cellini's Diaryland Diary

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God Save The Queen

I think often of that house in the French countryside that we stayed in during the summers when I was small. The cottage was made of stone and there was a great fireplace with some sort of iron apparatus over it. There was one great big room that served as dining, living room and kitchen. And then on either side of that great room there was a bedroom that one stepped up a few stairs into. Each bedroom was low and cozy. Mine was very small and contained little more than a bed, a small chest and a book shelf. Each night before falling asleep we read from 'Kra the Baboon.'

Outside there were little lizards - three different kinds - that crawled along the stone walls and sunned themselves. A little goldfish pond near the house and a larger pond farther away, close to the house where the princesses stayed.

Over the spring house there grew a plum tree. I would climb up on to the shingles of the spring house to pick the ripe, purple fruit and the juice would run down my face. Near the road the was an apple tree that I once ate from on my way back from the little town near by.

The little town had a puppet theater that I remember seeing shows at. And there was a little market that I visited with my father and bought a pair of slip-on, canvas, rope-soled shoes.

I remember these things so well. And yet I feel somewhat cheated for having gone so long without such places. I visited Paris again a few years ago for first time since I was very small. I stood in places that sent chills up my spine as I suddenly recalled standing in that very spot. Going to Paris as an adult was not a thing of discovery for me. It was a thing of remembrance. I left too soon and felt it keenly.

The smell of diesel from a passing bus still fills me with the sense of London as a child. The big double-decker buses. We would step aboard, grabbing the smooth, bright metal pole and sling ourselves up and then climb up the narrow, steep stairs to the second floor and if the seats were available (as they often were in the middle of the day) we would sit right up front.

A granola bar for a treat. A stroll along Portabello Road. I used my pathetic allowance to buy my father a pen shaped like a fish from a barrel of plastic fish pens amid a sea of used books and battered old furniture.

It breaks my heart sometimes that I haven't been back to England since. It was my home for years. London still, absurdly, feels like home. And somehow in spite of being fully American I still cannot stay seated when I hear the first notes of 'God Save the Queen'.

I am bound to that city and to that country forever. I was there when it happened. A bandstand full of green uniforms and horns exploded one day as I walked home from preschool.

British friends of mine today roll their eyes at little things I say in support of the crown. They just assume that its some sort of typical American romanticism of the monarchy. I've never explained it all to any of them. Some know that I live in London but they don't know about it all. That I was there with the canvas curtains being pulled up around the bloody bandstand. That I was part of it all in my small way when we were attacked. And I was there looking out of a window as the royal wedding passed with Diana in her dress. I was there to see the queen in her green dress and hat when the ground was broken for the new Lloyds building.

And there was a little girl I knew who lived along the way home from school and she would open her window on the second floor and never speak as we passed but she would cross her arms on the windowsill and rest her chin and look at me as I walked by.

Women, I find, have changed little since that time.

5:02 a.m. - 2011-09-11

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