Next morning (now Wednesday, having lost most of Tuesday to the diverted flight), I see Marjorie for the first time and I'm thrilled - I haven't seen her since spring of 2001. We have a visit from Rebecca, their oldest daughter, and her daughter and my goddaughter, Emily, now 13 - we all have a cup of tea and a fun conversation and I present Emily with a HUGE bag of "scrapbooking" materials. It's a new hobby in the UK and most of what they have is imported from the USA at great expense; thankfully my good friend Sharon is a scrapbooker over here and we went shopping for things and she donated a lot of materials to the cause (yay! Sharon!) - Emily is beside herself! As they leave, Rebecca tells me that's she's taking me to dinner with her girlfriends on Thursday night (the 3 of them try to do this every week; it works out to about 3x a month) - okay, fun.
This is perhaps a time to talk about origins of relationship - WHY am I so connected to this English family?! Well, back in 1978, four months after getting married to Phil, we were planning to go on this rock'n'roll gospel tour of England; Phil had toured with this band 3 or 4 times already and the leader was his good friend. As it turned out, Phil got a gig at the Music Center (pit orchestra for "Pal Joey" with Lena Horne and he couldn't afford to turn down months of work for what was, essentially, a missions trip) but he still wanted me to go and they needed my voice (as it was, the band used a handful of my songs in every concert, so I was the most featured of the four singers and played piano and guitar much of the time). The set-up for this tour was through a small parish outside Gravesend which sponsored the tours by putting all the musicians and singers up in homes - so now, instead of needing a home to accomodate a married couple, they need a home to accomodate a single woman - but they need some mad English folk who can cope with the mad American! THIS is how I met Colin and Marjorie and we all hit it off famously - I have visited them dozens of times since 1978 and they've stayed with us twice; we took them all over the southwest, including the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, San Francisco, San Diego, and Catalina. They are lovely, lovely people who were profoundly grieved when Phil left the marriage. C&M's daughters, Rebecca and Rachel, were about 13 and 10 when I first came (Rebecca has also come to visit - Rachel has yet to come). In the course of some phone calls made before the trip, I realized that Bec's kids, Emily and Harry, are the same ages that she and Rachel were when we all met.
We made a run out to a local garden center and have lunch there (!! - see, we don't tend to have sit down cafeterias in garden centers) and shortly after we get home there's a phone call from Rachel and she wants to come by with her kids - apparently she'd come by Tuesday late afternoon (remember, I was supposed to land by noon) saying, "I've come to see the American!" Rachel is hysterically funny but so much of it is delivery - she has a wonderful wonky sense of humor and I love seeing her. All the kids are out of school since the school holidays have started - she took her kids, Rosie (6) and George (4) and a friend of Rosie's up to Bluewater, the largest shopping mall in the UK (well, it was - I think it still is - built in an old quarry!) where they were doing all sorts of special kid stuff - they all had their faces painted, except George had a lion face pained on his arm instead - good fun.
Thursday we decide to head out to Chartwell, a relatively local stately home (Churchill lived 30 or 40 years of his life there) and have lunch there, but we run into horrible traffic and eventually give it up, turn around and go the opposite way to Oad Street Craft Centre where we had delicious soup before rushing back home because Colin has to drive up to the outskirts of London and take his aged (nearly 90 years old!) sister in to one of the London hospitals for a regular appointment. The shape of Colin & Marjorie's life is rather challenging right now: they moved from Gravesend to a little community between Meopham and Sevenoaks and they're living out in the country (which they love - they adore driving around the country lanes) in a lovely little farmworker's cottage (a row of 4 or 5 small homes). But Colin is the youngest of 6 children with about a 20 year range in their ages and the eldest (this sister) has no children and therefore looks to Colin to step in with all that care, as does one of his brothers! Eeeep! But it's a real question - who will take care of the elderly without children of their own? So at the time they'd enjoy travel and their four grandkids, they've got lots of demands on specifically Colin's time and energy from elderly siblings.
Marjorie and I spend the afternoon in the garden, drinking tea and eating these lovely little chocolate "bites" from Marks & Sparks (lethal!). Colin wasn't late picking up his sister and it all worked out okay and he made it home so I get ready for dinner with Bec and her friends while Colin & Marjorie have fish and chips (!! - rats! I love fish and chips! almost as much as curry...). Bec picks me up and we drive up to an upscale Italian restaurant and meet up with her friends.
It's a lovely dinner (I started with a carrot and coriander soup - one of my favorites and not something you ever see here in the USA) and a fascinating conversation - these women have all been friends through school, so all of them remember the rock gospel band with which I toured and that became part of the focus of the conversation - remembering what it felt like to be 13 and excited about an American showing up to stay in your home, excited to be at a concert and see your houseguest performing. One of the women, when asked by her son why she was more than usually excited over a Thursday night dinner and she answered, "I'm having dinner with a rock'n'roll star!" You just never know how other people see you, especially from a distance - so while I'm uncomfortable with the description of myself as a "rock'n'roll star" I'm also flattered that I ever appeared to be one, even to that small community - amazing. Fun night, bright clever women sharing their lives with me - it was delightful.
Friday we have a bunch of errands to run - Colin realizes that he has to have the MOT run on his car before the end of the month, so we drive in to Gravesend and leave it with their mechanic, quite near the port (a part of town I never visited before!) and then we drive out to Bec's where all the family is getting together for lunch (except Daniel and Gary, the two son-in-laws; they're both working - poor fellows!) and we are busy eating lasagne and salad and drinking wine; the kids pile into an above-ground swimming pool in the back yard and a grand time is had by all. But *now* it's time to drive in to Rochester to pick up my rental car, drive back to Gravesend and pick up Colin's car from the mechanic. Turns out the computer-directions to the car hire location are *completely wrong* but, thank God (literally) we found the place anyway and I wind up behind the wheel of a Vauxhall Vectra. It's a *very* nice car, but larger than I would like. I follow Marjorie back through Gravesend to drop off Colin, then back through Meopham to their little community. We have a nice quiet supper and then drive back up to Bec and Daniel's so that I can have a little time with him, not having seen him since he rescued me at the airport Tuesday night! Finally we're back at C&M's and I pack up my bags, anticipating my early-morning departure for Gatwick airport.
Saturday morning the sky is clear and blue and then quickly clouds up and we kick ourselves for not loading the car while it was clear, because NOW it's bucketing down (it really is amazing how quickly the weather changes in England - I know everybody jokes about it, but it REALLY is true!). I check the computer for flight arrivals and learn Ellie's flight is about 20 minutes early but Michael's is more than an hour late. We load my bags into the car during a relative lull in the downpour and Colin gives me directions to the motorway; I put my big British road atlas in the front seat along with my bottled water (!! - through the years I have learned that changes in water are the hardest thing for my system to tolerate and I do much better if I just stick to bottled spring water) and then we all hug and kiss goodbye and the first part of my journey ends as I drive away from my friends in Kent.
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