Cabbages and kings

If you remember the game SimCity that used to come preloaded with Apple computers in the 1900s, you will be able to picture the random piece of terrain you were assigned upon which to would build your dream city. You will think of it when you visit places like Washington, DC’s National Harbor, which I have written about previously, where I just spent several days at a conference.

You got your land and you built a coal or nuclear power plant. You built the electric grid and laid down roads, which would eventually swarm with ant-like traffic. You put down units of housing which might become trash-strewn lots with high crime rates or grow into dark glass towers. You could check the stats and the growth rate, add industrial units if jobs were needed. Periodically you would receive feedback: “Residents demand a stadium” or there might be an explosion at the nuclear plant, with little particles of radioactivity smudging out bits of the roads or buildings.

A quarter of a century later, I remember it fondly. It preceded the Sims, whose tacky condos and pets and relationships would corrupt what may have been a perfect game. A current iteration exists, which we gave the Older Daughter for Christmas, called Roller Coaster Tycoon.

National Harbor has no public transportation, but they seem to have gotten away with it, like the Walrus and the Carpenter in the poem, who lure the baby oysters out to nowhere and eat them.

On arrival there are girls in leotards or with exposed midriffs and starched glittery bows and gold lipstick and tubercular blooms of red upon the cheek. No, not conference entertainment, well, sort of, but cheerleaders there for some kind of convention. Teams of parents are wearing baggy sponsorship T-shirts or odd shades of green. In we filter, with our tote bags and a different shade of enthusiasm.

The hotel is set, as the name suggests, at the edge of a harbor. It is hard to say where the magical world of the hotel ends, with its townhouses within an atrium, and the fake town beyond the fields of landscaped cabbages begins. There is an ice rink and a miniature Stonehenge set by the side of a road, themed restaurants, and ragged metal statuary. You leave the hotel and enter one of the eight-lane highways that connect Maryland, Virginia and “the District.” The sign for Maryland says, “Enjoy your visit.” Why not something about the state’s assets or its beauty. Why not, “Welcome home”?

I am not staying at the hotel, but with friends from London who now live in Maryland, in an apartment building. It is filled with people, young people, young people in duffel coats. An older guy, maybe in his 30s, stops by the concierge desk: losing his hair, dark clothes and dark sneakers with a day-glo green sole. He’s asking the concierge about his son. “He’s in North Carolina?”

“No,” the concierge says, “he’s in Florida.”

“That’s right,” says the man, “That’s correct,” as if he were administering some kind of test. Later he will tell people about the conversation, in passing. Let it be noted that he is good with people, he makes an effort.

A woman is in the process of leaving her apartment, already bundled into a belted black down coat, talking on the phone as she gets her keys. The door is ajar and I see her showroom-style kitchen, all burled granite and wood and halogen. I had to make a note of my friends’ apartment number so that I could find my way back, like a parking bay for people. I did not want to find myself pushing random buttons in the elevator wondering, Where might they live?

I had forgotten what it is like to live in an apartment building. The elevator door slides open like a curtain, each passenger a new act. You can hear their conversations under the doors, their phones ringing through the walls. In the elevator are minutes from the latest tenants meeting. The last item on the agenda is Disposal of Household Grease: Best Practices.

There are more cabbages in my friends’ neighborhood, arranged in planters like profiteroles. Here we have music playing on the street and people eating Saturday lunch in restaurants and the educational children’s toy shop and the posh wine shop and a place that sells pernickety sweaters and Nordic fashion. They are having a closing down sale and before I enter the shop I know that these are going to be the kind of clothes I hate and they will be, even on final sale, too expensive.

“Oh,” remarks one of the sales people/owners as I enter, “you brought wine.”

Maryland no longer hands out plastic bags in shops.

The clothes were, as I expected, awful.

Everything is bright and pretty (except the cabbages. The cabbages are silly.)

In the morning, my friend who is attending the same conference, drives us through the fog back to the fake town.

If you were the development tycoon and you could build anything, my friend asks, is this really the best you could come up with? The house in the atrium, he says, is based on the template of the hotel chain, a replica of a replica of a replica. We’re just lost in the fog with the cheerleaders and the teddy bears and the statuary that commemorates and represents the need to have a statue in this location because it’s the kind of thing a real place might have. A large stone, or more likely fiberglass cast to resemble stone, arm with a grasping hand reaches out of the bay.

