"what is it
they say can turn even this into wisdom
and what is wisdom if it is not
now
in the loss that has not left this place"
W.S. Merwin, "The Indifferent Stars"
As I last foresaw on this blog, I did make off to Vermilion, Ohio last week to write in a beach house there, just across the street from where I lived my first year out of college. The weather was perfect, mid-seventies and sunny, I wrote mornings, walked afternoons, read evenings, just like summer had been in 1973. With one exception. I did not have the dark cloud of depression and suicidal thoughts hanging over me, not even on Sunday, when it rained all day.
And as I was walking the mile and a half to the library, as I did often 1972-3, feeling rather content, as it seemed I never felt back 40 years ago here, W.S. Merwin's poem "The Different Stars" came to me, nearly whole:
...pain having gone from there
so that we may well wonder
looking back on us here what tormented us
what great difficulty invisible
in a time that by then looks simple
and is irrevocable
pain having come from there...
What was all that pain about then, I wondered, looking down River Road, where I had actually considered just plunging my car off the edge two specific afternoons. What was the deal?
When I graduated in the summer of 1972, I had wanted to come back home, but I could not get the job I wanted. My local school board had interviewed me, and I thought the interview had gone great, then I heard nothing. Eventually, a former teacher told me the new (and short-lived) superintendent had thought my skirt was too short. I was devastated, having spent four years of college getting a five-year degree with honors in two majors and a secondary teaching certificate when I could have just bought a longer dress!
And I had to take a job two hours away from home in a rural farm community. The kids were great, but most of my co-workers mistrusted me as the only person not "from there." The curriculum was appallingly bad and boring and there weren't enough textbooks to go around, so I bought books and wrote my own curriculum to cover the district's and still do my own thing.
I taught well: two of my Spanish students placed in the top three in the state tests that spring. And I just loved my students. I started a Spanish Club and when the kids taking German felt bad they didn't have a German Club, we made it a "Culture Club" and went caroling in German and Spanish. We had a paella dinner and drove to German Village in Columbus for lunch. I was sophomore class advisor. We read Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, and they helped me pick a trash bag full of dandelion flowers to make dandelion wine. The head of curriculum showed up to observe my class unannounced and said it was the most exciting he had ever seen.
And back in my own life, I had found this great apartment right on Lake Erie, in Vermilion, which itself was not all that friendly of a place, but I had the beach and the seagulls and a great walk to the library. And I appreciated all of that.
But I overworked myself to the point of exhaustion, and I was lonely. I tried joining a theater group, which just became a monthly gripe-about-Vermilion session. I had my one friendly colleague and her family to dinner on Friday evening. And after they left, I felt so bereft, I took a whole lot of pills and alcohol...which I slept off and woke, the next afternoon, quite surprised by the beauty of the very late afternoon sunshine.
Looking back on me there, I do wonder what tormented me so, as Merwin says, what great difficulty invisible plagued me? Merwin is talking about the breakup of a relationship, but it certainly applied and applies to the breakdown of my psyche just then. I can say "exhaustion," I can say, "loneliness," but really I have been just as tired and lonely since then and did not feel so very desperate as I did in my early twenties.
It may be that the answer to Merwin's question, "What is it...can turn even this into wisdom" is just "go on, live your life, don't die. Choose life. I guess it didn't hurt that I found the poetry of Adrienne Rich to read alongside Plath and Sexton and those great lines of hers:
..all the time nursing, measuring that wound.
Well, that's finished. The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.
(from 21 Love Poems)
This past week, I walked across the bridge at McGarvey's Landing, and I saw that pain has gone from there. The house I stayed in last weekend had a plaque above the kitchen sink that said, "And they lived happily ever after."
It's true.
"Kindred," An Old Poem, a New Reading: On Leaving for Vermilion 40 years later
Standing with my friend Kate Newland in the lobby at the Rita Dove reading in April, I struck up a conversation with Laurie and her husband, Tom, who said something about Vermilion, Ohio. I replied that I had lived there during my first teaching job out of college, on Ewa-Yea Street in "The Comas."
