europe – Much That Is Fair

Mother of Cities

There are pluses and minuses to using a conference as an excuse to travel. In general, I find the pluses outweigh the minuses in the long run: sometimes you can get a grant to help cover the experience, you have a built-in reason for being somewhere and are often among people who are eager to make friends or at least grab coffee, you get to see places that the regular tourists might not go, and so on. The minus, however, is a big one: you are not going to see very much of the city beyond the conference venues unless you leave the conference. Case in point: for the first three days I was in Prague, I walked by the opera house where Don Giovanni premiered and the city’s famous astrological clock without even registering them, because I was running late. Whoops.

Poor Old Erin’s Isle

As a child, I first encountered Ireland through its music. One of my favorite songs on my mother’s Kingston Trio CD was “Roddy McCorley,” the song about the 1798 revolutionary who was hanged on the bridge of Toome. This meant that practically the first thing I ever learned about Ireland, ahead of the shamrocks and the leprechauns and the Guinness, was that they were an unrestful country: “In Ireland,” the recording begins, “in all of their many revolutions, they always found someone to use as a hero.” It would be many years before I learned what exactly they were revolting about, but those two early associations would remain: music and an unquiet existence.

City of Literature

Perhaps not unlike many children my age, I first came to know Edinburgh through Harry Potter: the legendary place where J.K. Rowling had first dreamed up the boy wizard. Once, a visit to The Elephant House, where the story’s first chapters were written, would have been one of the highest pilgrimages I could make in the United Kingdom. And rightfully so, I think. I owe a great deal to Rowling. Her stories taught me, as they did many in my generation, about the power of our choices, even when our actions seem to have little effect on the wider picture. They offered me role models, particularly in the form of a bookish girl who could get along just fine with her classmates without sacrificing her grades. And it was thanks to Rowling, more so than anyone except perhaps my third-grade teacher, that I learned how to write. She told her readers that if they wanted to learn to write, they had to read: to read everything that came in front of them, from the nutrition facts on the cereal box to any book that passed into their hands.

Help for Grief and Me

Hearken, landsmen, hearken, seamen,
to the tale of grief and me,
Looking from the land of Biscay
on the waters of the sea.

Looking from the land of Biscay
over Ocean to the sky
On the far-beholding foreland
paced at even grief and I…

– A. E. Housman, “The Land of Biscay”

Many rom-coms want you to believe that when you get stranded in a tiny village somewhere in the UK, your savior will be a young handsome man who falls in love with you at first sight (thus trapping you in that town forever, but for nicer reasons than you were originally stranded, I guess). In my experience, however, the people who really come to your aid in moments of crisis are middle-aged women (all hail Florence, my savior when my car got towed in France last spring!). My hero a fortnight ago was a female taxi driver, who drove me and a whole crew of other stranded travelers through Devon as far as Exeter, where we could all board trains to our final destinations. Thus I escaped Okehampton after all, and thanks to a woman who insisted on charging all of us a single combined fare – £10 per person, probably less than it would ultimately have cost me to take the train. Look for the helpers, as they say.

And it was a good thing that I got out of there. I was meant to spend the week based out of Bristol, traveling to nearby towns like Bath and Cardiff and perhaps further afield into Wales if I felt up to it. But Shabbat morning, news came through from the States that my paternal grandfather, long ill with the lingering aftereffects of a heart attack and COVID-19 (still, even now, claiming victims, though we refuse to think of it), had finally passed away, and my plans changed.