Oxford (1997)

Yesterday John, Chris and I went to Oxford. We missed the trip last time because Amy was in the hospital. We ate a fine pub lunch at the "Wig and Pen" and then headed around town while John took pictures of places from Hardy's book "Jude the Obscure." Oxford is a collection of separate colleges, each with its walled and gated courtyards, its spires and chapels. Their names are very evocative--St. John's, Christchurch, Balliol, Magdalen--ancient places that were old in the thirteenth century when Chaucer wrote of the "clerks of Oxford" in Canterbury Tales. I started off melancholy, thinking of Virginia Woolf, longing and envious of her brothers' education. My mood was not ameliorated by Christopher, screaming in the tower of St. Mary's (completely disrespectful of melancholy anyway) because he couldn't climb the ladder by himself--20 tourists waited below for him to finish his tantrum and descend. And where in fifteen seconds do you find a place for a four year old to pee--because fifteen seconds is all you've got. At least then we were closer to the river and there was a tree to stand behind.

At any rate, interrupted in this way by Christopher, I remembered the recurring dream I had years ago in which after a long journey I came to just such a place--a monastery, school, home--the Oxford colleges were accurate to my dream right down to the walled gardens and overtones of religion. It was graduation day for at least one college, and the graduates were dashing about with their black robes edged in ermine, their well-dressed parents trailing them with cameras. Then I felt envious and excluded, not just because of the gates across the gardens and the signs at the courtyards saying "no visitors", but because I had to go to Oxford on a bus and buy my own meal in a pub and I wasn't and never will be invited to lunch by an Oxford don--and as fine as BYU is it isn't Oxford.