Tom's jaw dropped, and he said, "We have a house right across the street on Minnie Wawa." Oh man, I had forgotten Minnie Wawa, the next street over. A memory stirred, "I have a poem with Ewa-Yea in it in my first book," I said. But for the life of me, I couldn't recall which poem it was.
I had to come home and look it up.
"Kindred," of course, "Kindred." At first, I had felt so out of my element that year, 1972. I couldn't get a teaching job at home, where I wanted to come back to desperately, finally landed one at the last minute, just before Labor Day, in a tiny farm community, one of the only teachers in the school not "from there," and feeling like a goldfish out of the bowl, and not finding any water in Norwalk nor any apartments in Oberlin, where I would have fit in with all the neon tetras and zebra fish, I landed in a second floor studio apartment in a neighborhood on a beach of Lake Erie.
There in that wonderful, miserable first year of teaching, I was quite truly suicidal much of the year, so very lonely and overworked. But college friends visited, and my mother called to remind me that a clean apartment wasn't all that important just now, and squirrels came and banged on the screen when I hadn't put corn out early enough for them. When I wasn't at the high school or working or asleep, I walked the beach nervously, though the only way down to it was to shimmy down a cliff. In the winter, I walked in a long green cape I had made out of two army blankets and noticed how the lake waves froze in discs, like records piled up on shore. I noticed too someone taking photos of me. I must have looked like a tent coming across the icy sand. In the summer, I floated in very shallow water and recovered from the year. In August, I found an apartment in Oberlin for $30 less, and I moved, but Vermilion has always held a small strong place in my heart, a place I came to feel a kindred to, even though I had no connections to any humans there.
I sent a copy of "Kindred" off to Laurie:
KINDRED
Where does a page re- and re-read land in your genes--
as the car emptying oil finally throws a rod?
Somewhere you have never been. Painting through,
painting through, even the artist may see the color only
after, the way you glance and glance before noticing
the blue spruce has carved itself out around the spouting.
Things become kindred by heart tock and metronome.
Maybe you've seen Wyeth's picture thirty-ones times,
no connection, then thirty-two, you about face, and
Christina's flesh-colored sleeves are yours, your torso
is angling, touching your elbow, wrenching; in the bleached
expanse you were that desolate but unafraid.
There was no such line for the shore to cross
at Vermillion's beach front off Ewa-Yea Street,
no one number of times that the water lapped
but the sand moved. People
reappeared on your doorstep and ran through you,
an hourglass trying to give them an order.
Whole wedges are pie-cut, spatulaed off the clock,
handed over and not begrudged to what's not you
and then is.
(from A Tunnel of Flute Song, copyright 1980 Diane Kendig)
Like reading old diaries, reading old poems brings back more memories than are on the page. I recall now that that spring, I had actually driven a car, leaking oil, across I-70 to visit a friend in Indiana and the car had thrown a rod on the way home. "Throwm a rod" seemed to me such understatement for what had sounded like a hundred children under the hood, throwing rods, leaving me stranded far from anyone I knew, which was how I had been feeling every day anyhow. Also I had been to MOMA that year and had seen "Christina's World," for the first time, had felt my heart breaking in the left side of my chest when I first glanced up and saw it, felt how far away her home was across that wheaten-colored space.
So much had happened that first year away from home. And so little in the grander scheme of things. I was alive, though, and felt the opposite of Tennyson's Ulysses: that all I had met was a part of me: the downstairs neighborman with the cleft palate who had eight reeking, unfixed male cats and a suitcase of poems with opening lines like, "We love our little kitties, we do." New England accents in the Vermilion coffee shop in March, the amazing diaries my students kept, the stories they had of farm life and the orphanage some lived in across the street. It was almost too much to bear some days.
--
When Laurie received my poem, she emailed me back and said that all the streets in Vermilion's "Nokomis" (ahem) neighborhood were based on Longfellow's Hiawatha and that "Ewa-yea was the owlet, or the sound the owlet made." Oh my gosh, the people in my neighborhood in 1972 had said I was living in "The Comas," or I had misunderstood, so all along, I missed that I was living in a most literary neighborhood, living right on, as Laurie says, "The Crystal Shores." And yet, I have no doubt that it was those shores, that water, that kept me alive that year.
