Mr. Lewis was always among the majority who went forward. He was one of our chemistry teachers, and he was completely bald. Because his forehead sort of blended in with the rest of his head, our chaplain always seemed to slightly misplace the ashes, drawing them an inch too high so that he walked back to his seat with a cross nearer to the top of his head than his forehead. I would watch for it each year. I couldn’t help it. That bobbing cross, placed so high up compared to everyone else’s. Its dark ashen color so stark against Mr. Lewis’s light bald skin. It was the most prominent of all the crosses painted that day, hidden by neither hair nor acne. The bobbing cross that walked all over campus on Ash Wednesday.
This is, largely, what Lent was for me in my school years. Singing a single note on repeat, trying to control my breath. Mr. Lewis’s bald head. That bobbing cross, made of black ashes, smeared an inch too high.
As you can see, from the start Lent was not holy to me. It was a combination of dreaded chapel services and partial dieting. It was a confusing forty days that lacked true religious implication and consideration of God, Jesus, or the Cross. In fact, Jesus, his death and resurrection, were not central to my version of Lent at all.
Because of these seven school-aged years of confusing and seemingly morally conflicting Lent, still today when my pastor mentions Lent or I read something about it on the Internet as it’s approaching, I get a little uncomfortable. I feel a twinge of dread. I feel a twinge of hunger. I feel confusion in my heart and in my head. And to this day, I have never gone forward to receive the ashes.
Abstaining from caffeine in Oxford did nothing to reconcile my relationship with Lent. If anything, it intensified uncomfortable memories into February-induced PTSD. A fast from fried food was nothing compared to a fast from caffeine. My other blood.
Mornings, typically my prime hour, felt long and hard without coffee to aid me. My French press stayed in one place on its shelf, and I replaced my morning habit with hot chocolate. It was sweet but did not get the job done the way I needed it done, with a lightning bolt’s worth of energy dripping in my veins.
I looked at my bag of coffee beans beside the hot cocoa mix on the shelf in my cupboard, and I am not kidding you, in my decaffeinated state of delusion, Frideswide appeared and mocked me.
“You’ll never replace coffee,” she taunted in an eerie voice, “but your effort is adorable. Keep it up, saint.”
Oh Frideswide. The villain in my tale of an Oxford Lent. This was my battle every morning. Coffee sat on my right shoulder and badgered and badgered me, while the ghost of Saint Frideswide, with her stern narrow face, sat on my left shoulder and told me I was weak and couldn’t do it and would never be enough. I had to walk out of the kitchen and retreat to my bedroom simply to find peace and be as far from temptation as possible.
In hindsight, I should have taken my coffee grounds, placed them in an urn, and made a ceremonial march to the Thames before tossing them in. I should have taken a handful, mixed the grounds with water, and smeared them across my forehead in the shape of a cross. For that is what it felt like for me—like sacrifice, like death.
Is what I say here sacrilegious? Quite possibly, but it is the truth. Coffee had died, and I was grieving, the type of grief that didn’t quite make it through all the stages. I was stuck in “anger” and never made it to “acceptance.”
From February 25 to April 9, 2009, my mitten-clad hands were in a holding rotation of hot cocoa, mint tea with honey, and Diet Sprite. Diet Sprite is gross. Mint tea with honey, though, is not terrible. Even though it looks green and weird and not the color hot water should be, the actual taste is refreshing, and the minty steam reaches deep into your nostrils in a good way.
In spite of the gallons of mint tea I drank during those forty days, giving up coffee did not make me a tea person. I remain suspicious of those who prefer tea over coffee. Have you ever tasted coffee? Do you know its power to transform your entire world?
Lent that year taught me almost nothing spiritually, similar to ninth grade when I gave up fried food, also similar to the next year when I gave up soda. I didn’t get it, and honestly I still don’t.
But Lent in Oxford did teach me one thing. Though it was accidental and by no effort of my own, it taught me that I like to leave a spoon in my tea.
Through all the hot-drink drinking I did those forty days plus Sundays, I learned how I liked to drink my tea and my hot chocolate. Instead of removing the spoon after stirring in the cocoa mix or the honey or sugar, I found it beneficial to leave the spoon in, so I could keep stirring when the sugar or the mix began to sink to the bottom. I wanted all of the cup’s contents to remain mixed. I wanted every beverage consumed at its full sweetness potential. So I kept the spoon clanking in my mug the entire time and stirred and stirred and stirred. I blame this strange spoon fixation on the abrupt removal of caffeine from my diet. Each recovering addict needs something to draw her attention away from her addiction, right?
By February Jisu had become my most consistent friend in Oxford. The type of friend I could call whenever I wanted without feeling weird about it or overthinking it. Jisu was with me in coffee shops while I worked on school presentations and practiced them for him. We scoured the Internet when I was on the hunt for a new bike. By February we were even discussing taking a trip with another friend to his hometown of Vienna. The fact that someone could actually be born and raised in Vienna was hard for me to understand. Like people who are actually from Paris or New York; I assume everyone there is a tourist.
