Marching In: To New Orleans and Back Again by Megan Mills

            The thing I remember most from that first visit are the houses. They were all so magnificent and Southern. Houses with wrap-around porches and grand columns. Houses laden with balconies of the most intricate wrought-iron railings. Colorful houses. Houses in danger of being swallowed alive by looming oak tree branches. And plantation houses. Compromising my admiration for these gorgeous estates rich with history and my knowledge of the tragedy of that history was challenging. In fact, there is no possible way to compromise; I was simply deeply fascinated by them. When I travel, I traverse not only distance, but time. I start by blurring my modern surroundings. At the plantations, I would block out the sounds of cars in the distance, the evident signs of electricity and indoor plumbing, my friend Ali texting beside me and just imagine. Imagine how this place functioned in its prime. Imagine the sound of horse hooves on dirt paths, the rustle of ladies’ dresses and the smell of smoke from men’s pipes. Call it ignorantly romantic, but imagining the past is how and why I travel.

             And its past was exactly what drew me to New Orleans. That summer I had been swept away by Gone with the Wind. I wanted to don a bonnet and whisk off to Georgia, as if there I would find Southern gentlemen willing to fetch me food at a charming outdoor barbeque. Ali and her family had moved to New Orleans earlier that year, so when she invited me to visit, I thought, how perfect: that’s where Rhett and Scarlett honeymooned.

            We got to the houses eventually, but they were not my first impression of the Big Easy (a fine and accurate nickname for the city, without a doubt). Our first stop was Bourbon Street and I can’t say it was something I was entirely looking forward to. And for good reason, I thought, the instant we got off the street car – not trolley, street car – and turned onto Bourbon. I swear it was the worst thing I had ever smelled. It was trash day, I hoped; it couldn’t possibly smell like this all the time. I looked to my left and saw the sign for a club called Hustler. “Relax, it’s just sex,” it read; welcome to Bourbon, I thought.

            As I quickly discovered, there was so much more to New Orleans than its houses from a different era and its infamous party scene. I forced Ali to take me to jazz clubs, where we snickered after illegally ordering margaritas. I ate everything – gumbo, jambalaya, oysters, beignets, coffee with chicory. The Southern accents of the locals captivated me. Everyone was so friendly and relaxed and I tried not to act like a Puritan from up North because I wanted them to like me as much as I liked them. I decided I wanted to be buried in a crypt, they were just so beautiful. I thought that New Orleans was to be one of my favorite places and for reasons beyond it being a mere setting for a fictional tale and a fascinating history.

            I knew my return to New Orleans would be drastically different. Many times, I find that returning somewhere can be better than visiting it for the first time. The anticipation is richer. I was bouncing in my seat on the plane, playing jazz licks in my head, counting down the hours to good ol’ Southern comfort. Yet, there is also the fear of disrupting your idyllic image of the place. My return to New Orleans was centered around my friend’s bachelorette weekend during the peak of Mardi Gras season. I was thrilled to celebrate with my friends and to experience that grand festival. But I knew I would be walking on the Bourbon side of things this time around.

            As it turns out, Mardi Gras is contagious. Its devil-may-care revelry infects everyone. We saw it in all walks of life. Like a family friend of Ali’s, a downright Southern Gatsby with monogrammed drink stirrers and traditional New Orleans blues bouncing off the rich blues and greens that painted his walls. The little ones who sit high above the parades on ladders, unaware of the pleasure they possess of growing up with such tradition. A solo traveler we befriended who was in town to experience the city in its prime, but mostly just to dance. There was another family friend, a socialite born and raised in this place which resembles European cities more than its American counterparts. “Happy Mardi Gras!” she greeted us from the porch of her house right on the parade route. “Please, come in, drink all of the wine and eat all of the king cake.” She told us New Orleans was the kind of place that if you loved it, it would love you back.

            I found that love of all places on Bourbon Street. It thrived with an energy I had never before experienced. Beads of purple, green and gold were everywhere, thrown from the balconies above and covering the street below. I don’t recall any awful smells and I looked on the Hustler sign with fondness. It was all New Orleans.

Going Back by Anna Krauthamer

When I was studying in Prague, I planned a trip to Positano, Italy, because I believed I had to go back there while I was already living in Europe.  That semester, Positano wasn’t as far from me as it usually is.  I had been to Positano many times before with my family, but this last time I went alone.