Imagine the empty terrain. The cursor blinks, waiting for you to select your tool, to build the roads and create the zones (commercial, industrial, residential). Visitors demand an  experience.

What do we bring home with us, then? My friends’ daughter is four. She likes princess dresses, Swan Lake and reversals. It was a bear. No, it was a monkey. It’s on your head. It is a froggy day, we tell her.

I have displaced her from her room. At night I dream that I am on a London bus with my daughters. It is rainy and winter. As we alight, I realize that we have a son. He is hiding under one of the seats and I scoop him up wondering how it is possible that I have been, for years, telling people that we have two children when we have three, girls when we also have a boy. What does it mean that I have forgotten my son? And that I almost left him hiding on a bus?

Away from your family you are displaced. As a single entity attending a conference I appear to be a whole when I am a part. The younger daughter sends the occasional text as do friends and former colleagues from London as we search for each other at break, each of us now making our way in the new world, still finding strange this new, more affluent and referential version of America.

The cabbages, weather-resistant, practical, nutritious, inexpensive and with their blooms of color, could sustain us should the hotel run out of food or the beltway close, should something occur that is just beyond the imagination, like a fiberglass monster rising from the water. Oh, wait, that was their idea.

In SimCity, you were the king with your cursor, planting fields of cabbages to increase the commercial value of your property. I had never imagined myself as a resident.

Five stages of house

1) This is my room. It has purple carpet and these are my favorite books and this is my collection of china animals. My mother wishes we had a bigger kitchen. I like to look out the window. I never ever want to move.

2) When I get my real house, it is going to be so nice. It will reflect my real personality, not my mother’s, not my housemates’. This place is temporary. I don’t even think we own a vacuum cleaner.

3) Sunny, brite, 3BR, EIK, garden, tons of potential, must see!

What have they done to these walls?

It’s kind of small.

Did somebody die here?

I’m worried about the master bedroom.

Just say you hate it. Either you like it or you don’t. People worry about leaks or subsidence not something fixed or something changeable (like tile.)

The bathroom needed to be completely redone so we figured we might as well replace the hideous tile the previous owner put in.

Do you have any idea how much it costs to redo a bathroom?

We need to do something about the yard.

If we ever sell this place, we’re going to need to do something about the yard.

4) If you don’t see what you’re looking for, please ask. Don’t forget to look in the garage and the backyard. There’s some nice patio furniture. They always said they were going to landscape, but they were always too busy. You know how it is. There are price lists in all of the bedrooms. Towels/sheets $5, bras $3, underwear $1. All VCR/DVDs $2.

5) Which bedroom is mine? I like this one. You can see the birds. It makes me happy.

L’Anniversary

Today marks the second anniversary of this blog. I knew the anniversary was rolling around but I wasn’t expecting it today. Surprise!

I was in the middle of a different post, but I feel I should pause and reflect.

This morning, before it started to rain and thunder, and when the hot sun was already on the rise, I went out for a brief run. I ran past the house where we lived for less than a year when we first arrived. The people who live there now have an enormous boat that they park in the carport that took up so much of the yard. They would have seen that as tremendous asset, whereas we worked around it. We set up our grill under it. The whole thing was slightly graded. We wondered how long it would take and much it would cost to tear up the concrete.

We came back from house hunting, mentally exhausted from all the imagining and trying to clear our heads of the chemical smell of all the scented candles people left burning to cover dog smell. “Maybe we should just stay here,” we’d say, rousing our weary brains to reconfigure the house in our minds’ eyes as our real home. “Maybe.”

Those first months were just a blur of getting bearings.

It was dark and stormy when we arrived from London, but the landlord had left the door open for us. He had set up the mattress we had ordered and bought us a cat box and put litter in it. There was no drama. It was as arranged. Safe, different, strange. Home. Sort of.

I remember opening the sliding door into the inky backyard. “We have outside space.”

The next door neighbor had cancer. She had a carer whose son was called Psalm and a vegetable garden. We saw hummingbirds for the first time. They handed okra, cucumbers and tomatoes over the fence and we returned the containers with cookies.

I never knew where I was driving. My husband navigated, go left, go right, but it took a long time for me to knit it together. I walked to work. We had one car. If I needed to go somewhere during the day, I walked home and got the car. That was three years ago and it seems much longer than that.

