Travel and Taylor and time

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Jack and I are just home from a whirlwind college visit trip, our last I believe. We flew to Glasgow last weekend with the intention of seeing the University of Glasgow and spending a few days in a new city before leaving Scotland to drive from Durham to Bristol to Southampton—pretty much as north to south, east to west as you can go in England.

We travel well together, and our college trips have been enormously memorable, fun, exciting adventures that we both treasure. We’ve trained, flown, and driven through small town Connecticut and Massachusetts to thumping Edinburgh during its annual Fringe Fest to happy Dublin, venerable St. Andrews, and burgeoning Belfast. Jack has been a delightful wingman in every place and on the myriad historical, political, literary, and nature pilgrimages and tours on which I’ve dragged him. I will treasure our days of laughter, good and bad meals, many encounters with marvelous strangers (and a few unsavory ones including a dude who we passed on the street in Glasgow and immediately challenged Jack to an airborne arm wrestle that lasted entirely too long*), and his willingness to see myriad places as possible homes rather than “foreign” lands of lesser worth.

Although he spent a terrific day in Glasgow last summer and I’d heard great things, we did not expect to fall madly in love with the city. But we did, fairly immediately. It is so vibrant in its pride of place, warm and welcoming people, artsy vibe (it’s a UNESCO City of Music), activism, fabulous restaurants, and architecture, much of which is stately and gorgeous. And, if you’re from Glasgow, you’re a Glaswegian, which is just a very cool moniker.

Glasgow has four universities, and we saw U of Glasgow and Strathclyde, both of which have excellent engineering programs. If I had to give you an American sense of them, I’d say they’re vaguely like Columbia and NYU in that Glasgow has a campus, green space, and sits in a distinct neighborhood (a la Columbia) while Strath is deeply integrated into the streets of central Glasgow (a la NYU). We met students at both; all raved. Strath was not for Jack, but Glasgow knocked his socks off. Mine too. Founded in 1451, it’s full of history and is phenomenally beautiful—looks and feels like Hogwarts—and all the students we spoke to were positively thrilled to be there. One said, “this is a great place to come and find yourself.”

Scenes from around Glasgow:

That and a great education are the two things I want most for my boys in college. They are precisely what I got at Northwestern, and I find them equally important, the finding yourself perhaps even moreso than the education. Jack’s high school experience has been, to put it charitably, a mixed bag. I feel so terribly hopeful for what college might be for him. Perhaps I think back to my own vexed high school years and how utterly crucial college was in terms of getting to start over. I knew no one in Evanston and so could fashion a new Emily or, rather, learn who she really was or could be without the baggage one acquires while growing up. It can be hard to shed a skin when others already think they know who you are, hard to pivot from a self you’ve just sort of matured into as a child and sibling. For me, at least, college was the first time I couldn’t easily fall back on anything but me, and that was scary and awesome and critical and thrilling.

The University of Glasgow grounds:

Three days in, we rented a car to head to Durham, a hilly city in England’s North East that is home to Durham University which Jack had researched and felt very excited about. He does NOT like to sit in the front seat while I’m driving on the left side of the road and so decamped to the back with headphones and snacks. I loaded Spotify and settled in for what was not, as I had previously claimed in laissez faire fashion, a 90-minute drive but rather a 4-hour trek riddled with tiny “streets,” roundabouts from hell, and a shocking paucity of gas stations. As the sun sets around 4p in that part of the world right now and we’d moseyed over to the rental car place with leisure after a lengthy visit to U of G followed by a late lunch at Mrs. Falafel, we were in inky blackness fairly quickly. I hate to drive in the dark.

Even before crossing the Scotland-England border, I needed gas which was, as I mentioned, nowhere obvious to be found; upon Google-mapping “gas,” we were deposited at a diesel-only truck stop in Lockerbie. A teachable moment, I tell you. “Jack, look up the Lockerbie bombing…Libyans…PanAm plane crash…while I find another station.”

From the back seat, “Mom, what? Libyans and a bomb in Scotland?”

Anyway, he learned, we can now say we’ve been to Lockerbie and we did find gas, and in figuring out to both get the attendant to zero the machine and to then pay inside after pumping (can you even imagine anywhere with that trust in America?), I had a chat with the attendant and a customer who, after I told them where I was from and how lovely it was that they didn’t have random crazies with guns like we do, told me that in fact they do have random crazies with guns although many fewer and honestly the biggest issue there is major drugs but it is beautiful.

