Breaking routines

"Where were you?" asked Herr H., my avuncular companion in archival work, in a pseudo-monitory stage whisper over our respective tomes. I laughed, unrepentant, and explained that I'd been in Oxford. "How nice!" said Herr H., "normally you never treat yourself." I added in more sober tones that my sojourn had been for an academic conference, primarily… but the joy in my first reply told the essential truth: Oxford is always a paradise to me, even and perhaps especially when it's providing me with academic work to do. I came home with two secondhand mystery novels, a new book of poems, two kinds of tea, and sweet memories from visits: dinner with a Fordham colleague in London; tea with a friend from study-abroad days; and two days spent in the dear company of another friend, picnicking, visiting a museum, cooking with Jobim and Sinatra on the stereo, and even punting. And I met other scholars of medieval medical history at the conference, had conversations about the frustrations and joys of Latin, exchanged article references and contact info with fellow graduate students, and got encouraging comments both on my paper and my dissertation project. And all in a city that looks like this…

Radcliffe Observatory

Twilight over the Rad Cam

University church, St. Mary the Virgin

Christ Church

 On the first two mornings, I went to morning service in the cathedral; after that, the conference successfully tired me out enough that I was no longer awake in time to be kneeling under Burne-Jones' beautifully human saints by 7:35.

It doesn't all look like this, of course. If it did, I might find it uncanny. But it has quiet residential streets, and streets crammed with odd businesses near the train station (including an English-learning institute named after Kheiron, to my disproportionate delight. The centaur's body makes part of the K.) Walking out to a friend's home for tea, I found myself among tiny international groceries, laundromats, charity shops, hip new restaurants, and old evangelical churches… a landscape that felt much more like the places I've lived in NYC than Oxford's center does. But the center is always too bustling to feel oppressively rarified. And it has views like this. And people I love. And an enormous Anglo-Catholic parish where young families and old academics lustily sing the hymns ("the song of them that triumph, the SHOUT of them that feast") and warmly greet visitors, including returning ones. And Oxford has good amateur choirs. And baroque concert series. And at least two pubs named after Thomas Hardy novels. My adolescent fantasy of moving there is resurfacing as an only semi-improbable hope.