Bones

I saw a grown man weep at a musical.

Last night I sauntered off to Queen's Theatre, sat in the "stalls", and waited for Les Miserables to begin. I had been waiting since I was 14. Behind me sat bickering, giggling teen sisters, their mother and their grandmother, whose running commentary erased my loneliness. "One of the actors is from S Club 7!", one shrieked, divulging valuable information I would otherwise have never learned because I hadn't bought a program (and I thought of you, Yolande & Lise!). Soon a mumbling man sat next to me and proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes talking to himself while he texted someone at the speed of smoke signals (I can say this because my texting abilities are even slower -- I might as well tie a message to a tortoise!). As the curtain rose, he began to hum. This went on throughout. the. entire. play. A little bar of music here, a little there.

I wanted to smack him.

"I haven't seen this before!", I held back from hissing.

Several songs later it dawned on me. He wasn't humming because he wanted to piss off the young, Canadian, unpaid museum studies intern who had emptied her pockets to be here. No! He was humming because he simply couldn't contain himself. When a stark white light shone on Jean Valjean to indicate that he had given up the ghost I heard a sniff and turned to see the raccoon of his eyes silver and iridescent, like the inside of a sea shell. He was weeping.

To see a stranger so moved makes them hardly a stranger. Like stealing a look at another’s x-ray.

It’s been a week of seeing the bones of things. On Friday, mum and pops arrived, their new gortex jackets crinkling. After a hell-raising train ride to York (hell-raising simply because my family is too used to traveling in chaotic places that we don't know how to behave in industrialized places; picture my mother and I running, RUNNING, down the platform to the last car where we were forced to leave our luggage, frantically trying all the doors we could find -- well I was trying different doors, mom was stuck unknowingly trying to get into the engine -- and then picture suitcases being thrown from the train and us wiping our brows, so proud we had gotten our bags before the train continued on to Scotland. Picture the locals laughing. And the train staying on the platform for an additional, relaxed 5 minutes, our panicked hurry completely irrational and unnecessary) we arrived in our refurbished stable of a cottage and stared at the James Herriot landscape. And sighed.

The following morning we trekked down a cliff to a beach for fossil hunting, my parents’ blossoming passion. It’s like a game of Where’s Waldo, only Waldo is a few million years old. We sat on a rock and ate our sandwiches and I drank my dandelion and burdock soda. And after sitting still long enough, the fossils started to appear. I’d never found an honest-to-goodness fossil before and then I stumbled upon one the size of a fist. I held in my palms the marrow of time. I can’t even conceive of how long ago my fossilized ammonite had been fleshy, alive and breathing - I have a hard enough time imagining life before the internet.

Skin tight from salt air and sun, we drove to Whitby, a veritable anthill of tourists, to seek out the ruins of a hilltop abbey we had seen from a distance. Neither discouraged by the staircased hike, nor the admission price, nor the “salty sea dogs” event that was encouraging children to scream and whack each other to smithereens with foam swords, we stood there, in the remaining ribs of the abbey. Staring through vaulted windows stain glassed with blue skies. And it felt like we were amidst the bones of a prayer.