At night, we liked that we could hear the trains. It sounded American.

I still like to hear the trains. I noticed the yellow signboard outside of one of the shops on the arterial road had strange messages that didn’t seem to advance the cause of the business it represented. But I was too busy and too confused to think about it.

A year later we had moved into the house we live in now. We got a flyer for the block party. We made friends. I started the blog.

I have friends.

I have started writing again.

I learned how to play tennis. I have teammates.

I have started noticing the signs on the yellow billboard.

Magically delicious

My husband spent last week in London and returned home with treats for everyone. It’s funny how reductive our tastes can be: tea, biscuits, Smarties and the Queen.

There were also requests for Rescue Remedy, a particular facial toner my daughter uses and tea tree oil, all of which I’m sure we could find at the healthy supermarket if we could be bothered to drive for 25 minutes. These were emotional touchpoint requests not deep desires in and of themselves. We miss our old life enough to want some visual reminders.

When we had just moved back, I bought Twinkies. The girls had never had one. It would be educational and I wanted to see if they were still as delicious as I thought they were in my teens. They weren’t. No one liked them.

This story on food Americans miss when abroad includes things which, except for Mexican food and hamburgers, aren’t very good, but they signify home.

Not all bagels in NYC are good. Most aren’t. Favorite place? Brick Lane Beigel Bake, London, their bagels, small and chewy, still warm and filled with cream cheese and lox. And Carmelli’s, a place up in Golders Green, North London, did decent bagels, too. It just takes a while to find what you think you want or need.

That we bring back teabags (and of strong builders’ tea at that) instead of loose tea may indicate a lapse or lack of standards. There is, it turns out, a place downtown that sells freshly roasted coffee beans and a selection of loose tea. That is where we should be shopping. We have known about it the whole time we have lived here but have thought, oh, it won’t be that good, it’s inconvenient, the hours are stupid.  (They don’t open until 9 AM on weekdays!) And maybe so, but if and when we ever move or it closes this will be the kind of place we pine for.

While he was there, I pictured the shops along the street where his hotel was. The things I would have asked for couldn’t have been brought home: the thrill of discovering an obscure book in the Oxfam used book shop, a sausage roll from The Ginger Pig, smelling soaps in Ortigia, the beautiful packaging of Rococo chocolates (I will ask for a tea towel next time), browsing for ribbon for my work ID badge in V. V. Rouleaux, getting picnic provisions at Waitrose and passing from a summer street into the coolness of a park in an ancient city.

The older daughter asked for Smarties, but what she really wanted him to do was ride the new Metropolitan Line, which she has seen on YouTube, and tell her about it. Even for me, the irritants of tube travel, the repetition, the black snot formed by breathing particles of burnt rubber train wheels, the Metro and its sensationalist headlines, the arrival at your stop, the series of escalator journeys up towards Big Ben that was a stage in my commute, become the stuff of dreams.

Die healthy

Fall hit me hard this year. It was breathtakingly beautiful, with the trees and that. One day they were touched by a spark and over the month of October we watched them ignite, leaping from green to red or orange, the change spreading to the surrounding leaves, and now, in mid-November, some smoulder and glow, but the bare branches are there, too.

Along a street I travel daily there has been a remarkable range of orange, amber and amethyst. This leads me to wonder if people could be categorized into those who like color or those who like pattern. Would I exchange paisley for a certain shade, or is it not the shade but the combinations of colors that I like, and why does a color suddenly strike you as perfect and exciting? And what about people who like texture?

October was Breast Cancer/Women’s Health Awareness Month, and also the month when I finally got around to having a mammogram. As I wait for the technician in my paper cardigan I think this is how it begins, starting off with the happy talk, and then an awkward pause when they spot something worrying and your life flips. Fortunately, this was a non-event for me. I left with party favors, a sachet of pink mints and a little purse with the name of the hospital on it.

And October was the month we finally sorted out our American wills, including the living wills. More questions, all hypothetical, about mortality.

p.s. We are all going to die
A story on NPR about people in late middle age facing their mortality. Man interviewed expresses intention to continue doing everything right in order to stay fit, live to be old and “die healthy.” This provokes lots of “stupid yuppie” comments on blogs.

But anyway
With Halloween, come the lights. With the onset of winter comes the retail cold, cough and flu season. I succumb to bottles of own-brand NyQuil (Night Nurse) and DayQuil (Day Nurse) at Rite-Aid while my husband returns from Costco with cough drops. We need more lights for the deck to shine against the silent nights and carry us over until trees are reloaded for another round.