My parents went to Positano, a small town on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, for the first time in the eighties, several years before my sister and I were born. Then they took us back the summer when we were five, again when we were six, seven, eight, eleven, fourteen, and eighteen. My mother never wanted to go anywhere else. I don't blame her.  Positano, a fishing village built into mountainous coastal rock, leads down to the water; there's just one main road.  The town itself, all its buildings painted some pastel color, is tucked into the mountain's folds. As you walk up the main road to get to the top of Positano, the higher you are, the better your view of what lies around and below you. You see haphazard rows of white and peach, from this distance, tiny structures that make use of their mountain's every square inch, and surrounding the buildings, ancient green and grey landscape. Beneath all that, you see the sea, separated from the town proper by a rocky gray beach dotted with what looks like, from this height, little orange beads.  

Positano has one main beach, with little grey stones and sea glass instead of sand. Everyday we were in Positano my family went to the beach, where we would rent orange lounge chairs from an old man we knew as Capitano.  He was there every other time I had gone to Positano, starting when my sister and I were five, always coming by our chairs to give us slabs of frozen coconut or to remind my sister and me, then burgeoning swimmers, how to say “someone help me please” in Italian, but when I went down to the beach last fall, another man who's now responsible for those orange chairs told me that he had died.

Just farther up into the town, barely off the beach, there's a restaurant called Le Tre Sorrelle that my family ate at almost every night for three summers in a row. We had prosciutto and cantaloupe and watched the beach at night, the orange umbrellas drawn and the water strewed with wooden fishing boats straggling toward the horizon, until everything else around us was quiet. After dinner we'd walk back up to the lovely small hotel, the Villa Rosa, that we'd stay at every summer, in the same set of rooms every time. Ours had a terrace that looked out at the ocean, and sitting there at night, high above sea level, the black sky blending in with the black water, you have a sense of being very small.

Positano was my favorite place in the world. Before I went back, on my own from Prague, memories of hiking up to Positano's peak with my parents and sister were part of a hazy impression of sunny days and late nights with my laughing family, eating gelato and pizza and fresh fish caught that day, of the annual summer Fiesta with fireworks set off from those straggling wooden fishing boats and the rainbow reflections in the black ocean, of our parents buying us matching sundresses, of learning to swim in the ocean with my father and learning to paint from a leafy terrace with my mother.

My family isn't the only family to become less happy as the years go by. Elizabeth and I changed from carefree children to adults. It got harder and harder for my parents to climb the mountain. The summer when Lizzie and I were eleven, we flew out from New York with only my mother; my father had to stay behind a week so he could bury his father. We went back the summer before I started high school, and I was so excited about the next four years and everything beyond. We went the summer right after those four years ended, but my life wasn't where I'd thought it would be. I wasn't going to college that fall—I didn't know then if I'd be going to college at all, actually—and my fear and sadness over how things seemed to be turning out began to overwhelm the joy of being in Positano.

I remember arriving back last October.  It was my first time in Positano when it was not summer.  I got in late on a Saturday night, and it had been a hectic journey. I missed my flight from Prague to Rome the previous night, and almost didn't go at all, but I wasn't willing to give up on seeing Positano again.  So I got another flight the next morning, then took two trains to Naples, another train to Sorrento, and it should have been a simple bus ride from there to Positano, but I missed my stop and had to take a cab from a nearby town. It'll be worth it, I thought, as my trip became more and more complicated. I'll be back, I told myself. As the cab entered the town and drove down the streets I had walked on countless times, I recognized the local grocery shop whose mozzarella my father swore by, the desert place whose items looked so good but, to my sister's and my chagrin when we were finally allowed to try them, were really full of bitter rum I didn’t then appreciate, the salon where I'd get my hair cut every summer. There's no extra room to build anything new in Positano, which means that everything was still the same as it’d always been.

When I stepped out of the cab, in front of the hotel I'd stayed in many times before, I willed myself to feel the way I had before in Positano, but it didn't work. When I went to bed that night, in the same rooms my family had once occupied, I told myself it'd feel different in the morning, after I had slept, but I still felt nothing: it was like trying to summon a stranger's sense of being in her favorite little town to which I had inexplicably decided to travel. The next morning, as I walked up and down the streets, went back down to the beach and back up to the mountain's peak, I kept on trying to access the joy I had always felt before there, but it never worked.