"Kindred" may be 40 years old, and yet, I see from it that, "I am still learning," as Michelangelo said, just as I learned last year about the first poem.I composed at age 3. (See "Language, Memory and Poem Acquisition.") I feel the poem has just been handed back to me, resurrected, and so I send it back out to the world again here as I head out this week, back to where the poem came from, hoping write a few more poems, to see what else I can learn about myself then and now, this time, accompanied by the person who has been most very kindred to me for 26 years.
BIG POETRY GIVEAWAY : Drum Roll!
WINNERS OF THE TWO BOOKS
Kate Sillman wins The Places We Find Ourselves
Katrina Roberts wins Dream Cabinet
WINNERS OF THE TWO BROADSIDES
Andrew wins the Ed Dorn broadsideKatrina Roberts wins the W.S. Merwin broadside
If any of you have not yet sent me your postal addresses, please do, by back channel, and I will get these off in the mail! Congratulations to all three of you, especially Katrina who scored big, despite multiple participants. Thanks to everyone who joined in the fun this year.
Diane & Paul Return to the UK Day 10 - Thorpe Abbotts & Tavistock Square
Days 10 Another Kendig Home at Thorpe Abbotts
For our last day, we chose to go the opposite direction than we toured to the whole trip, east to East Anglia, where my dad, Russ Kendig, was stationed during WWII outside Diss. That entailed going to the East Liverpool Train Station for the first time (thank you "Journey Planner"- see day 9) and taking the train to Diss, then a taxi out to The 100th Bomb Group Memorial Museum. My one regret about this trip is that we didn't take any photos of the many volunteers who keep this place alive for the many visitors, including the vets who first lived here. I am pictured here with Ron, who with his wife Carole, are just the heart of the place today. He showed us this stone mosaic that a departing G.I. gave to an English family, who had it out in their garden till the family was leaving a few years ago and contacted the museum. Ron is from the region and has the local dialect which I love and couldn't reproduce if I tried. Instead, we took a lot of the photos to take back to my dad. He and my mom toured the museum in the 1990s when my sister Daun was teaching in her college's study abroad program in Northumberland, but the museum has grown a lot in its displays since then, such as acquiring the mosaic which Dad probably passed most days of his year here.
Allan, another of the volunteers (and a retired engineer) took us on a tour of the control tower, pointing out what the layout would have been. He told us that the tarmac had been broken down years ago to be reused for road elsewhere, but if one goes on the google aerial view, some long-gone base areas have seeped into the earth and can be seen till. From the tower, one can see the location of the Battle Headquarters, where the Commander would go in the event of an attack.
It was good to make this physical connection to my dad's past. Unlike many WWII vets, my dad did not avoid talking about his war adventures, both the fun and the horrendous, and he did not sentimentalize them either. No rah rah what a great idea war is-- he did write letters for some of our friends who applied for CO during Vietnam-- but also, he has a clear sense of pride in the very difficult task he accomplished as an 18-20 year old tail gunner in this terrific group, the 100th and within it, The Brass Hat. He remained lifelong friends with his crew, especially Bob Ellis, the pilot and Best Man at his wedding, whose son, Drake and his wife Jennifer are my friends today. A shoutout too, to the other last remaining crewman of the Brass Hat, Wilt Kreamer and Donna!