Let me count the ways

“He says, ‘Hey guys, welcome to Abercrombie.’ What do I even say to that??”

It is an open-ended conversation starter, a welcoming gesture in case you were intimidated by the shuttered gloom of the place, of entering an adolescent cave. It is a more casual version of “Is there something I can help you find?” (Bath & Body Works—um, yes, have you got any Halloween-themed hand sanitizers? That’s what I’m handing out this year!) Or the creepy stranger/friend tactics of Gap a few years ago: “Great scarf!”

“What do you say to that? Jeez,” my husband says, “you really are a curmudgeon.”

I am and I am not. So rather than continue my rant about the mall and the strategic greeting tactics of its young employees or the fact that stores have created 13 seasons to separate us from our money and bring more stuff into our houses, I am going to write my list of things I like about living here, aside from my work and friends.

1) Fresh okra. An Egyptian/Middle Eastern specialty in London, it is readily available here. We love okra more than corn.

2) The Apple Man at the farmer’s market. He says things like: “A lady bought a whole bushel of these for apple sauce and said, but I hate to waste the peel. Well, I told her, you just boil these up and [I forget the rest] you can make apple jelly. When you grow up on an apple farm, you don’t let any of it go to waste.” And for $4 you can eat winesaps all week.

3) When I heard a song I liked on the radio, the next day I wrote the station and they forwarded my question to the host, who wrote me back that evening. This was the song:

4) When the wheel fell of our garbage bin I called the city. The next day a truck stopped in front our house, a man jumped out, popped on a new wheel and rode off. I waved wildly at him yelling thanks. Stunning municipal efficiency.

5) Abundant BBQ. When we lived abroad and only vacationed in Alabama (seriously) we would bring barbecue back to London. I hardly eat it now, but I know it’s only minutes away and that gives me a sense of security and wellbeing.

6) And if I need a digestive biscuit, they sell McVitties at Publix.

7) Our public library is really good.

8 )  If I went out at night I could go hear bands play at a converted mill for about $10. I could bring the dog and there would be free parking.

9) Our airport is easy to use, parking is $8 a day.

10) Two public radio stations.

11) Creek walks

12) A local cheesemaker whose wares can be purchased at Kroger and Costco.

13) Going to the pool after work, from air conditioning to three minutes of hot car to warm concrete, bug noise and the day winding down.

14) a very good used clothing store. I had a similar run of luck with finding good stuff at the St. John’s & St. Elizabeth’s hospice shop in London and thought I might have just been connecting with one person’s wardrobe, so my luck might be that this has happened again which is both sad/morbid or they were just tired of it/fortuitous.

15) Dog Park

16) Driving by fields of cows on the way to Target.

There, that was more than 10 things.

The next time the youth at the door welcomes me to Abercrombie, I’ll just be like, hey, back. We are, after all, happy to be here. But let me shop in peace, okay. And, no, you can’t have my phone number.

The salt of the earth

The Amish community sits on either side of an awful highway. It is a road that says don’t leave that for this.

Along the strip are Chevrolet dealerships and China Buffets and payday loan, pawn your title places. Vinyl signs with ugly fonts glare in the heat of the day. Tinsel glitters from the car lots. We roll through this flat land, no trees, no relief. Here and there are old signs that have some character, like an enormous yellow muffler, but mostly it is Shoe Caravan, this-n-that crap for your home and Captain D’s Seafood.

It is a moat of modern life, the kind of thing the elders might contrive to keep folks on the farm.

We are looking for the general store, the portal, where you can find the map that says which houses sell what. It is 100°F, a heavy heat that drains your energy and a brightness that blurs your vision.

At the country store, a man washes his horse in the buggy port.

Down the road, behind the store and around the corner, we go back in time. The only roadway signs are now small white ones with black capital letters that identify the products for sale. Green peanuts, onions, okra, pies, harnesses. The first house we stop at sells furniture and produce. The houses are set in clusters of buildings, workshops and barns. Two farms may abut each other so that there is an almost urban proximity to the two houses and then acres of green. A friend later explained that the second house was for the parents when they retired, leaving the farm to the child most likely to succeed.