It rained that day, so the beach was empty. I had never seen it rain in Positano before. Next to the beach, there's a big stretch of gray concrete where ships arrive, and the gray stone blended in with the gray water. It was very beautiful.   If you go a bit farther away from the beach, there's an empty trail whose cliffside drops into the ocean. I walked the trail down to a remote, totally empty, lagoon. I watched, from that distance, the quiet beach with its closed orange umbrellas, and realized everything that had changed outside of Positano’s protected, dreamlike world since the first time I had been there.  I tried closing my eyes and pretending that it was ten years ago, that it was another hot summer in Positano,  and that my family was waiting for me somewhere back on the beach among the orange umbrellas, but I felt silly; I could not forget that when I opened my eyes again it would still be October and I would still be alone.  My trips to Positano, with my family, in the past, had condemned me now to grasp for something irretrievable.  I stood up and started walking back to the hotel.

I left the next morning on a bus to Sorrento.  I had run around Positano all morning buying presents, visiting the stores my mother loved, and barely made it to the bus stop on time. But the bus was late. Still, my panic remained, ten, twenty, thirty minutes after the bus was supposed to arrive, and I began to realize I would probably never return again; I would probably never want to return.  The whole time I was there that weekend, I had waited to feel like I really had come back, and when I saw the bus approaching from off in the distance, making its way around the curvy treacherous road, I looked at the town and realized I was saying goodbye.

A couple of days later I Skyped with my parents.   It’s been a long time since my parents were last in Positano.  They wanted to hear about everything; they were so excited to see their favorite town again through my eyes.  “It must have been so nice being back,” my mother said, picturing me, I'm sure, on the beach, in the Villa Rosa, and on our terrace looking at the town she loves and, I know, misses very much.  I told her that it was just like she remembered it.

Traveling Circus

{Ricochet}

By Emma Page

Honestly, I was having a hard time remembering why I was in Phoenix in the first place. Nothing about my previous travel experiences had prepared me for this. I was used to flying with my family, either to familiar destinations or in possession of an extensive and precise itinerary created months in advance. Yet here I was, traveling alone to a city I’d never seen, with a plane ticket I’d bought just days earlier. Finding cheap direct flights from Seattle to Chicago isn’t difficult, even considering how last-minute my purchase had been. I cursed my blind frugality. I’m sure if I’d scrolled to the second- or third-most-expensive fare when booking my trip I wouldn’t have been standing alone in a line that didn’t seem to going anywhere, contemplating just catching the first flight home rather than dealing with standby seats and an indefinite layover.

Someone behind me turned to his neighbor, commenting: “man, I wish we had some bongos right now. This line could use a drum circle!” I ignored him, turning to twitter while I strained to make out what the news anchor on the holding-room television was saying. Something about a “polar vortex?” That couldn’t be right...

My feet were starting to ache from standing, and my phone battery was looking dangerously low. I contemplated the situation. On the one hand, this would probably make a better story than whatever I would be doing back in Seattle. On the other, I wasn’t going to be in any mood to tell it if I had to spend 24 hours in the Phoenix airport waiting to get a flight.

The bongo guy went on explaining behind me that he “was about to quit his day job to focus full-time on his carbon-fiber fixed-gear bike repair business.”

I checked my phone again. O’Hare International, the second-largest airport in the country and my final destination, was closed entirely. Twitter informed me that the polar vortex had frozen all of their antifreeze fluids. I suppressed a horrified giggle at that improbable piece of information. My amusement turned sour as I pondered the high likelihood that I wouldn’t make it to Chicago at all.

Bongo Man revealed that he was “living in Portland right now, with some rad people.” Of course he fucking was.

When it was my turn at the counter, an extremely frazzled-looking woman informed me curtly that the best she could do was stand-by for an 8am flight tomorrow, and I could have a discount on a hotel room at the nearby Marriott. Having just watched a long line of people spend upwards of an hour berating this helpless employee, I tried not to let my frustration show as I thanked her a little more than was strictly necessary and decided that the $60 for a hotel room sounded more than reasonable.

