To the East

Combined Media. Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

No more Croydon. I don’t know how to grasp how much has happened and somehow put it into that time frame. We’ve been in Croydon, which is an hour outside of London, with Pauly and Alice for the past week but some kind of alternate reality has been enacted. A friend my parents knew during university contacted us our second day in. Which makes me think the Maternal Dissemination of Anxiety has been distributed to anyone who has the misfortune of being on my mother’s contact list. She is convinced that we are going to kill our children while we’re over here, as if in some way the good ol’ U-S of A would have prevented us from doing that. If anything the FDA would have helped us along. But it is fortunate for us that he approached us because otherwise we’d be sleeping at the airport. They make unfortunate movies about those kind of people. 

Anyways, this Gavin guy, he’s in Edinburgh, teaching Linguistics at the University. Benj and I met with him yesterday and he handed us a slab of addresses and contacts of colleagues of his and extraneous friends of my parents. Every country on the European continent is represented! Not to mention Taiwan, Western Russia, and Japan. We’ll head to Edinburgh tomorrow with the kids and then from there...I don’t know? It’s our choice. The continent is our oyster. We’ll probably go to Ireland first and then over to the mainland. I think it would be great for the kids to see the countryside in France or to go see Copenhagen. See a place that is different from their home, a place that could be their new home. 

We bough the kids a pop-up atlas at the airport to show them where we are and where we’re going, where we came from. The first thing they did when we got to Croydon was dump all of Amelie’s clothes out from her suitcase and stuff Kiel in it. Amelie toted him around the room for probably five minutes while Kiel laughed from inside. I sat outside the room and cried. Benj was nowhere to be found. The kids are playing around with no concept that their life has been wiped clean because their parents don’t know how to keep their opinions to themselves and like to break things, especially things that belong to the city. 

"Protest 4." Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

We could do this before, Benj. We can’t do this now. We can’t do it when it doesn’t only affect us.