Coming Full Circle

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
--T. S. Eliot

SAN CARLOS, CALIFORNIA
These words have come to mind at many junctures in my life—and now they seem especially pertinent and poignant.  During our last few days in Europe, we became conscious of “closing the loop,” returning to what we’d seen or experienced before either to reinforce an impression or evoke a new perspective. 

In Madrid, on our last day, we followed a walking tour laid out in our guidebook and happened upon an exhibit about Yves St. Laurent and his revolutionary effects on women’s fashion—going through the exhibit gave us a better understanding of his attraction to Morocco and his beautiful gardens that we visited in Marrakesh.  Later in the walk we passed by the Plaza de Colon or “Columbus,” appropriate for us on the threshold of returning to the New World, and the location where, when we first arrived in Spain two weeks earlier, Lily met the high school teacher with whom she’s been corresponding about setting up an exchange program for Sequoia Spanish students.   We walked back to our apartment via streets of the Chueca District, retracing the path we had taken our first night in Madrid, when we dragged our recalcitrant bags from the rental office over what seemed an endless maze of streets.

Returning geographically was necessary and obvious.  We had to fly back to London for one more day in order to catch our flight out of Heathrow.  Abby wanted to re-visit the highlights of central London in an effort to delay preparing for our departure.  Lily wanted me to go back to the corner grocery shop to buy croissants for our final morning—she and I had been treated to croissants from the same shop on our very first morning in London.  Indeed, we were coming back to our landlord’s house where our luggage was stored and to meet for the second time, his former graduate student, Mansour, who had so kindly waited up until midnight for Lily and me when our flight arrival was delayed. 

Instead of repeating visits as the girls did, Peter and I chose something new for our last afternoon in London.  We decided to visit Highgate Cemetery as I had found out that my favorite Victorian author George Eliot is buried there.  But I realize now that going there was also circling back, in time and history, to visit the graves of some of London’s most famous and infamous residents.  Along with other devoted tourists, we stood by the tomb of Karl Marx and reflected on Marx’s impact as well as more recent notables like Doug Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The dusty remains of thousands of former Londoners now rest along muddied meandering tree-lined pathways below headstones of carved angels draped in ivy. 

As twilight approached around 3:30 pm (what people in Devon call “dimsey” I recently learned), we decided to walk over to Hampstead Heath, where the girls and I had rambled three weeks earlier to see the swimming ponds (they are open all year!) and find a “mirador,” or viewpoint from a hill, to look out over the city.  Londoners were out in large family groups enjoying the last minutes of daylight, racing around on bicycles and putting away fishing gear.  We joined them as we sauntered up a grassy slope to reach a perfect vista looking south to the center of the city in the distance.  The girls were down there somewhere, breathlessly running across the Millenium Bridge or dashing off to Convent Garden.  We could see the Gerkin Tower and the unfinished Shard Skyscraper with St. Paul’s outlined very clearly in front of it; the London Eye was off the right, quite faint but still visible in the twinkle of lights just coming on like a haze of summer fireflies. 

I wondered when we might come back to London—not for the Olympics in a few months, surely.  But certainly in the not-so-distant future.  Abby is determined to return before her under 16 Oyster Card expires; Lily is vaguely considering going to school in London sometime.  For our family of four the return home to San Carlos is both an end and a new start.  We’ll relive many of our experiences of the past four months for years afterwards through shared anecdotes, photos, joking references. 

For now, until familiarity returns,  we see our California home in a different light.  Opening the front door to our house and stepping inside we felt foreign; our eyesight had changed and all the angles and colors in the rooms looked different.  It will take a while to re-settle I’m sure, and we’ll probably bore everyone with our comparisons between European and American culture, but I hope we’ll follow T. S. Eliot’s prediction or benediction and ultimately better understand and appreciate our lives here as a result of our explorations.

Beth