There has been drought. The ground is dusty and the dirt swirls around us as we pull into the yard. Turkeys squawk in the shade. Outside the house is a little hut with baskets of tomatoes and peppers, a sign for okra and a display case of bead necklaces, some patterned, some random, the crafts of the less skilled, children, or in the case of another house we go to, of a blind man, meant solely for visitors.

A woman comes out of the house. She wears a dark, long-sleeved dress, white bonnet and round, tinted glasses with metal frames that look like soldering, the earpiece curling out under one earlobe. Her accent is not heavy but the cadence of her speech and her accent are unfamiliar. A girl follows her out, and is then sent to find a child to pick more okra.

In the furniture workshop are two small children with their father. What you don’t see with the long dresses are the feet: bare, dirty, broad and muscular. The father is short, with curly blond hair cut in a Dutch boy bob and bangs—like the boy on the paint can—and a springy, uncut beard. The boy and the baby play with the pile of shavings. The father makes tables and chairs and a high chair that turns into a rocking horse when placed lengthwise on the floor one way and turns over to become a desk and chair.

He communicates more with smiles and gestures. He brackets his sentences so that we are guessing at the middles, like feeling our way along the wall of a dark corridor. He likes this, but would be happy to give up this. He gestures at a shelf of commercial stains. He could be 25 or 35. He has at least four children and he got the house.

When an older sister picks up her crying small sister, I see the baby’s long white bloomers. Their authenticity is more of  a surprise than had she been wearing Dora the Explorer pull-ups. The clotheslines are hung with rows of big-to-small white bloomers or dark blue long-sleeved shirts.

At the next house a girl pumps water in the front yard, making a flash of silver against the energetic, silhouette of her figure as she throws herself into her work. There is no electricity, they do not drive cars. The children are educated from first to eighth grade. They learn German first, then English.

“Imagine if they had turned their hand to wine-making,” I said.

The other shoppers/visitors: a black woman looking for collards. In her backseat, four small children press their faces against the window to see the Amish children. A white woman with some kind of slatted basket that needs repairs talks to the farmer at a table of produce, potholders and Indian corn necklaces. If you lived locally this would be your farmers market and your  alternative to Lowes for outdoor furniture.

We go from house to house and buy more produce.

An Amish man walks along the road carrying a gun.

Those of us who grew up reading and/or watching The Little House on the Prairie will remember wondering what Laura would have made of the modern world. And through my futuristically chauvinistic benevolence, I felt a twinge of conscience. Maybe they would have benefited from Thinsulate and radio, but then they wouldn’t have captured our imagination or enjoyed what they had otherwise, the maple syrup snow, Pa’s fiddle.

The next day I heard a radio diary of a trip to Mali where the mud used to build houses and the mosque is harvested at the end of the drought season. People were torn between a desire for modernization and regret for the loss of their traditions. The builder says the mud houses are much cooler in the heat and the people who live in them are healthier than those in concrete houses yet most aspire to a concrete house.

At one rather busier, more diversified shop they were selling car air fresheners to smell of things from nature, like kudzu or cut grass, but they didn’t; they smelled of air freshener. If you want to smell kudzu, drive a buggy. The freshly shelled beans are put in ziploc bags and there a few rustic little pots stamped China on the underside. Even so, I did not get the feeling that after we all departed, they were putting on their T-shirts and flip-flops and watching TV.

The Amish have been settled here since 1944 and the religion dates back to the 17th century. Where do they draw the line at technology? What must it be like to see us over the years, parking our cars in the driveway, our changing, immodest fashions? I found an ABC TV series about Amish teens and rumspringa, the year of “running wild” and deciding whether to become Amish or to leave their families and join the modern world. One of the boys had rigged his buggy with an iPod and speakers. The music he chose was 1980s heavy metal, as if he couldn’t bear to bring himself totally up to date. At the end of the year he decided to stay, content to ride to sound of his own horse.

The younger daughter likes the way the children have jobs and the older children look after the younger ones. The older daughter would be in her last year of school. They would enjoy the time spent out of doors. If we were to join the Amish, we would have no skills and a lot of catching up to do, as if our whole lives had been rumspringa.