At the hotel, a friendly concierge set up a 6am wake-up call and handed me a warm “hospitality cookie” in a small paper bag. Cheered slightly, I munched thoughtfully on the cookie as I walked up to my room. The air in the hotel courtyard was warm and still, with moonlight and the glow of an outdoor pool casting eerie shadows on the alien shapes of the cacti. The smell of the desert gave way to the tang of A/C in my room, a surreal contrast considering my rainy origin and my frozen destination. I took a bath and watched a marathon of “Beverly Hills Housewives,” my frustration fading as I drifted into sleep.

***

The house was wedged between a Whole Foods and a Crossfit gym, an incongruous piece of dull residential architecture in a cheerful, well-lit shopping district. It was clean but bare, with a cramped kitchen, a single bathroom, and institutional-looking couches in the first-floor living room. Upstairs was a single, large room, unfurnished except for a pair of love seats and several stacks of un-inflated air mattresses, blankets, and sheets. I dropped my bags on one of the couches and collapsed, paralyzed with exhaustion. Although the house was empty at the moment I arrived dragging my bags up the front steps, I knew that wouldn’t last. I was something like the twelfth guest out of nineteen staying for the week in a house intended to sleep no more than nine. Aching from the snowy walk from the bus stop, I did my best to claim a corner of the upstairs room, spreading my belongings out across the floor and fading once again into an exhausted sleep.

***

We stumbled out of the taxi into the dark, wet street, wading through an icy puddle toward the sidewalk. The driver had dropped us in front of a low, unmarked building flanked by a gas station and a freeway onramp. I was frozen, as usual, and hadn’t eaten in far too many hours. Broke and running late, I had taken a deep breath and decided to leave the search for food until after the show. A warm glow spilled out of a small door a few yards away, and we could hear familiar voices as we approached.

Inside the door was a narrow hallway leading to a crowded room with a few cafe tables and a bar to one side. The room was in the same state of dingy, dignified dishevelment as old theaters everywhere, with peeling plaster and faded gilt on the molding around the bar mirror. Through another low door in the back of the room was the theater, a medium-sized black box lit barely well enough for us to find our way to our folding chairs.

Earlier in the day I’d listened to a slender, upright young woman with a tangle of dark hair and bright red lipstick speak at a press conference. In her clipped, neat French accent she had told us about this highly unusual one-woman show which was in fact the product of her Master’s thesis in contortion. “When I would perform my act, people would come up to me after always saying ‘that must hurt you so much!’ and I say, well, no, it doesn’t actually. So I studied, and I trained, and I created this piece to stop those questions.”

As the lights rose slowly I saw that here she was again, contorted unrecognizably. She hung bent in half backwards, her ribs seething towards the ceiling as she panted and swayed slightly. She moved imperceptibly lower until suddenly her hands were on the floor, her face hidden and her hips twisting. Most contortion relies on a combination of grace and shock value, bending the human body cleanly into impossible positions. Nothing about this woman seemed graceful, or even human. Her legs and arms were twisted reptilian limbs, her ribs and shoulder blades heaving scales, her movements agonizing and unlikely. It wasn’t her flexibility that was unusual, but rather the quality of her movement and the stunningly strange shapes she achieved over the course of her 50-minute performance.

***

48 hours later I sat on a sidewalk half a mile away, cursing Chicago, the Polar Vortex, and my hubristic decision to make the walk to the theater without looking up directions first. An easy 10 minute walk had turned into a 40-minute odyssey, and my odds of survival were looking lower and lower by the second. Although it had warmed up considerably since the vortex had stranded me in Phoenix, the weather was so surreally awful that I was about fifty percent convinced I must be trapped in a nightmare.

My phone said it was twenty degrees outside, and yet somehow it was raining in wet, heavy sheets that immediately worked its way through my layers and froze against my skin. My Seattleite soul was so baffled by the fact that it could be both below freezing and pouring rain at the same time that I kept fighting the urge to indignantly ask someone what exactly this city thought it was doing with the laws of nature. The sidewalks were flanked by foot-tall snowdrifts which melted to create a thick layer of black ice underneath the rainwater. Each time I successfully traversed a block, I was confronted with a ten-foot-wide, six-inch-deep ocean of ice water sitting malevolently in the depression made by the wheelchair ramp. My leather boots were functional in the snow but completely hopeless against this slush-storm. In my frustration I had managed to walk too quickly and slip, landing hard in one of the smaller puddles.