We toured the "Sad Sack Shack" which had some displays, including the story of Sad Sack, both the character and the cartoonist, a character I recall from my childhood in the memorabilia my dad kept in the house, along with the hundreds of photos he had taken and developed during the war. And there were many displays in all the buildings, including a photo of my dad's group, The Brass Hat, which went on display in 2006, so we took a photo of the photo to show my dad, who knows it well. He still has a clear memory of his flight outfit, including the oxygen mask that rubbed his nose while he chewed gum, the only food he had for the day except for a Hershey bar, but we took a photo of it anyway:
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Meanwhile, Carole and Ron had arrived. I had met them a year and a half ago at Dad's 100th Bomb Group Reunion in Cleveland. As well, I met Margaret, working in the cafe, who made us a great cup of tea, what Mom had remembered about the place. (My mom and her tea!). We met Derrick and his wife (Kathleen?) and Sian and Gordon and Tony. And Margaret's husbandk who was working hard on the yard. All of these people volunteer at the museum, and all of them clearly have many
talents that go into their volunteerism. Most of them have been to many reunions in the U.S. and plan to go to the Savannah Reunion in October this year. However, it wasn't all volunteers at the Museum. We ran into many English people touring the site, a couple with their Westie who especially appreciate the grass plat outside the cafe, a couple who photographs WWII bases and showed us their huge scrapbook, a young couple looking to volunteer. And there are many more visitors there, right now this moment as I type as it is 10 a.m. in England (6 a.m. in the U.S.) and Opening Day at the museum, commemorating the 70th anniversary of missions flying out of Thorpe Abbotts.Before we left, Ron gave me piece of the original tarmac for Dad. Wow, talk about having a piece of the rock, huh? It is black tar, loaded with heavy, local stones. I bought Dad some other souvenirs, but this is the only one he will get right off.
And then we said good-bye to our many new friends, as Allan drove us back to the Diss train station.
Arriving back in London two hours later, we grabbed dinner and took one more walk through Tavistock Square to get a photo of the bust of Virginia Woolf, who lived on the block before Leonard's and her home was bombed flat during WWII. And there, in the center of the park, was a stone to Conscientious Objectors and a statue to Ghandi, which all seemed a fair way to round out the day, as I am right now reading a book by Kim Stafford, himself a CO and the son of the famous WWII CO, William Stafford, who worked in camps all during the war and was nearly killed for his beliefs. So in our journeys this day, we paused to pay tribute to all those who have stuck to their beliefs in the most difficult days of the 1940s and beyond, even as Nelson Mandela, another hero of our era, lies in critical condition in South Africa. As the 100th Bomb Group Museum pledges, "We Will Remember Them.Diane & Paul Return to the UK Day 9 - Stoke Poges
Paul had two items on his itinerary for this trip, Coleridge's Cottage and Stoke Poges Cemetery, the scene of Thomas Gray's 18th century poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," a poem I first read in Mrs. Church's 12th grade English class and then at Otterbein. Much maligned by the Romantics, unfairly, we think. Many lines of this poem are embedded in our culture, "the paths of glory lead but to the grave" and "far from the madding crowd," the latter of which Thomas Hardy used as the title of his novel. This cemetery claims to be the place the poem was written, and Thomas Gray is buried here. Seemed as much worth a visit as all the guys in Westminster...and some day, maybe there will be a woman poet buried in one of these places, and meanwhile, Plath is alone, up there in West Yorkshire.
Stoke Poges is also mentioned in Brave New World, and I gather it is in two James Bond films.
I had done the travel research using that great British took, the Journey Planner: http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?language=en
This online tool tells you how to take a train, bus, bike, feet, or car to anywhere in Great Britain, and we were testing its mettle these last two days. It told us to go back to Paddington, take the train to Slough, and then blah blah blah. With the ankle sprain, we planned a cab once we got to Slough.
We took the train to Slough, where we had learned via Wikipedia, there was an interesting drug bust in 2009 and there is still a stuffed dog "Station Jim" who in life collected money in the station for the fund for orphans. We missed him at gate 5 but thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can see him here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slough_railway_station
In Slough, which looked like a small city of young people and new immigrants, we got an Indian cab driver who seemed amazed that we wanted to go to the cemetery, and he had to call for clarification on which one it was before dropping us off at the gate to Gray's field. There we walked for half an hour through curious fences and around cow patties before spotting the seven cows and this sign:
We saw two women walking dogs who were sometimes on the lead. We soon came around to the huge monument to Gray, which bears much of the poem, and then we went to St. Giles church, a very old church indeed, to the tomb of Gray.