Our nightly ritual was to lock up our bikes, go into his house or mine, make something warm to drink, and talk, sometimes for hours. Jisu noticed my spoon habit, and he enabled it—the mark of a true friend, I think. Whenever he prepared my drink, he would return to the living room holding both our mugs. His mug with the spoon removed, like a normal person’s, and mine with the spoon still in.
He rented a room in a large old home beside the St. Clement’s Street bus stop. The house was full of other one-room renters—students, older professionals, internationals—an odd mix. And then there was Jisu, in the middle of them. Young, personable, attractive. Normal.
In my memory, the light in his living room is low, and darkness sits outside the windows. Oxford in winter is dark most of the time. The sun sets by 4:00 p.m. and rises late in the morning. If you need a good escape from the darkness to some place lighter and warmer, Jisu’s living room on St. Clement’s Street is a good spot.
Clanking my spoon obnoxiously, I sat on Jisu’s couch and complained about the weather and my workload. I had sworn off reading anything for fun. I had time only for books for my classes. This meant day after day I read sad contemporary Irish novels for my Contemporary Irish Literature class and various books about Shakespeare and C. S. Lewis and others I was considering for a thesis. I read heavy literature and drank too much hot chocolate, and all the while I spent lots and lots of time with my Austrian Korean friend. He would talk about his job and his career dreams—Oxford is a good place to dream—and then he would make more tea, and he would put honey in mine and hand me my mug, always with the spoon in. And I would stir and stir, and the stirring lulled me into a type of late-night conversational coma.
With others, I felt insecure clutching my spoon so tightly. But not with him. Not when the dark outside the windows was thick, but the warmth inside was somehow light, somehow thin. Just enough to not smother you and just enough to make you feel safe. It is truly a gift to know another person who radiates that type of heat from his own self.
Who would have predicted an unholy and complaint-ridden Lenten fast would uncover for me a friend who left the spoon in my tea?
There was a deep and dark depth to my disappointment when I arrived at Starbucks Easter Sunday and it was closed. Similar to the sinking feeling we have all experienced when driving up to Chick-fil-A, our mouths watering and ready for some waffle fries, only to remember as our car approaches the drive-through line that it is Sunday.
I
had dreamed about it the night before. Coffee. The first cup of coffee after forty days plus Sundays for an addict such as myself is equivalent to seeing the sun for the first time after days of darkness. It’s experiencing life again when you thought all life was gone. In a word, resurrection. I had been looking forward to that first cup of Starbucks coffee for what might as well have been forty years, and then, faced with six innocent letters, my dream died.
“CLOSED”
All of Lent crashed before me into a crumbled wall of disappointment.
I should have known. It was 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday. In a small city in England. I should have known, but I didn’t, and I stood outside that Starbucks door watching the last forty days play out in an imagined series of animated images reflected in the glass: slow, sad mornings; the resistance to so many temptations; bottle after bottle of diet Sprite; headaches and jitters; that darned Saint Frideswide and her narrow face. Suddenly all of it was for nothing. All of it had meant nothing. Now that my reward was postponed, I could no longer remember why I had fasted those forty days plus Sundays.
Perhaps because I never had a reason to begin with.
7
The Road More Traveled
I think distance can make the heart grow fonder, and distance can make the heart forget reality. Such was the case with my tiny bedroom at the top of the stairs in the house on Donnington Bridge.
The first house I lived in during my time in Oxford, the one before the house on Donnington Bridge, was a sea of beige IKEA furniture on a street called Badgers Walk. My roommates were Americans I knew through some other friends from back home, but they were living there for only a few months on work visas. So by December, it was time for me to make arrangements for a place to live after they left. I scoured church classifieds, the only place I knew to look, for a room for rent, preferably with nice people. A girl named Lizzy had posted about a room in a house farther into town than where I was living. What Lizzy failed to mention was the “room” was actually what I, and most Americans, call a large-ish closet. It was seriously tiny. It had room for one twin bed, one tiny desk, and a matching tiny chair. It had one tiny window on the far wall with a view of the neighbors’ gardens and their hanging laundry and no room for clothes or anything other than one’s own body.
But I needed a room, and Lizzy and her roommate, Alice, seemed like completely normal Christian English girls, and this house had all the warmth and charm my Badgers Walk home had lacked. No beige here. No IKEA here. It was an old cottage painted white. Wisteria grew over the front door. They had the cutest wooden kitchen table and a real stand-up piano, just like my mom’s when I was growing up. Considering these charming elements, the tiny room wasn’t so bad. I signed the lease, and soon after, before I moved in my stuff, I went home for Christmas break.
In the weeks I was away, I began to romanticize the quaint British cottage I would return to. I described it to my family as this lovely little place near the river. “My room is the one with the view of everyone’s gardens,” I said. When I came back to England in January, ready to move into my picturesque cottage with my three enormous suitcases in tow, I was hit with the truth that my heart, due to my time away, had deceived me.
I hauled my bags up the narrow, steep staircase and stood in the doorway of my new bedroom. The room had obviously shrunk since I last saw it. My suitcases did not fit inside it. My own body barely fit inside. I peered out into the hall. A wardrobe sat at the end of it. I had forgotten that because my room was so small, Alice said I could have the hallway too. I could store whatever I needed there or in the wardrobe that sat at the end. A tiny bedroom and a hallway and a wardrobe.
