawrence “Hyde Park at Night, Before the War,” Amy Lowell “A London Thoroughfare at 2 am,” Brian Bilston “They’re Renovating Buckingham Palace,” Evie Shockley “London Bridge,” John Betjeman “Summoned by Bells at St. Paul’s," Theresa Lola “Flagship of Buzz,” and Patience Agabi “The London Eye.” I especially love how in the final poem there's a glimpse of Wordsworth writing "Westminster Bridge" and the shoutout to the older poem, down to the year 1802 cleverly reconfigured.
In line for tea at the cafe, a Canadian woman told me that she'd canceled her trip to the US and decided to travel to the UK instead. I completely understand. I also understand how kind people use these kinds of conversational gambits to suss out other people's positions and to offer consolation.
Pic 2: In other nerdy news, I did very well on the trivia contest on the flight and then got a bit nerdier and beat my own high score. (My pic.)
In addition to these two happy pictures in blue, we've had some minor travel woes. There was considerable difficulty finding our transfer coach until the airport marshal helped us. Also, our Oyster cards, which are our main form of transportation inside the city, seem to have a zero balance although they're supposed to last us two weeks. This needs to get figured out tomorrow... but it's a bank holiday and may not. Pfft.
I managed to do all the things today:
I'm mostly packed (carry-on only for two weeks).
Took Nu to see Sinners again per request. (My THIRD time.)
Watered my zillion plants and asked them to stay happy and healthy until I return, please!
Decorated for At's birthday, got the cake photo-ready, and packed her presents.
At is 26!!! Celebrated with At, dropped presents off at her place and then went to dinner with At and friends.
Booked it early to go to the CASA gala. (I couldn't let them down...)
Came home and realized that I'd left the student health info and travel health insurance docs in my office AT WORK, so I made a two-hour trip to retrieve them in the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. This is the part I didn't plan for and could have done without.
Now I'm checked-in and waiting for Big A to drop me off at the airport when he wakes up.
Pic: FB reminded me that 15 years ago we hired a party bus to take At and a bunch of friends, cousins, and grandparents to a Dave and Busters to celebrate turning 11. (At and Nu corner right. How cute, chubby, and kind of portable! And Big A just beyond them... his hair!)
We picked this spot for Scout's memorial because of the way he'd always come bounding up to greet me around that bend.
And while I didn't bury Scout's ashes there (what if we move?), we put up a wind chime and a solar lantern, and when Max and I are out on our first walk early every morning, we (ok, I) sound the wind chime.
Big A and I talk about how Max manifests some of Scoutie's quirks--the way he snuggles in the crook of my knees, "side-mopes," wrestles with Big A and so on. He's not as interested in food, gentle with Huck or a crybaby as Scout was though. And Max worships Nu--Scout wasn't ever sure if Nu was his younger sibling or older sibling.
Now that I've written that out, it's clear how much Max is unlike Scout... But Big A says he has the "spirit of Scoutie." So sometimes when I come upon Max just chilling by Scout's memorial, it really makes me stop in my tracks.
Pic: Max out by Scout's memorial. (Nu's more matter-of-fact theory is that he's treed Kylo, our black-garbed squirrel and Max's arch friendly rival.)
What are we doing? Why is a literal five-year-old in ICE custody? Why has been taken from Minneapolis to San Antonio? Why not hand him over ...