Two days later summer is obliterated by a cold, dark, steady rain for Labor Day. I take the girls and a friend to the movies at our outdoor, town-styled mall that has no place to buy an apple or a pint of milk, no newsagent or chemist, only adornment, entertainment and dining. We arrive early and amuse ourselves as the only customers in Sephora, smelling funnel cake shampoo and Justin Bieber perfume. The message of the movie is one the Amish would appreciate, that you should spend the time you have now with your family over other pursuits. It is hard to imagine them now, in their simple houses with the rain pelting down and the fall coming, though I like to think I could give this all up if I had to.

The ice and the icing

We did not do a survivalist shop before the snow, just a regular one, and by the end of the week we were down to five slices of bread and just enough milk to make it to the big thaw if we only used it for coffee.

School was closed all week and while I returned to work on Thursday, I did not drive my car until Friday.

In less time than it would have taken to free my car from the snow, I had walked to work. I took my lunch: a microwave packet of dal from Costco, Ritz crackers, cheese, Sun Chips (which I hate, hate, hate; they are worse than those lowfat Doritos), dried figs and a grapefruit.

A colleague offered me a ride home, but you do not walk to work and hitch a ride home.  A peach sunset, smoky blue mountain ranges, brittle tree forms, electrical pylons. I followed the cleared fields of crunchy snow under the wires, through the donut tracks in the parking lot behind the church, looked out over the twinkling lights of the parkway and had yet another one of those disjointed moments of, “This is where I live.”

Or as my daughter observed this morning, “It seems like I’ve been here forever but also like we just got here.” And I told her I feel that way often. And she seemed a little surprised.

I was so happy to come home to the bounty of a shopping trip. And a store-bought king cake. It felt like such a luxury. “The girls made me buy it,” my husband said.

I like that we have regional foods, and that we are close enough to New Orleans to be part of the king cake tradition. I like that we can buy buttermilk in a half-gallon carton. In London, you could only buy little 250ml containers. I miss double cream, lemonade with ginger, digestives, Crunchie bars and sausages. (I know, it’s so Enid Blyton.) But in exchange we have a pillowcase full of fresh shelled black-eyed peas in our freezer. We can by stoneground cornmeal and grits, proper molasses, and there is a store in town that makes about 50 varieties of cupcakes. We haven’t even been there yet, and I have coupons for it in my purse, but it’s just good to know it is there. In London, there was the Bluebird Bakery, run by an expat American. Red velvet cake with its abundant frosting supplanted the elegant chocolate gateaux of Richoux and Maison Blanc for birthday treat of choice, though if I had to choose, I’d take a nice square of opera cake with coffee buttercream.

When we first arrived in les Etas-Unis, the girls gaped in wonder at tie-dye frosted cupcakes in vivid greens, yellows and blues at the supermarket. We discovered birthday cake flavored ice cream, with hard rivulets of blue frosting. We bought icing paste in Easter egg pastels at William-Sonoma. America is not afraid to use color in her food. Gatorade comes in at least two shades of blue, and people confuse it with juice, like it’s a reasonable thing for kids to drink. It’s a sports drink. Those people at Vitamin Water just got theirs from some advertising standards bureau and let me just say that was a long time coming. I think it’s just a fact that people like ingesting things that are blue or bright pink. And they took advantage of that.

We settled down. We’re in a groove with the food. We have our sources, our routines. And come the spring, hopefully, we will be back to fresh salad and veg from the garden.

Spring is coming: I went to the county agricultural office for soil testing kits. It is time to get going on the garden, rotate the crops, and to do something about the scrubby plantings in the yard and replace our trapezoid of lawn with wildflowers. The risk of ground frost is winding down. I am already behind.

But tonight there is a winter storm advisory and more snow is predicted. Just in case, I stopped by the supermarket on the way home and bought a baguette, a sourdough boule and a half-gallon of milk.

I’ll fly away

Pearly Kings

In November, our English friends threw a Guy Fawkes party with soup and jacket potatoes, a fire pit and sparklers.

Even though Alabama’s state lines are dotted with shacks emblazoned with a big kaboom and Snuffy Smith-style cartoons, bonfires and fireworks are forbidden in the city. Hence the fire pit, which is a kind of patio furniture.

Among the guests were British, American-born kids who consider themselves American; British kids who consider themselves British, but probably not all of the time; and our own American, British-born kids who will most of the time consider themselves American but enjoy our digital radio for hearing British accents and watch YouTube videos shot in the Underground when they feel homesick.

Gathered around the fire in the dark, listening to the accents, I think of the parrot tree in Richmond Park.