An hour later, I quietly slipped off my soaking boots and tucked my frozen toes up onto the worn velvet seat of the theater. I’d done my best to towel off in the bathroom when I arrived, but the icy stream of water rushing down my spine as my sweater defrosted was still going strong. I had decided several hours before that, as much as I’d liked what I’d seen so far of Chicago, the Midwest mid-Polar Vortex was probably what Hell looked like. The horde of uniformed school children sitting in the section of seats to my right (all looking much drier and better-prepared for the weather than I did) emitted a low, squirming murmur as the lights went down. A couple behind me muttered knowingly to each other. “I hear this troupe is the next 7 Fingers. They’re blowing up.” “I hear Cirque wants to buy the show.”

The aesthetic was upbeat, low-budget urban: bright tshirts, jeans and a 40-foot fake building edifice on which the cast scrawled graffiti during the performance. A cast of five men and one woman milled about the stage, newspapers and umbrellas tucked under their arms. Even at rest, each of them overflowed with the casual grace of an elite athlete. As the first act burst into motion, I felt like apologizing to the city for any weather-related complaint. Chicago had brought me this display of a kind of artistry that is almost impossible to find in the US, and I’d have gone through that icy rain a dozen times to be there.

A few of acrobats crouched in the wide windows of the fake building, and two men sat on top of it with their feet dangling over the edge. “AAAY TIME FOR BREAKFAST!” shrieked one who looked eerily like Cory Monteith, tossing a box of cereal to his friend as he pushed himself off the ledge. He spread his arms at the last second and rebounded off a trampoline twenty feet below, floating effortlessly back up to the top of the wall. He paused for a beat, then twisted and fell again, this time ducking his head and flipping twice on his way down. As my eye followed him up I caught sight of his friend with the cereal passing him on the way down, then suddenly three more bodies flying through the air. For the next ten minutes, the six cast members shared the 9’x15’ rectangle of the trampoline, whipping past each other as they ducked in and out of windows and switched places at the height of their 30-foot trajectories. It was a death-defying display, high-caliber acrobatics disguised as dreamscape playground antics. Plenty of skill without an ounce of self-serious drama. When they tumbled grinning and panting off the stage, the applause was thunderous. I smiled and thanked the ice melting between my toes for bringing me here.

21 Scoops

 

by Christine Campbell

“The nuns are back!”

            I took a reluctant break from the first of many gelati that day to look expectantly for our accidental companions. Alizeh gestured excitedly down the beach, trying to point them out while clutching a Fior di Latte cone, but I had no trouble spotting the group of habit-clad women against the horizon of the sparsely populated April shoreline.  They were carefully navigating their way across the pebbled beach, taking high, awkward steps as though they were skipping cracks on a sidewalk, their stockinged calves appearing on occasion beneath long black skirts. Toting paper lunch sacks and hanging on to well-balanced cones of their own, it was clear they had just emerged from the same gelateria we visited moments before. How could we have missed them!  I had opted for the black and white Stracciatella, because I liked saying the word and felt I could pronounce it with some authority, but whatever flavors the nuns had chosen were multicolored and bright, making my sweet tooth jealous.  Mint greens, pastel oranges, and raspberry reds stood out in stark contrast to their black garments, seemingly more suited for the sticky hands of rowdy kids at a carnival than for 50-something sisters in habits. 

              Alizeh, Richard, and I, given the freedom of a six week Easter Holiday from Oxford, had been tending to our tired feet on the beach of Monterosso al Mare, the first of five stops in Cinque Terre-- a group of five coastal towns along the Italian Riviera. We were somehow still wired awake after a 5:00 alarm in our Florence hostel got us stumbling out the door, though every day in Italy had been an early one.  The bells of Florence’s Duomo resounded unforgivingly through our wood slatted windows at 7:00am sharp, but with margherita pizza to eat and gelato to taste, Davids to ogle and cappuccinos to sip languidly in cafes, I was tired of sleep and only wished my body could put up with more hours in the day.  This particular morning we had rushed to our train car in a frenzy after forgetting to validate our tickets, with our backpacks comically full and cameras bouncing dangerously around our necks like proper newbie tourists. 

