Urban-Language Barrier

When you let suburban American children loose in a city--especially in a European city--you are bound to discover a vast realm of knowledge they do not have.

Sure, you expect a language barrier in Paris. (And, to a lesser extent, in London, where even common sentences like "mind the gap between the train and the platform" will elicit endless repetitions of the phrase "mind the gap" in an approximated accent.)

But there is also an urban-language barrier, both more unexpected and more awkward to manage. Here is a partial list of things suburban children do not know--and that you will not be able to teach them in a few short weeks, no matter how much you try.

Apartment house etiquette. Such as: Do not shout down the central stairwell after your running sister. Do not run down the central stairwell. Do not sing annoying songs loudly while brushing your teeth and looking out the open window into the common courtyard. Do not stomp like a heard of elephants down the hall; there are people living below you. Do not use your outdoor voice, even in a fight; there are people living all around you. Do not practice your tap dancing, run races, escalate your voice to ever higher pitches, or--heaven help us--walk as if your feet are made of lead: There. Are. People. Living. Below. You.

Sidewalk etiquette. Such as: You and your sister cannot hold hands with me and your father and walk four-abreast on a sidewalk that is one meter wide. When there are oncoming people, you have to choose one side of the sidewalk or the other And. Stay. On. It. so that they can pass you. That wandering thing you do, as if you were meandering through a field of flowers, doesn't really work on urban pavement.

Museum etiquette. Such as: Do not make audible yawning noises when you walk into a room full of Picassos. Also, do not touch the thin little chains that are meant to separate the people from the art.

Dirt. As in: it is everywhere. Please keep your hands to yourselves. No. They will not. They will run their hands along building walls as they walk, along fences, along subway tunnel walls, along benches, around signs, along tops of poles, along any vertical surface meant to keep people in or out, along any horizontal surface that is approximately their height. Even if you explain what that disgusting smell is in the subway tunnels, they will still forget and run their hands along the walls. The grime of the city will cover them from head to foot. (They will, however, quickly acclimate to being forced to bathe every single night without fail.)

On the other hand, there are lots of urban things they will easily learn, and some of them are invaluable life skills. 

Negotiating public transportation. Including, how to read a subway map and figure out the most efficient route from Here to Where I Want to Be. How to manage the subway ticket gates--in multiple languages and different systems. And how to keep track of subway tickets (these--the children who cannot keep track of their own coats in winter!--can hang onto innumerable tiny slips of paper that let them on and off miraculous underground trains).

Buying fresh food daily. Frankly, this one is easy. You just have to choose what kind of croissant you want for breakfast and then walk to the corner boulangerie/patisserie to purchase it. Or pick your fruit and vegetables and stop at the market that's halfway between home and the Underground. This is connected to learning to eat a baguette, chevre, and sundried tomato spread at 10pm when you have finally returned from the day's adventures home for dinner, which is also a very pleasant thing to learn.

Toilets. As in: go when you can. You may never get used to paying for the privilege, but your kids will quickly get used to taking advantage of the opportunity when a public toilet pops up. (Hint, if you're ever in Paris with kids: the nicest free public toilets around are in the round park just before the Place de la Concorde walking down the Champs Elysee from the Arc de Triumph; the most disgusting ones you will pay for the privilege of using are in Tuileries Gardens.)

And, through it all, they will get to see some amazing things--and you will get to see those things through their eyes, which is even more fun. Moments like this (in the modern art gallery of the Pompidou Center) are priceless:

Even if they cannot remember after ten days of reminders that they need to quit stomping through the apartment. There are people living below us.

Thoughts from the Train

—for Beccy, she knows why

The train on the rails is surprisingly smooth and quiet, a small periodic squeak and the regular, inadvertent woggle in my seat the only things that betray the fact that we are moving. It is a far cry from the clickity-clack of Old West movies or the soot-filled Victorian journeys that marked the dawn of “progress” across England. And while I am drinking Starbucks and using wifi on the climate-controlled train, we are nonetheless passing whole villages of tile-roofed houses and fields thick with damp and redolent of prior ages. Deeply green, the grasses have a lushness that reflects how wet even an English summer is. It is as if all the color drained from the sky—which remains a dull gray day-in and day-out—and pooled in the fields and hedgerows instead. One begins to feel, after ten days in England, that a blue sky would be almost too much. Too dazzling. That the tints of green ought to be enough.

Especially when a dappled white horse kicks up its feet and trots along a fence. They are almost impossibly picturesque, these glimpses of a landscape that could have come straight from a Thomas Hardy novel. Of course, such snatched views punctuate the far less lovely—council houses built after WWII, an oversized box of a commercial distillery, power lines strung across the verdant fields and held up by towers like metal giants on iron girder legs. But as we move further from London and deeper into the Midlands, green fields dotted with white sheep and criss-crossed by wood fences and ageless stone-and-tile structures become the norm; the eye-sores are an occasional punctuation, an exclamation mark of surprised interruption to the soothing flow of rolling countryside.

It is hard to understand this green if you have never been to England or Scotland or Ireland. “It looks as if the whole country were irrigated,” says the man across from me, in a soft South African accent. I can tell that he, too, is unused to the unrelenting green. It is something of a marvel. Even in Michigan, which has four good seasons, the grass suffers patches of brown. Here, the shades of green are multiple, but none of them tend to brown, only to deep green and deeper still. Emerald and kelley and chartreuse and pine. Silver-greens and yellow-greens. Clear, fresh greens, and deep, nearly black greens. Greens piled upon greens as if there were so much water in the world that each green thing sought to outdo its neighbor for sheer green-ness.

I am headed to Edinburgh for two days of research in archives.

Yes, I know how lucky I am.

 I also suspect that when I arrive, my friend Jodie will take one look and mock me for coming to Scotland without socks. (When packing in the heat of a Michigan May, it is hard to register summer as a time for cardigans and water-tight shoes.)

I should be working on my notes from all the research I’ve already done, making lists of the people to whom I must write follow-up emails, starting the syllabus for the fall course that will be based on these explorations. In short, I should be working. But the arched railway bridges, the flowering hedges, the church spires in the distance, surrounded by weathered stone hamlets and black-faced sheep, draw my eye away from page and screen. I can type while looking out the window. And so, for now, I take a pause in my work to stare at the landscape. To be reminded of the day—so many years ago—when a friend took me home with him for the weekend from college in Canterbury, and he drove at reckless speeds down single-lane country roads lined with high hawthorne hedges. To see, in my mind’s eye, the fields Tess walked through to gather the milk cows in her happy days.

To realize, for a moment, that not every minute of every day must be filled with obligation. And to smile at the pair of swans, placid in their tiny pond. . . a thick-set draft horse with shaggy ankles. . . an ancient stacked-stone wall with an unfamiliarly beautiful black-and-white bird sailing over it. . . smalls ferns, bright starbursts against the grey stone of a Victorian train shed. . .remnants of Hadrian’s wall plunging down a hill towards the River Tweed—picture postcards flitting past the window of seat 69, carriage E.