The Spaces in Between - An Ode to Jalal

If you look closely when you're driving the 427 en route to the Pearson Airport you'll see a small cemetery swaddled with speeding highways. Blink, and you'll miss it.

I've been thinking about the spaces in between. The places you only see when you have the time. The places between point A and point B we don't really consider because we're in transit. I spent six hours in Heathrow. My hosts weren't home yet and I didn't want to venture out into a brand new city bedraggled and dragging luggage (well, the luggage that didn't end up in Salt Lake City at least) so I sat in the arrivals area, where they had food and bathrooms big enough for me and my tank of a suitcase. And watched. And thought. Not much, but I thought a little.

You know that question about being stranded on a deserted island and only being allowed one object? There are two answers that drive me crazy: 1) a boat and 2) my wife. A boat is cheating and a wife/husband/partner is not an object. But when I found myself crying in that weird mind-boggling space that is US customs pre-clearance at Pearson (am I on American or Canadian soil?), I thought my answer to that question would be glue. When I said goodbye to you, I fell apart at the seams. The seams of my mind and my body, my heart and my soul. And I thought if I was ever stuck on a deserted island without you, I'd wish for a very big bottle of glue.

But this isn't a deserted island -- it's London! Two movies, a giant mug of tea, and an attempt to "freshen" up in the bathroom later, I boarded the tube and set off on a 2 hour journey across the city to the Isle of Dogs. I was introduced to London backwards, via people's backyards and the city's underbelly; via picnic sets and gardens, trash heaps and the tiled walls of tube station after tube station after tube station. After three trains and three hellish stairwells (Thank you Delta Airline for losing my other bag because if I'd had to carry both, I might have dropped them down the stairs and killed someone) I finally arrived and was warmly greeted by two friends of a friend who fed me and put me to bed.

I woke up, showered and ate -- all of which was so refreshing I wanted to break out into loud praises for the Lord, much like the bathers my brother and I would see at the pools in Benin who would shout out their "Hallelujah"s and their "Dieu est Grand"s whenever they emerged from the water still breathing, still alive -- and took off exploring. This place is so steeped in history, it's embarrassing; being from a country whose material landscape is so recent, I gawked at everything. The baroque ceiling of the Old Royal Naval College blew my socks off!

I hiked up the hill of Greenwich park to the Royal Conservatory. The place was crawling with school groups and tourists, and I got the impression that wasn't unsual from the one way path winding through the museum. Before entering the museum, I watched the looong line of tourists waiting to take their photo in front of the Greenwich Meridian sculpture and had to laugh at our human fascination with 0 degrees longitude and then I laughed even more when I read about the "Longitude Prize" contest of 1714 which would award 20,000 pounds for whomever invented a "practical and useful" method for enabling ships to determine longitude at sea. Apparently there were lots of submission, some from the "lunatic fringe", but "among the stranger proposals were a string of firework signal barges moored around the world, magical potions and a clock sealed in a vacuum jar". I wish the firework signal barge had won. In a smaller room of the museum I found the meridian, a telltale metal bar scared the floor. And I took a picture of my feet. I couldn't resist. (for more pictures please go to my flickr account or http://flickr.com/photos/90614791@N00/) When I came across an "interactive" where visitors were encouraged to fill out a card titled "Time stopped for me when..." I wrote down "when I first kissed the man who would become my husband" and dropped in it the slot to be perused by some unpaid intern like myself.

My favorite thing of the day though was when I took the foot tunnel under the Thames to Greenwich, a tunnel which was built in 1902. I liked it for the same childish reason that I like revolving doors, escalators and moving sidewalks. And because, standing in the middle of the tunnel neither on the Isle of Dogs nor in Greenwich, I thought of how I'm not completely in one place either. The rest of me is with you (and Salt Lake City!).