I had noticed that the church and Gray's field were on the edge of "Memorial Gardens" and we planned to walk those, too, but had no idea what we were getting into...in a good way. The Memorial Gardens is a burial ground for cremains, designed to look not like a cemetery. No one is to have grave stones but instead small stone or metal plaques give names and dates for the deceased, and the idea is GARDENS, which were beautiful. Bowers of wisteria, that had finished blooming, small little plots with tiny stone markers filled with tiny flowers I have never seen, huge roses in the rose garden. Heading into the place, we bumped
into the director, Yvonne, who invited us into the office to see the framed posters outlining the history of the place, which includes William Penn (who seemed to have gotten everywhere), Gray, and many many other people. We walked and walked the gardens, which include a 300 year old and a 600 year old tree, fountains, bushes and more flowers.
Then we asked Yvonne about a place to do lunch, thinking some little pub in Stoke Poges, but she had a great idea, the Red Lion. She warned us the walk would be "dodgy" in spots-- no sidewalk, no path--and she wasn't kidding about that. We were nearly run over twice (drivers!) and I fell into a ditch, but arriving at the Red Lion was worth it. I had lamb rump with sausages and asparagus and pearl onions, and Paul had mushrooms in a white wine sauce and one of the top ten beers of his life, a Sharp's Doombar
. (I made him name the other nine to make sure he wasn't making it up.) We were able to sit outside and just sit. And then we got a cab back to Slough and a train back to London and the Tube to Euston Square----no we didn't because I got to talking to a young English woman about how badly she was treated by Miami Customs, and so I told her how badly I was treated by Miami Customs and then how badly everyone is treated at the Miami Airport, which is a viper pit--
and there we were, at King's Cross, and so walked our way back to the hotel through a rather residential city neighborhood by looking at the map and asking people, one a man who gave us two tourist tips for "his London." I forget the first, but the second was that St. Paul's Cathedral costs to tour, but there is a wonderful short free 5 p.m. music service which gets you in and good music too. I leave that one to you...or for us the next time we get back to London.
Diane & Paul Return to the U.K. - Day 8 London Theater
DAY 8 - LONDON AGAIN:
Back to the Brits and Their Theahtah,
by Dickens
We left Wales mid-morning for the two-hour train ride to Paddington, then back to the Tavistock Hotel. After dropping off our suitcases, we left posthaste for the nearby Charles Dickens Museum. Dickens didn’t live there long, but it’s the only place still standing where he did live, and they’ve managed to gather enough Dickens-abilia to make the tour worthwhile, especially since, like the Freud house we saw in Hampstead Heath years ago, it’s my favorite type of tour: they let you roam the rooms yourself, read the information on the wall (all very low-tech, but then so was that part of Dr. Who) without some docent giving long corny lectures as you stand there not getting too close to anything. (The Emily Dickinson House comes to mind.) They even let us take photos, as nearly everywhere else did, but the Dickens house photos have disappeared from the camera. What the dickens???
*****My Dickens’ chat begins here. Skip to the next*****if you don’t want it.
I have a relatively new, deep, and conflicted relationship with Dickens. We read him in junior high school, of course—still recall the thrill of all the eighth graders being filed into the gym at Edison Junior High to see the ancient black and white version of Great Expectation, our reward for most of us actually reading it. (I recall Marsha Brown saying, “Pip” over and over, making both “p’s” as unvoiced plosives, as a linguist would describe it, and I can’t figure out how else to convey it.) I remember one of the quiz questions that Mrs. Kate asked about the novel was what color gloves some character wore. I missed that one on the quiz and would miss it today. Pretty much missed the details in my novel reading in those days. Do now.
And then in college, no one read Dickens. Not a lot of ambiguity in Dickens, never mind not seven kinds. A lot of class issues, and man, we didn’t talk about those in literature classes during the New Critics. Somewhere along the way, I read A Tale of Two Cities on my own. It was a far, far better thing than many other things I read.
And then decades went by until this last decade, when I was trying to uh, incentivize my walks along the Atlantic Ocean. (And these days, through Sippo woods.) You’d think the ocean and woods would be enough to get me out, but I needed more, and “walking with my ears, reading with my feet” has been my habit for about 8 years now. I have never been all that keen on plot, but for this exercise, plot propels me forward, so I looked for plot-heavy works I can follow by ear. Dickens proved just the thing, and Bleak House, Little Dorritt, and currently, Our Mutual Friend, have kept me going for weeks. Still, the man’s life is not real nice. Jane Smiley’s recent biography, concise, clear, and complete, filled in all the gaps on that which Drood colorfully re-created.
