Letter from London…
26 May 2005
Since we met in 2002, Colin and I have been doing something that a lot of heavy-in-love couples do: we surreptitiously compete to see who can give the best Christmas and birthday presents.
The first Christmas, when we had only been together a few months, I gave Colin a series of inexpensive (I was still a grad student) but thoughtful gifts that had something to do with each of our past dates. A stainless steel martini glass from Grand Street Café (engraved), a framed recipe (the first dish he ever cooked for me), a stuffed Hedwig doll (the owl from the Harry Potter movie he saw with me and my girlfriends), etc. He gave me a trip to Jamaica. Although he said he really loved my gifts, I think he won that one.
For his birthday, that year, we were on holiday in Australia with my parents and my brother. So I planned, via long distance e-mail and phone calls, a hot air balloon ride. This was not easy to do. Hot air balloon trips are contingent on weather conditions the morning of the flight. So, 
while the five of us meandered on Kangaroo Island the day before the planned flight, I had to sneak away, into the bush, to call the company via payphones, for frequent weather reports. Meanwhile, I had to convince Colin to get up at 4 a.m., on his birthday, drive a rental car, in the dark, on the wrong side of the road, to someplace we had never been before, to participate in something he had no idea what it was. Fortunately, as you can see (above), the weather held and we had a glorious sunrise ride over the Barossa Wine Valley, followed by a champagne picnic. Score one for me.
This year, London was the theme for my birthday. Colin took me to high tea at the Ritz, then to a play starring Kim Cattrall (Samantha from “Sex and the City”). It wasn’t planned, but I did get to say hello to her afterwards. So, as the months passed, between February and May, I was gnawing my nails off, trying to plan his birthday. I was gun-shy: the credit card security vultures had spoiled my Christmas surprise –a limo ride from work with our friends to a martini bar, and dinner at four-star restaurant– by calling him and asking if the charges I had made were valid. In the past five months, we had been to Egypt and Brussels and the States, drinking fantastic beer, standing at the feet wonders of the ancient world, swimming in clear blue water. What could top it? So much time together, I thought, maybe he needed a little time away, a time to reconnect with nature and himself. So I started trying to arrange something special, just for him.
Colin, when he young and wild, used have long, curly hair. He rode his bicycle from the hills in North Vancouver to work at National Research Council at the University of British Columbia. In Ottawa, when he attended Carlton University, he ice skated on frozen canals from his apartment to class. He has skied black diamonds at Whistler. He climbed the Squamish Chief. When we packed our 300-square-feet of belongings to move to a flat in London, his climbing gear came with us. Last summer, when we visited Ottawa, he and his brother, Duane, cooed over Duane’s rock wall, built in his two-story garage. I was mildly interested, but bothered that my athletic husband had been stranded in the obese flatlands of Kansas the last five years and hadn’t had much use for ascenders and pitons and belay devices. He hadn’t been skiing, or cycling, or skating. Instead, in Overland Park, Kansas, people in beefed up SUVs hollered mockeries at Colin and I as we walked the three blocks from his apartment to a nearby restaurant. “Get a car!”
I tried to plan it, a rock climbing getaway for Colin, in Spain or Northern Italy or Wales. I called, e-mailed, tried to ask Colin hooded questions about his skills, his gear, without giving anything away. Finally, I realized I could not give him this gift without his help. I needed too much information to just surprise him. I told him my plan.
“Actually, honey,” he said, “I think that might be too much right now. Besides, I’d rather spend my birthday with you.”
Well. If you know me, you would know that what I heard wasn’t my sweet husband expressing his preferences, telling me he wanted to be with me. What I heard, instead, was rejection. I was upset. I had spent weeks thinking about this trip, trying to plan it, making calls. All I needed was for him to say “Wow! Elizabeth, that is SO great! Oh, I can’t wait! You are so thoughtful.” And, after all, after a year, of marriage and close quarters, of piles of stress, I sort of thought he deserved a little space away from me.
Colin told me he had been thinking about going to Scotland, to visit his cousin Glenise and her husband, Mick. Maybe play some golf. That was what he was thinking about doing for his birthday.
I was still very upset. He got to plan my birthday! Why should he get to plan his own as well? Why did we haul all that damn gear to England, just to let it sit in a bag forever? I was crazed. But, if you know me, well, you know that isn’t anything new. It didn’t last. Colin talked me down (he didn’t need his gear for that) and we planned a weekend in Scotland.
Not quite ready to get back into the rock climbing, he really just itched to get out on the links with the only other woman in his life: Great Big Bertha.
Mick and Glenise picked us up at the Aberdeen airport, smiled at us and said “Hello!” as if they had known us all our lives. Now, with all the available transport available in our modern world— taxis, rental cars, buses, and, in the case of Egypt, horse-drawn caleches or donkey carts— there is nothing better than being met at an airport. The idea of it: one person in the world, set down here, waiting for one other person to arrive, to carry them to their final destination, always charms me.
