Cambridge, Mass.
My journey has been something like the
tourist who is continually attracted by the promise implicit in a side road or
diversion. Maybe there will be something more interesting if we take this
rather than the main road?
One of the volunteers with Nightcap was
a young American student Stuart Weiss, Stuart described himself as ‘culturally
Jewish’. I later came to realise that Atheism is a perfectly respectable
position to hold in Judaism.
Stuart (and later his wife Michelle)
became a very good friend and it was partly out of fondness for his radical
position and his committed politics and his great sense of humour that I asked
if he would be prepared to act as an ‘honorary’ Godfather to our youngest
daughter Charlotte.
Stuart agreed and at the Christening
read the Old Testament lesson in Hebrew (at least that is what we told everyone),
it was in fact a half remembered section of what Stuart had learned for his Bar
Mitzvah with a certain amount of additional busking, with his great beard and
his Jewish American accent he looked for all the world like Alan Ginsberg
reading Howl, it was an amazing sight and I only wish I had owned a video
camera in order to record it.
We kept the relationship alive, at first
by letter, card and ‘phone call, (now its email and Facebook), how much the
world has changed.
The opportunity to visit America came
about as so many things in life do by accident. My colleague Peter Selby had
trained at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He told
me one day that he was taking his sabbatical at the college and advised me to
apply for the following Spring Semester when I was due to take a sabbatical
myself.
The thought of spending time in America,
of returning to college, of studying and writing was irresistible and so I
applied to become a Proctor Fellow at EDS.
To my amazement I was accepted and so
began the adventure of a lifetime. There was just so much to be done.
Money had to be raised as we didn’t have
a penny to fund a trip for six people. Flights had to be booked. Visas had to
be applied for.
Accommodation had to be found. Should
the children attend school? Should it be viewed as a holiday. Could we visit
Stuart and Michelle in Vermont?
I continued to do my job. Take services.
Develop projects. But I also began to prepare to hand over my responsibilities.
Six months is a long time to be away.
Eventually the day came when as a family
we stood on the platform at the train station in Newcastle, six apprehensive travellers,
with seventeen pieces of luggage including a trumpet and a violin. We boarded
the train and were waved off and as the train pulled away Charlotte pointed to
the platform, ‘there’s a bag’, we panicked, she laughed, the joker in the
family had caught us out again.
And then across the Tyne and we headed
south for Heathrow.
The flight was without incident. It was
my first ever flight on an airplane, for the children it was their first flight
also, but they took it in their stride and seven hours later we arrived in
Boston, Massachusetts and stepped out of the Logan Airport into twenty degrees
below, to be greeted by Stuart, his wife Michelle and their two young children,
Leah and Michael.
Stuart had gone to the faculty office at
EDS, introduced himself, acquired the keys to our apartment, shopped for
groceries and made the apartment homely and welcoming for us.
That evening a meal was cooked, Chicken
Parmigianino with Tomato Sauce and Spaghetti. Despite its Italian provenance it
was a thoroughly American dish and it was followed by Ice Cream.
Later when we visited Stuart and
Michelle in Burlington we visited Ben and Gerry’s Ice Cream Parlor in
Burlington and Charlotte bought a Cherry Garcia T Shirt.
Charlotte was born in 1974, we visited
the US in 1985, it was eleven years after I had taken Stuart to Manchester
Airport and he had disappeared down the departures corridor to catch his flight
home. It was just lovely to be back in touch.
EDS was such a breath of fresh air. As
Gerry O’Grady the lead tutor on the Proctor Fellowship Programme observed of
the student body, there are some angry women out there. Two names stood out,
Carter Heywood and Sue Hiatt who had been ordained in Philadelphia in the first
round of (illegal) ordinations in the Anglican Communion.
On the first occasion that I attended a
Eucharist with Carter as President and Sue as Deacon, I knew that I was taking
a positive step towards becoming a supporter of the ordination of women. It was
a relatively easy step to take for all the reasons I had signed up to
intellectually.
In the EDS community, as a white,
heterosexual, married couple we were a minority. Issues of Gender were heatedly
debated in a class called: The common genealogy of racism, sexism and
classicism. It was terrific to be part of that community at that time. People
often talk about the sixties but there was as much going on and as much
challenge in the eighties and of course the debates followed me home and
continued to influence and shape the life, not only of the Church but of
society as a whole.
During the spring of 1985 I fell for the
American Dream totally and began to explore ways in which as a family we could
relocate permanently.
The children’s schooling went well apart
from our youngest who, having started school in Newcastle was not old enough
for school in the USA which starts a year later. He hated day-care and so
stayed at home with Mum whilst I went off to audit courses in Christian Ethics
and Discipleship.
I loved being at school and Janet
started life drawing classes in Cambridge, the course was free if you
volunteered as a Model, but despite my challenges she preferred to pay the fee,
which as she pointed out was perfectly reasonable and meant that she didn’t
have to hold a pose which she sensed even then she would not be able to do
because of the MS, which occasionally reminded her of its existence as a potential
threat for the future.
I joined a creative writing group which
met in Harvard and enjoyed the creative support and the challenge of other
writers.
One poem that I wrote was a celebration
of the Ice Sculptures in Harvard Square. It was a descriptive piece however
when I read it to the class, the image of the frozen eagle was taken to be an
analogy for the dollar and my piece a challenging poetic review of the economic
power of the USA.
Wow!
In order to stretch the dollars to allow
us to make the most of our stay I began to take services in Trinity Church,
Boston as a Sanctuary Assistant ($50 a pop as Stuart put it) and at Christ
Church, Somerville where I was also hired to take Communion to the shut-ins.
A member of the Choir at Somerville
offered the use of her cottage on Cape Cod and we hired a big station wagon
from Ugly Duckling Car Hire and drove down to the Cape for a glorious week in
May.
We also visited New York which was
everything you might expect, exhilarating, scary, wonderful, entertaining and
tiring as we walked from Brooklyn to Manhattan and took the ferry to Staten
Island right under the Statue of Liberty.
At the end we offered the children a
choice of Disney World in Florida or Niagara Falls, they chose Niagara, we
later realised why when we made a pilgrimage under the Falls to the spot where
Superman first kissed Lois Lane.
For the last ten days I hired a Cadillac
from the Airport and we drove to Niagara then on through upper New York State,
took a ferry across Lake Champlain and had our final week in Burlington with
Stuart and Michelle.
I had been delighted to be offered a
Proctor Fellowship and had boasted about it to friends and was somewhat
embarrassed to realise that the fellowship had been funded by a donation from
the Proctor family of Proctor and Gamble.
I returned from America with two
manuscripts, neither of which were published, and a thick file of poems, having
re-discovered my vocation as a Poet, indeed that year I wrote a new poem which
was a joint winner in the Evening Chronicle – Bloodaxe poetry competition in
Newcastle.
Dating the earliest people in Japan
She
would always be up first
smiling,
she would attend to her tasks
Her
family were all the same, up before three
they
were the earliest people in Japan
And
I loved her paper house, the way
her
silk kimono slid to the floor
It
never failed to be stimulating
dating
the earliest people in Japan
Her
moods were constantly changing
sometimes
at night she’d claim to be tired
Then
she’d wake just before three, that’s when she’d make me
one
of the earliest people in Japan
I also self-published a travel come
poetry collection which I called Undoing Theology in Red Sneakers.
But I also knew that I needed to move on
and if possible that move should be back to the USA. Eventually we did move to
Birmingham, but it was the West Midlands of England not Alabama.