******end of chat
I really dislike Dickens’ treatment of his wife. Like some movie stars of our times, he announced his separation from her in the papers without telling her. He was all around not very nice to her, and his children were divided on how to be supportive of her and not be cut off from their father’s wealth. Her sister, Georgina, moved in with him and then, there was his 16-year affair with the actress Ellen Terry. In the Dickens house is a very large, jewel-encrusted snake as a ring his wife gave to Georgina to tell her just what she thought of her sister’s betrayal.
The museum places a fair amount of emphasis on Dickens’ parents’ poverty; the family, including little Charles, actually lived in the debtors’ prison, The Marshalsea, which is the setting of Little Dorritt. Little was known about that in Dickens’ lifetime except for one very close friend he told, but it greatly affected him all his life, and a section of the museum addresses that epoch of his life, including his being hired out as a child to work. The house also has quotes from the novels inscribed on the walls, including Mister Gradgrind’s famous horrid, pedantic scolding of a little girl who likes flowers, and a really funny (and satiric) one I didn’t know about what a waste poetry is. One of the family portraits that hangs in the house was painted by Millais.
We walked the house, from basement kitchen, out to the wine cellar, up to the top floor, with its time line of what was going on in the rest of the country while his life went on. Mrs. Gaskell died a few years before him, for example. As always, we wrapped up with a visit to the gift shop, where I bought Victorian cards, and the café, where we shared an Earl Grey cake with lavender icing and Earl Grey tea.
Next activity on the agenda was a play in the West End at Trafalgar Studios, and after freshening up, we set off early to master the Tube. We walked to Euston Square and took the Picadilly Line to pick up our tickets, walking through Trafalgar Square which was just beginning to get crowded and out to find a park with cranes posing and squirrels performing for the crowd. The gardens were beautiful, and there was a historic cottage that had once belonged to the gardener. 
A tour book mentions that the National Museum (next to the National Portrait Gallery) had a good café, so we stopped in for dinner. It was good. I had a good plate of hake and Paul had an artichoke risotto. Good wine. Good bread. Good. And then with time yet till the theater opened, we sat on the steps of Trafalgar Square and watched the children pose for their parents and play on the lions, watched them warily then gleefully approach a new child and together chase the pigeons. Families of four and five with teenagers speaking Italian and Arabic, women with hajib and three with the veil. No skateboards, and I didn’t see a single cell phone. The sun was shining at 6:00 p.m., and it was really a golden hour at the Square.
At 7:00 the doors opened to the theater, and we got our seats. The Trafalgar Studios is relatively new as London theaters go, small (in a good way) with great sightlines. Part of the audience was seated on the stage facing the audience. The play was Pinter’s Hothouse, written in the 1950s, after accounts had surfaced of the Russians using electric shock therapy on political prisoners (and the play has strong undercurrents of abuses with EST by people in power.) Then Pinter put the play aside, unperformed, and never got it out until 1989 when he directed it himself. A satire, it is shockingly funny, a black comedy with some terrific dialogue and characters. But the plot is a bit iffy to say the least, and the ending seems absolutely half-baked. Still, the star, Simon Russell Beale, was amazing, and the whole cast did a terrific job of the lines, which were like Mamet on steroids. I don’t think it is giving a thing away to say that Mr. Beale got to throw more than one glass of whisky, and his character, while being very bad indeed, was very duplicitous, clueless, and very very funny He does bug-eyed incredulity quite well.
The audience was not nearly as rude as the ones we experienced 20 years ago in London, though I was surprised that a couple (in our row, naturally) were seated late, between the second and third scene. Pleez. And it seems odd to me that the ushers are forced to stand round on the stage at intermission waving programs (5 pounds!) and hocking ice cream and beverages. People ate a LOT of ice cream between act one and two, let me tell ya.
After the curtain and before a Q and A, we walked back through Trafalgar, back past the two museums, back to the Tube, back to the hotel and to bed before day nine in STOKE POGES!!