We had first encountered the nuns on our second train from La Spezia, which we had somehow managed to catch on time. The women sat quietly together and shared some sort of pastry in a paper bag, flipping through well-loved Bibles and snapping photos out the window between bites.  Their calm and welcoming presence, discordant as it was against the throngs of tourists and tired Italian businessmen, offered a thoroughly appreciated break in tone from the gaggle of talkative American college girls immediately in front of us, whose incessant chatter fit all too well with their high, blonde ponytails and Jansports.  We had been trying to distance ourselves from these girls, for better or for worse, so as not to be thought a part of “that” group of Americans. In our nervous anxiety about getting off at the right stop, however, Alizeh, Richard, and I were caught in their legging-ed vortex and somehow followed them off the platform at Rio Maggiore. As we eventually realized our mistake, we hightailed it back to the train, wondering desperately what the nuns would get up to as we watched it leave without us. 

Luckily after we caught the next car to Monterosso and found out that the nuns had opted for something sweet in our absence, the day seemed to be getting back on track. Our fear of trying to fit every conceivable sight into the neatly packed time span of about 8 hours had subsided, and in its place was an unexpected, almost voyeuristic desire to know how their day would shape up. From a safe distance we watched a few black habits whip around in the wind as the nuns navigated the stones beneath them in sensible, rubber soled shoes.  My mind was driven to a scene from The Bells of St. Mary’s, in which a habit-clad Ingrid Bergman teaches a schoolboy to box, light on her feet and hopping evasively around the room to demonstrate proper ‘footwork.’  The reference was lost on Richard, who is a fierce but friendly Catholic, so I was left laughing to myself while trying not to drip Stracciatella down the side of my hand. 

Keeping tabs on our new found friends all the while, we found ourselves physically worn down as we tried to hobble towards the sea without shoes or socks, hoping to keep our things dry in anticipation of a long day of walking.  Alizeh’s perpetually Chaco-sandaled soles, which had, in the previous week, trekked a portion of Spain’s Camino del Santiago in the rain, had grown raw and tired without her thick wool socks.  Her 30-foot journey to the water’s edge over bulky black stones was painfully greeted by an anonymous sting from something waiting among the waves.  I’d like to imagine it was a jellyfish, but the pages of our guidebook were curiously barren of useful information about hazardous marine life off the coast of northwestern Italy in spring, and no tentacles were spotted receding beneath the surface upon second glance. Alizeh never wavered in her steadfast determination to continue eating her gelato as we waited to see if the conglomeration of red dots on her left foot would evolve into something more sinister, but this was a relatively accurate portrayal of our priorities throughout the trip.  Dark alleys in strange cities meant nothing if there was pizza at the end. 

After a brief period of tentative hobbling to test out the damage when her sandals were strapped back into place, Alizeh was on the mend and we were all upright again. Our feet were unpleasantly sticky-salty as we started off in casual pursuit of our nuns, who had settled down on top of a few large rocks that jutted out into the water and provided ample room for a picnic.  We were motivated by sheer curiosity; though our break from University life left us time to explore a bit of the world before shutting ourselves back into the Radford Camera to churn out essays, it seemed a much more drastic departure from daily life for these women, wherever they were from, to be laughing freely on the beach, not calculating the spiritual merits of some weathered Fresco in Rome or shouting at spring breakers in short shorts.  Alizeh snuck a photo of them once we had maneuvered our way out onto the rocks, a few of the waves threatening to break over our toes, and it was one of those moments you would never expect to be so beautiful in real life. All was silent apart from the waves at our feet.  Even the busy beauty of Florence, such a departure from home and school and England, felt a long way away.  The sun was warm on our backs but still gentle enough in early April, and I sat with my friends, scanning through photos in our cameras’ viewfinders, reflecting on previous days of travel. All of the nervous anxiety about going somewhere unfamiliar and trying to fill every minute of our days with planned museum visits and tactical relaxation melted away as we learned to just sit there and listen to nothing. 