We had heard for years about the wildlife in Richmond Park, the red and fallow deer that roamed the unspoiled wilderness of it, a king’s park for 700 years, a place to ramble, but it took us about 10 years to make it out there. We went with our expedition friend who shared our love of picnics and public transport, both as means and end. We had holidayed in Sheringham together (winkles, tide pools and the Norfolk steam engine); taken the Metropolitan Line out to the mini-steam engine in Watford; made an annual trip to the Acton depot to see the tube memorabilia and expo, where my older daughter recognized model trains from YouTube.

Armed with Nalgene water bottles, cut up fruit and a packet of biscuits, we could walk our children for miles, and so it was he who lured us out to Richmond Park. The herd of deer that ambled by were both impressive and scary in the way that wildlife can be, but what surprised me was the flock of parrots, a green swarm punctuated with red and blue, estranged pets massed like a horde of Victorian urchins or expats being homesick, like the Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s. Guy Fawkes in America or Thanksgiving in the UK. You flock together, you adapt, you modify.

One parrot would have tried to keep a low profile among/st the pigeons. Not being a pigeon himself, there was always a bit of disconnect. The pigeons had a long history with each other and internecine issues around crumbs and lampposts. Perhaps one day, feeling a surge of homesickness and anomie in the greyness of Trafalgar Square, he spied another parrot, and they took flight together. Someone had told him about Richmond Park and he had been meaning to go, but you know how it is. The day starts full of good intentions but you just end up pecking trash outside of Tesco Metro.

Like the parrots, with their tropical origins and their bright plumage, the American cheerleaders who tipped up for the 2009 Lord Mayor’s New Year’s Day Parade, are an exotic flock. They shiver in their skimpy uniforms. I imagine the fatigue they must feel, with the 5- to 8-hour time zone difference, the vigorous sightseeing that would be done to justify the expense of such a long journey, the group meals, the waking up in whatever cheap hotel close to Waterloo or Victoria, wherever it is that school groups stay.

They would rise at what would feel like midnight, to apply a full face of makeup and straighten their hair, then stumble out into the dark 6 a.m. of the new year. Ear warmers and an extra layer of tights were no barrier to the chill coming off the river as they assembled at dawn in the streets around our house. (You can read their account of it here. There were 600 of them.)

We lived near Parliament Square and woke on New Year’s Day to the sounds of drums and brass tuning up. A marching band, in long wool trousers, gathered by the pub at the corner. Remembering to swap our slippers for shoes, we wrapped up and followed the parade.

Pearly Kings (see photo above), street theater, mini-cars, reenactors filled the road that ran alongside the Houses of Parliament. Around this time, High School Musical was a big deal and the American cheerleaders, winners of some competitions to be there, they told us, were a source of fascination. My older daughter had gotten a camera for Christmas and she took photographs of them, and of it all.

We didn’t know that in six months we would be driving down this same road, away from it all. We would touch down in the midst of the land of the cheerleader, and seek, gradually, to join a new flock.

Not my type

“How about this one?” I hand my younger daughter a book. We are setting forth on a long weekend and she will need reading material. How could she have read all her books?

“No,” she says, without hesitation, “I don’t like books about animals who defend their territory.”

It was like a friend’s explanation, in college, of why she detested Sea World: I hate fish who do tricks.

“Oh,” my daughter says later when we are questioning her about this specific dislike. “It’s a whole category of books: cats, mice,” she sighs. “Animals fighting.”

How useful to have such a handy response.

“I don’t like U-boat movies,” is actually a phrase I have had cause to resort to. U-boats or submarines, any kind of underwater vessel. Or movies set in prisons. Or TV shows about tanks. I don’t like surrealist plays or minimalist sets. I would not go to a ballet about a political struggle.

“I don’t like animals that have,” my daughter struggles to hurdle the world, “civilizations.”

She would reject Animal Farm, a book I read multiple times at her age, and Watership Down, which I remember as really violent. Are peaceful civilizations okay? Is it a rejection of animals who talk or just animals who are involved in warfare? While a part of me totally gets what she means, another part of me realizes that I have no idea where these ideas come from or how they will develop.

When she was little, her rejecting word was “none.” None animals. None carrots. None shoes. Now she is more subtle. She prefaces her judgment with the words, “To tell you the truth.”