I love such interactions. Back on the road; headphones on Jack in the rear, Spotify and Taylor Swift up front for me. I will be honest in telling you that while I was, a decade ago, Swifty-meh, I am now a full-blown fan. An ardent Swiftie, and proud. I find that her music can be experienced in various ways: superficial/easy listening fun; reminiscent “ooh, she gets break ups and young love;” and fuck, have I made the right decisions along the way of living?

A friend recently saw the Eras tour movie and raved about it for days; she and I admitted that we both cried during the film. Oliver and I took Mom and Dad to see it, and Mom is now as much a fan as I am. Another friend saw the movie and is now hellbent on seeing an Eras concert wherever she may need to go to do so, even though she has already seen 4 previous (non-Eras) shows. A dearest BF and I bought tickets to see Taylor play in Amsterdam next summer. None of us is younger than 47. What is going on? Why did at least two of us cry in a movie of a concert?

I think it’s option three in the “experiencing Taylor’s music” that I delineated above. I believe I speak for all of my sample set, most of us middle age and newly- or almost-empty nesters, when I say that in Taylor we see a woman of total power and agency. She is both relatable and not remotely relatable. She has experienced so much of what we have and she has experienced things we never will because of her talents, yes, but also because she has not settled in any way. She lives her life on her terms and with total independence. That hasn’t been pain free; she has earned everything. Our marriages and children and settled lives haven’t been pain free either, and I’m not suggesting that we have regrets. Our lives and hers are simply different. But for women, who constantly manage societal and familial expectations, who sacrifice both willingly and grudgingly, who still neither see nor often experience gender or economic parity, to listen to and watch a woman who is so thrillingly independent and successful use her voice and own her power and her femaleness, well, it tugs at something. Is she living something we could have? I’m not sure it even matters if we’d have wanted anything like her life. Probably, we wouldn’t. But it’s the thought exercise of another path and the stunning visual of a different outcome.

We made it to Durham, to an odd’ish guest house with, surprisingly it felt, an Indian restaurant in its basement. We were voracious and thrilled and immediately placed an order. If y’all are ever in the Durham area, do not miss the Cathedral. It is magnificent, worthy of its fame. Here are but a tiny sampling of the photos we took.

Durham Cathedral (1-5) and town (6). Jack took the spectacular picture of the vaulting in the central tower. It is not filtered.

Jack felt zero connection to the University and because he was so besotted with U of Glasgow, we decided to skip the rest of our England visits and instead return to St. Andrews and then again to Glasgow. This was very wise, not least because I had apparently been on another planet when mapping our trips and had, as with Glasgow to Durham, vastly underestimated the driving times in England. Three cheers for cancellable and easily changeable hotels, flights, cars, restaurants, everything.

On the way from Durham to St. Andrews, I drove us to Bamburgh Castle. If you are not a lunatic The Last Kingdom fan as am I, you would have perhaps been able to miss Bebbanburg without a second thought. Because I am as big an Uhtred fan as I am of Taylor, there was no chance I wasn’t hauling it to this Northumbrian coastal fortress where I could intone “Destiny Is All” while imaging hunky Viking guys with swords fighting to reclaim what was rightfully theirs.

Fenan, uhtred (so effing hot), Sihtric. Below: Bamburgh/bebbanburg

Taylor kept me company for the rest of the drive, to St. Andrews and then back to Glasgow. Through endless roundabouts and missed turns and past pastures full of sheep and views that took my breath away. Through tiny villages and bigger towns and by school kids and Christmas decorations being hung.

Scotland is a magical country. I think Jack will end up there for college and I think that’s fabulous. As we left, I felt that tugging again, the wish for more time, the wonder about the road not taken. He, and all my students whose next big step is to leave home and go to university, is on the cusp of something so big and transformative. I almost feel envious.

*Personally, I think the arm wrestle was better than my experience of being puked on from behind an hour before landing in Dublin two summers ago by a guy who had been WAY over-served. I’m not sure where the guy whose butt and penis we saw while sitting outside for dinner (also in Dublin). He was not aggressive, simply underpantless in a very public place. Having grown up in Louisiana, I was largely unfazed by either of these experiences.