Diane and Paul Return to the UK - Day 7, Cardiff
DAY 7 CARDIFF –
WE CHANGE PLANS, Dr. WHOOOO?
So today, we had planned (multiple methods of travel: info on train and car rental) to go outside Bridgwater to Nether Stowey, where Coleridge wrote and took long walks and received visitors, including the man from Porlock, along whose path to Porlock we hoped to walk. But it was a 2-hour train ride, then a cab ride, with rain predicted so that our planned hike seemed a dubious bet, and we decided to stick around the Environs. We were too late for the Big Pit Welsh Mine tour, and tried to get the bus to St. Fagan’s, a historic outdoor Welsh village (the Plymoth Plantation of Wales, with about 400 years on Plymoth). But the bus didn’t seem to go on Sundays, so with tears in our eyes, we set off on plan “D” from the Cardiff Bus Station: the Welsh Museum and The Dr. Who Experience.
The Welsh Museum reminded me of Kelvingrove Museum
in Glasgow, a mix of art and natural history. A museum guard greeted us and answered our questions, mostly about the Pre-Raphaelite. It said it was a very small collection, but we went there first and were excited by how much we found there, about eight all told, but two we were very struck by, a Rosamund by Rosetti and a large Burne-Jones painted with a llot of gold and silver paint that was to be one of a series, which he quit when this first was ignored. They also had a big gathering of Impressionists, collected and donated by two wealthy Cardiff sisters. Their most famous was the Renoir that the guards call, “The Blue Lady,” but I loved most a Van Gogh landscape with crows and rain, accompanied by a little cartoon narrative for children, imagining Van Gogh walking along, besieged by crows, then by rain, then it all melting to become the painting. Not sure how I feel about that. There was a room of “Welsh Faces,” including a full-figure portrait of a famous 18th century harp player. We also stumbled onto a wonderful exhibit of art books by woman poet-artist celebrating 30 years of her press, Red Hen. By now, our eyes had shut down, so we had to leave off seeing the rest of the modern, contemporary, and historic European works—not to mention the world’s largest leatherback turtle—and head out…
The “Experience” amounts to a group of people being led through a sort of Funhouse set of rooms which are real sets from the show: they all tend to be dark and windy with fog or smoke with screens beaming a face-shot of Dr, Who, enjoining us t “Keep Cool and don’t blink.” He was chained to a chair but sure getting us out would be no problem, as robots appeared, saying, “Exterminate Exterminate Exterminate!” We were led to a room of transport controls, and Paul steered mightily, along with 20 other people, no doubt all steering the same, and we got out into more danger. An eight-year old girl cried and needed to be carried. Dr. Who called us “Shoppers,” and we shoppers were then given 3-D goggles for things on the screen to come careening at us. This all went on for half an hour, ending with 3-D goggles being collected and our being released for as long as we wanted into exhibit after exhibit of Dr. Who information and displays: costumes (loved the celery boutenierre), makeup, monsters, robots, and uh, women who seem a very minor subset here. Nearly every fanatic was paired with an eye-rolling
partner, including a couple we met who had just been married in Alberta and a German woman living in Scotland whose husband waited in the parking lot. (She knew everything!!) Paul took trillions of photos, which we were allowed to do. More to come! Then we hit the gift shop, buying some form of a Tardis for anyone we could think of.
And went back to the Norwegian church where we shared a wonderful Welsh rarebit, very puffy and mustardy. And our cab driver back was a Somali, born and raised in Cardiff. We walked the city a bit for our last afternoon there and then went to a Rum bar names “La Revolucion,” where we actually had a Cuba Libre—with three year real Cuban rum (& not Barccardi, the pretender.) Then tapas and burritos—all out of paella. Our waiter, Dinos, was a business major (undergrad and grad) from Greece, new at the job & bemused that we had asked for the bill, when he had been instructed never to use the word, but to use “check.” We laughed, too, and told him maybe he needs to work in the U.S. His wife has a degree in art, and it is very hard cranking out a living in Greece in anything these days, let alone art.
And that was pretty much our time in Wales, mostly Cardiffian, which we loved.
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