And that’s how we spent my 21^st birthday. We followed a bunch of sweet-toothed nuns around an Italian coastal town, forming some sort of unspoken experiential bond with them and soaking in the mutual sunlight.  We had originally been going for 21 collective scoops of gelato in lieu of typical drunken celebration (the nuns would not approve. Or maybe...?), but a dinner of fried octopus and seafood pizza had left us excessively stuffed in Manarola, and we fell just short of our goal.  We were distracted and led astray from our plan by obstacles good and bad (Richard was later bit by a lizard he tried to catch with bare hands), and to add to the chaos, on our way home we were caught in the middle of a regional train strike and temporarily stranded at La Spezia. The nuns, however, grouped together by the biglietteria and talking animatedly amongst themselves, made us somehow sure we would get where we were going.

 

Corner of the World

     By Chelsea Ennen       

            A bookshop (or anything else for that matter) cannot be found within an hour of my hometown.  I’ve always felt envious of my college friends who grew up in cities and know enough to mourn the loss of the independent bookshop culture, which I only vaguely understand as a concept.  For me, the occasional shopping mall Barnes & Noble was as good as it got.  What I did have growing up was a copy of Little Women I read so many times the front cover fell off.  Child-me with all my unmolded tastes had practically memorized it, and I said to myself “I’d like to read something else like this, maybe another female author from the nineteenth century?”  From there I found a copy of Pride and Prejudice.  Next it was a whole Jane Austen omnibus.  By the time I got to A Tale of Two Cities I had become a cliché: the Midwestern white girl who corrected the teacher on the Bennett sisters’ ages and dreamed of making a pilgrimage to the “Brit Lit” Mecca that was London, England.  

There was no question where I would go for my semester abroad in college, and when I arrived in January 2013 I immediately planned out my sightseeing schedule.  Westminster Abbey, where I knew a whole host of authors were buried, would come in towards the end: first I had to make myself worthy, to go through trials of some kind, to distinguish myself.  I decided I could best do this by immersing myself in London’s literary culture, so I made a list of famous London bookshops to visit as tourist destinations.  I sprinkled various “big sights” throughout the semester; and every weekend I would track down the shop nearest whatever tourist magnet I was visiting, and check it off my list. 

Foyles on Charing Cross originally gained fame for its counterintuitive business practice where books were organized by publisher rather than by category or author.  By the time I got there, it felt and looked like a good modern bookshop with the added bonus of Ray’s Jazz café, where I snuggled into a small wooden table with a hot latte in a heavy ceramic mug to watch the grey rain fall outside.  Daunt Books on Marylebone is best known for its travel books but what makes it memorable is the Edwardian interior.  Natural light flooding in from the high windowed ceilings and balcony-style top floor were second only to the greatest tote bag ever created by mankind (everyone in London has a Daunt Books tote bag).  Waterstones in Piccadilly is the largest bookshop in Europe: floor after floor filled with shelf after shelf of books.  I had prepared myself for the blandness and impersonal atmosphere of a large chain, but instead the ambiance was warm and friendly.  The lighting, while bright, felt gentle on my eyes, and the black shelves made the book covers pop like canvases in an art gallery. 

But of all the bookshops, Hatchards was by far my favorite.  Founded in 1797 it is the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom and sits near the Waterstones on Piccadilly, in one of London’s busiest neighborhoods.  When I stepped out of the tube I was immediately transfixed by neon signs like those in Times Square, the winged statue of Eros, the London Pavilion, the Criterion Theater!  Small-town girl that I was I vacillated between child like exhilaration and child like fear.  With its unassuming dark wooden exterior and small hanging sign with the name written on it in a tasteful golden script, Hatchards seemed as if it had been forgotten by time as the city just grew up around it.  Inside, the wooden steps that lead from one small floor to another were worn down in the middle by countless feet, the walls were dark, there was only just enough light for comfortable reading, the air smelled of old paper (what greater scent is there?), and I remember wishing I could live there. Stepping into Hatchards from the bustling Piccadilly streets was like stepping into another, older, quieter world.  When I stepped back outside I was almost surprised to see cars and not horse-drawn carriages.  More than that, I felt the significance of the fact that this shop was actually standing while my nineteenth century favorites were alive and writing.   