I felt overcome by a wave of claustrophobia. I sank onto my tiny mattress, wondering where all my things would go and how I would manage to live in this space—a closet bedroom and a hallway—for the next nine months. Was everything this size when I came and saw it the first time? Why did I agree to this? I took slow breaths and reminded myself how nice Lizzy and Alice were and how desperately I needed Christian friends. I remembered the stand-up piano in the living room and our cute garden out back.
The wave of claustrophobia subsided and survival instincts kicked in. I could do this. I just needed to be creative with my space. Spaces. I could get baskets for my clothes and use them as drawers, and I could leave my suitcases in the—my—hallway. I could put up curtains and pictures to personalize things. The space issue was nothing but a reminder that I had too much stuff. That all Americans have too much stuff. I did not fit in this country, but as I had been doing for months already, I would squeeze myself in, suck in my gut, put a smile on my face, and move forward. I didn’t want Alice and Lizzy to know that I hated my tiny bedroom or that I was worried about where all my wool sweaters would go. I would downplay my American sense of entitlement as best I could.
During my first night in the new room, I almost froze to death. My window didn’t shut properly, so the frigid January English air seeped in all night. I woke up several times to the tingling feeling of a different limb going numb. I reached into the night for extra clothes to layer on. By morning I was wearing thermal underwear, flannel pajama pants, a fleece, a sweatshirt and a wool hat with my comforter pulled up to my nose. I was so cold I wondered if I was still alive. “Will I ever even move again? Is this what dying feels like in the Arctic?”
I sat up and eyed the radiator positioned under my window. A lot of good you did me last night, I thought. The British, in my opinion, have a different definition of the word comfortable. They deal with the cold without coats, and they deal with the rain without umbrellas. They need not keep their radiators on twenty-four hours a day, for that would be wasteful. They keep calm. They carry on. This either makes them superior beings or gluttons for punishment.
The house was quiet that first morning. My new roommates had already left for work, so I was free to snoop. In my wool hat and fuzzy socks, I stepped outside my room and observed my surroundings. I walked downstairs. A built-in bookcase lined the far wall of the living room. I am such a sucker for built-in bookcases. I read the titles of some of the DVDs on the shelf. Notting Hill, Pride and Prejudice, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Hope Floats. This gave me hope. This looked just like my DVD collection back home. If we had chick flicks in common, maybe we would have other things in common too.
I left the living room feeling at home. As soon as I walked into the kitchen, I was a foreigner again. I searched the room quickly with my eyes and noticed the absence of many things. No toaster. No dishwasher. No coffeemaker. (No coffeemaker!) And I think that’s an oven, but it is very small. There is a washing machine, awkwardly located under the kitchen sink. And no microwave.
That about did me in. In my few months in Oxford, the cultural nuances of England had already left me feeling isolated. The accent, the driving on the opposite side of the road, the weather and constant rain, my clothes, my hair, my teeth. It’s not one thing that makes you feel like you don’t belong in a foreign country. It is a thousand tiny things that add up before that one thing, and that one thing is simply icing on the cake, the cherry on top, the big straw that breaks the big camel’s big back. For me, the straw was living in a house that had a kitchen with no microwave. How would I make oatmeal, sweet potatoes, and popcorn? How would I reheat my coffee?
I sulked back to the living room in my fuzzy socks, feeling completely lost. I sat on the lumpy couch alone and watched the slanting snow outside our window. I realized that watching snow fall when you’re alone is one of the loneliest experiences you can have. I didn’t like being alone while it snowed. Or I didn’t want it to snow while I was alone. Either way, the solitude zapped snow of its magic. And sitting there, alone, while the ugly snow landed on the hard, frozen ground, all I wanted from Oxford was out.
Around the time of the slanting snow, I received an e-mail from my college friend Ashley. “Hey!” it said. “So my roommate is moving out this summer. Wanna come back from Oxford early and live with me??”
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br /> Ashley lived in Dallas. This is where most of my friends had migrated after college. I had never wanted to live in Dallas before. I had never thought about it before. But reading Ashley’s e-mail at a time like that made Dallas look like an oasis in my desert of winter and foreignness.
Dallas.
It was hot there. Dallas has a mall or two. Ashley had a microwave and a coffeemaker and a dishwasher and a clothes dryer. Her apartment complex had a pool. I could have my own bathroom. I could go to the big megachurch she went to. I could hang out with guys who wore baseball caps and drove trucks and didn’t call basketball “netball.”
There I was, living in one of the oldest and most renowned cities in the world, and Dallas seemed like the best place I could possibly be. It seemed better than “the city of dreaming spires,” as they call Oxford. Dreaming spires looked like crap compared to generic American Dallas. Oh America, how I yearned for it and its highways and roads and gas stations and baseball stadiums and hot weather and red, white, and blue. Right there in the middle of dreamy and beautiful Oxford, I began to daydream about concrete, traffic, and public pools. I began to daydream about Dallas.
English Lessons Page 8