Dreams

I know it's been some time since I last posted. School has a way of blocking out all light and life. It sucks up the energy that comes with each new day and dissipates all hope by sundown. We are asked to do more and more for less and less. In Florida the line has been drawn. What will teachers do with changes being sought after in the state legislature? How will any of us find our way through these really dark options? If you are sitting at home these days thinking that our job is all joy and sunshine, check out what is going on around the country with education. Who would want to be a teacher at these costs?

But I digress...I am bound for London tomorrow. I have been in love with English anything since I was a child. Tea, crumpets, Dickens, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Christie, Byron, Keats, Browning, Poets Corner, Westminster, Big Ben, Tower of London, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and II, Charles, Diana, Camilla. I remember going to the drive-in as a five year old and watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. I collected every magazine picture and article I could find.

Why is this important? Because we all have dreams. We live our lives in such a way that some moment in time will find us celebrating the dream. We hope. We yearn. Then we go to college; we get jobs; we have children. We have money for mortgages and loans. We buy new winter coats and shoes which they outgrow at amazing rates. We manage a trip here or there but we never quite get to the dream. Well, some of us do. We have a head start with parents who teach us money management which is easy for them since they actually have it to manage and give it to us to manage as well. We never doubt that our family trip will be somewhere exotic, some port of call beyond the borders of our state, our country. We take it for granted. Yes, we do. But me? It happens tomorrow.

Not good with money and too generous to boot. But now it has happened and I am off. Who will I become on this trip? Will I become intoxicated with all things English? Will I forgive them their arrogance toward my Scottish heritage? Will I forgive them their arrogance against the Irish, the Indians, the Muslims, the Jews, the Afghans, the Americans? They do have a lot to answer for.

But in my fervor I will find joy and fulfillment as I look at the Magna Carta and the stones of Stonehenge. The shrine to St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury where the pilgims stood--the wife of Bath, the yeoman, the knight. The spires of Westminster Abbey and the burial sites of so many names I know. The glorious Easter service of St. Paul's. The British Museum will not lose its charm for me. I am bound for home--the English part of me beckons and I will find more of myself than I knew. And that is the glory of dreams rendered real.