Satisfied in my efforts to become a part of a real “bookshop culture,” I felt ready to proceed to the final stage in my journey.  This was the country where my favorite books were written; it was time to do something more than tour places I could buy them.  The time had finally come for Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.  My trusty Rick Steves travel book told me that Poet’s Corner is home to countless memorials of musicians, writers of all kinds, and even Laurence Olivier.  Many of them are not actually buried there, but about half of the names represent actual human remains.  It even worked out that my parents could come see it with me.  They were on their own European trip to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and by the time they got to me they had already seen Rome, Venice, and Paris.  My dad was on a literary mission of his own, finding all the places mentioned in Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code.  A history buff, the fun he had reading a book that bent history (to put it kindly) did not lessen his enthusiasm for learning about the real monuments, and he couldn’t wait to find Isaac Newton’s tomb in Westminster (“ ‘ A knight a Pope interred!’ “).

After we found Newton’s monument (which is so ornate we felt embarrassed for missing it ) and browsed through the hundreds of monarchs and consorts buried in the nave, the flowing crowd carried us back to Poet’s Corner.  Everywhere I looked I saw some familiar name or other; it was overwhelming.  Chaucer was here, Milton was there, I suddenly realized I was standing on Thomas Hardy.  We pored over every inch, but I remember wishing desperately that they allowed pictures so I could have something to look over after we left.  Some of the more famous names had ornate statues, like Handel, whose grave was marked by a life size statue of himself writing a piece of music, but others who were equally recognizable, like Henry James, Lewis Carrol, and D.H. Lawrence, were immortalized only by square stones in a row on the floor.  Even the stained glass windows were covered with names.  Countless eyes in busts bore into me with their marble stares, the grander statues loomed giant-like above me, the name-littered floor looked ready to swallow me whole for daring to step on it.

I knew Poet’s Corner would be one of the big highlights of my trip, but I had no idea the effect it would have on me.  It wasn’t long before my stomach tightened and I felt rather dizzy, which at first I attributed to a lack of protein and too much walking.  Suddenly I felt the gravity of the space I was in, the immense weight of all that these names and statues and memorials and plaques and windows represented.  The Corner was its own temple within the church: a sacred space where the nations’ literary history was glorified by tangible altars.  We were only an insignificant few of hundreds who daily came to pay their respects and offer their prayers. 

Despite my unapologetic devotion to literature I am really not a particularly sentimental or sensitive person, so I’m not used to crying or getting emotional at all let alone in public.  But as I stared down at Charles Dickens’ name my head started to swim, as if he knew I was looking at him and pumped my brain full of his iconic London fog.  I turned to my left hoping for relief, but instead saw the Bronte sisters’ memorial.  Dad nudged me, pointed a little to the right of the Brontes and whispered “Hey, look over there,” in my ear.  Jane Austen.

I actually had to sit down and breathe for a minute.  Confused as to what was happening to me I fought the stinging tears in my eyes and just stared blankly at Jane Austen’s name as my wiser parents patted my back and waited for me to collect myself.  I was no longer the skinny little kid who pushed back her hair with a Disney’s Pocahontas headband to read: I was almost a senior in college, I’d been exposed to a much wider variety of authors I admired and enjoyed just as much, but these were the books I grew up with.  These were the stories I loved most, that I read for pleasure.  These were the movie adaptations I watched over and over and over. These stories were my stories, and I was surrounded by the remains of their creators. 

Eventually I gathered myself enough to channel my nervous energy into chattering about why George Eliot wasn’t actually there and one of the guides must have heard me because he approached us.  “Have you found all your favorites?” he asked with a friendly smile.  He was probably used to seeing these breakdowns on an hourly basis.  “I don’t even- I mean I’ve found everyone I can’t even-” I struggled to form coherent sentences.  My eyes filled up again as I finally found the words for what I was feeling. “I’m sorry, I study English literature, my whole life is right here!”  He grinned knowingly.  “This place must be a pretty big deal for you then, huh?”  In that moment, I could have kissed that little man who helped us find a whole host of big names we hadn’t noticed, and who told us all about how people were often buried standing up to save space.  He knew exactly how big a deal that place was for me; I could see it in his eyes as he spoke.  He knew what this meant to me.  My whole life, contained in one corner, was right there.