In the middle of writing this, my mother-in-law says she is in need of a Monet water lilies poster to hang on the wall in the upstairs bedroom of the house where we are spending the end of fall break. I Google this for her and one of my search results is a blog called Stuff White People Like, which gets us off task, but is funny. The site lists Banksy at #129.

In one window I can type Monet into the MoMA search box, and in another window I can read about the nuances of buying a Banksy coffee table book at Urban Outfitters. I can laugh about how museum gift shops are a virtual mall for those Art 105ers I mocked in college, how their budding conventionalism started with buying Impressionist posters at the college store. And in the other window, I can become one of them, as a favor. And then I can blog about it. And keep laughing.

Posters can be found under a category called Wall Art, as per the naming convention on the three online museum shops I visited. Is it because poster doesn’t cover small frameable prints and you can’t call posters art? I have a hunch this is an American thing, a simultaneous discomfort with culture and crassness. Neither the Tate nor the National Gallery shy away from the term poster.

I buy a T-shirt of Stuff White People Like, because it has a combination of things I like and combines self-mockery with self-satisfaction. Perhaps when I put it on my head will explode.

A little while later, the doorbell rings. It is the UPS man with a large package, a framed, abstract watercolor.

To tell you the truth, I like it better than the Monet. The serpentine shapes correspond to the floral stems of the wall paper and it has the same colors.

My husband asks his mother, “If I buy you a William Christenberry poster, will you hang that instead?”

Later that morning we go to a Native American festival. Cherokee dancing is scheduled to be happening so we head for the stage. We see a man dressed in a tunic, moccasins and buckskin leggings with a long, black braid. We ask him where the dancing is. “It’s this way,” he says. “I am one of the dancers.”

“Then we’ll follow you,” my husband says.

“Well,” he says, “Right now, I’m going to the restroom. But if you keep walking that way, it’s straight ahead.”

A youngish fit woman in stretchy black trousers and a plain white shirt and a large camera is hurrying alongside us. “Can I take your picture?” she asks the dancer.

“No,” he says, “but I’ll be performing in a few minutes.”

“But I’d really like to take your picture now,” she persists.

“Sorry.”

“With the children.”

Then: “It’s for a school project.”

He doesn’t break his stride, declines again, keeps moving, headed as he is to the restroom, leaving her indignant and maybe, offended, though not in the SWPL #101 sense of it, when all she is doing is attempting #20 (“Being an expert on YOUR culture”) and being a Good Mother.

Out on the field we notice a number of expensive strollers, toddlers with bags of tiny carrots and organic juice. A small girl with stripy tights and a golden afro is being spoken to in French. University professor families, we surmise. Too groovy for local, too well-equipped for graduate students. It could have been Queen’s Park, NW10.

A lot of people have thought to bring their own chairs (see previous post on the ubiquity and usefulness of the folding chair in Alabama) and it was a long way to the parking lot in the blazing sun. We actually do have a chair in our trunk, but it is a vintage one we had found at the flea market. It is too heavy for an ironic prop.

Chairless and hatless, after watching a family-friendly version of the bear dance, we retire to the cool gloom of the recently remodeled museum.

As my eyes adjust to the light, I notice the crowd inside. Men, women and children all dressed in crimson T-shirts and Bama caps. It is a game day. They wear their 2009 National Champions commemorative shirts tucked in. But there are other T-shirts in the mix, one on a grizzled bikerish white man with a tattoo-style scroll that says Trail of Tears, that I think is in questionable taste (#101, Being Offended). Another wears a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert T.

It is a strange cocktail of cultures and tribes: the Bama fans amid the interactive displays, against a backdrop of elaborate feather capes and ceremonial vessels. And behind it all the curved glass wall of the café and gift shop, the sound of the milk steamer, the books, the jewelry, the massage oil, polished stone animals.

Back out into the sun and the dust, the girls are loosed upon the craft market. We watch the hipsters in festival shirts and matching fuchsia hair; pale teen girls in black Bama gear with their parents; the earnest, hiking sandal shod. The lines have blurred. It’s like the windows I had open on my laptop that morning–one selling Wall Art, another doing a cultural deconstruction of the readership of art books–have multiplied and morphed and now everyone actively embraces and defies categorization and stereotypes.

It is good that my daughter knows her mind so well, but type means everything and nothing. Somewhere, already, there must be an animal who commands a territory that is worth defending and worth reading about.