You can’t go home again?
My new self, a woman of 62, visited my old self on my first trip to London in almost a half century. I’d lived there for a spot then, but, when I got off at my old tube stop, I found myself looking for someone not there. Like my roaming cell phone, I never quite connected. This left me with an off, unfinished feeling, as if I had something to get to but couldn’t.
Walking towards my old flat, I continued roaming, glancing at the butcher shop round the counter. I spotted a meat counter, but no men in white coats behind it, and mostly wrapped deli to slice. Most everything had switched places, like a dream, and the buildings had grown taller too, some of them quite ugly.
Nearing my row house, I could feel the physical, 20-year old me, sitting inside me in some small place. But she seemed less full, partly formed, like a light sketch of me as I am now. I turned the corner onto my old street, called Sutherland, which like that dream, scrambled its name into Sunderland in my memory. And there it was, the same, a wide street with lined with row houses
We’re in London’s Maida Vale neighborhood, a name I don’t remember. And I lived here as 20-year old for three months with a nice boy, Leonard Ruggiero, who found me on the web a few years ago. Together, we pieced back the address, and he sent me a Google Map snap in a Facebook message. On my way there, with my hub of 32 years, I emailed Lenny and got an immediate response, there on the street.
While we lived there, I mostly danced all day. The endless modern dance classes with small troupe were headed up by Ernest Berk, a minor electronic composer and his wife, Lotte, a follower of German dance pioneer Mary Wigman. (Lotte, it turns out, later become a London fitness maven before she died at 90. More Google.)
And here I am (below) in front of my old home now, where you see me above, forty three years later, in this picture. (With almost all my clothing on, as it was damp and chilly, which I DO remember.)
Not sure who lives there now, but it was a bedsit then, a lovely long room with a garden view on one end, toilet down the hall, tub upstairs and a telly going in the basement for all to watch. And apparently, according to Lenny, a poet upstairs. It was winter, I shoved coins into the gas heater and toasted myself on one side, and then the other.
Having found the right house my body, and likely my spirit, continued to roam, a queasy, but not entirely unpleasant feeling. The young me watched a bit, but this isn’t her London, in time, space or attitude. The neighborhood, the town, is not the same, nor am I. But still I wonder: what happened in the time between then and now? Did I become the person I imagined I’d be?