Mick advises Colin on pin location at Peterhead
But it is more than that, even a greater miracle, to be met by a couple: fused, once-strangers who have hitched their lives onto one another and made a family from it. Whenever I meet a married couple, or any pair of long-time partners, I look at them: once alone, two, independent entities walking on the ground. I picture them younger. I imagine the most beautiful versions of themselves, the image they carry of themself, inside. They are looking up and seeing each other, for the first time. I love to watch a couple look at each other, to notice the small ways they interact, the pattern of their lives together. Mick made coffee for Glen. Glen called Mick “Sephie,” an abbreviation of their surname. It is easy to feel the eternity of my own marriage when I see others, hauling the long line of partnership, up hills, over rocks, into the warm crevices, and against the wind.
Colin had not seen Glenise, his paternal first cousin, since he was 11. I had never met either Mick or Glen before. Coming to England, for Colin, has been partially about reconnecting with his father’s family. Henry Phillips, the youngest of 8 children, was born in London. He and his siblings, whom Colin and I are slowly meeting, can remember being evacuated during the second world war, carrying a box that held their gas masks. Henry joined the merchant marines when he was still a teenager and eventually landed in Canada.
In Peterhead, the little town north of Aberdeen, Mick and Glen had plenty of room for us. One night, we ate dinner at a restaurant in a converted barn, three miles from the nearest town. Afterward, we drove past the ExxonMobil gas refinery where Mick works. At night, against a rural black sky, the complex glowed, blinked, hummed, blue lights heaving, an industrial Auroa Borealis.
In the day, we played golf while cows looked on– now in the rain, now in the sun– along the North Sea. The fairways and greens shifted and undulated, their roots in sand dunes. One morning, Glen drove us into the hills, the highlands, in the heart of northern Scotland.The land fell away from the road. Sheep and lambs, fluorescent green numbers spray-painted on their fleece, lazed in the field. Scorching rushes of rape seed in garish shades of yellow cut the green landscape in the distance. Highland cattle dragged their long locks and heavy horns in dirt barnyards. Colin navigated from the back seat and Glen drove. I stared out the window and looked at the land, the stone walls rambling across acres of green. Here, there, and again, huge gashes carved out in the forest: Norwegian pines gutted from the land to make room for native plants. A quick turn around a bend and a soaring point stabbed the sky, an ancient stone church in the distance, in nowhere, in a field, it seemed.
Glenise steered the car and told us about their years living in Hong Kong. I felt it, saw it in my mind’s eye: the moist heat, the bamboo matting, the pushy maid, and the garden snakes. In my mind, I felt the hot breezes in the palm trees. Outside, Scottish clouds churned and climbed in front of us. A few raindrops spattered on the windscreen. The sun cut into the backseat window, chased us, then disappeared.
At the Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown, we stopped and parked. We let young, freckled Sarah lead us through the stillhouse. We inhaled the vapors, watched the mash spin, then burble with the yeast. Sarah spieled on about barley and Roobie Dhu Spring water and bourbon and port-wood finished barrels. We tasted 12-year-old scotch whisky on empty stomachs at the tasting room. The day fell open on itself. Glen drove us on. We ate lunch in a bar, hundreds of single malt whiskys surrounding us in rank and file , in hotel next to the Spey River. It was cold. I pulled my jacket around me.
On the way home, we stopped at Craigellachie, on the Moray Firth. Warm winds pulled, miraculously, into this far-flung area of the North Atlantic. The days were so much longer in northern Scotland. At 3:30, we teed off hole one to play 18. We finished before dark.
Glen and I outside the original stone buildings,
Glenfiddich, Dufftown
We ate seafood, drank scotch, and wished we could stay longer. On Sunday afternoon, before we had to go back to the airport, Glen served us sweets with our tea and told us the story about “a fine piece.” I don’t remember how it went exactly, but it was something like this:
“When we first moved to the other house, the one we lived in before this,” she said, “a neighbor came by. I invited her in for tea. She sat and we drank a cup of tea and talked, as you do. Well, a few days later, she came by with a huge tray of cakes. She said they were for me, seeing as I didn’t have any. Well, I was surprised and maybe a bit put off because I just don’t eat them. I thought it was strange, but all right. I thanked her and took them anyway.
“Well, come to find out, in these parts of Scotland, you just don’t sit down to tea without a “piece”: be it a bit of cake, biscuit, some kind of sandwich. And if they serve something really nice, well then it is a fine piece. Well, of course, I didn’t know that! We had just moved here. But in the end, what must that poor woman have thought? I think they must have thought we were the poorest wretches around, not even a biscuit on hand. Just a poor cup of tea!”
Glenise served us tea, with a right fine piece of chocolate that afternoon, then drove us back to Aberdeen to catch our flight. Mick was at work, but bid us a warm good-bye and “hurry back” the night before.
We do not get to choose our families. There are so many sad, broken families in the world, pillars of lonely and angry people. I get frustrated, I get worried, but, in the morning, at night, I remember what I have, and where I came from. It is something special when your family– cousins, siblings, in-laws– are the kind of people you would choose, after all. It is part hard work, of course, and part benediction. But, for me, it is a simple frame of reference. Colin and I both love each other’s families. We are both so grateful for that.
“Write down the words of sadness
burn them in a cup;
write down the things you’ve wanted
throw them to the wind that’s soaring up to heaven.”
Jann Arden
Waiting in Canada
