Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do

Up from Boston

Up from Boston I flew from Boston to London on Virgin Atlantic. The flight was a children’s excursion. Classrooms raced around the terminal as if they were at recess, all the students enrolled in foreign study programs in Britain. Clots of students were so thick I felt like a hall monitor. No aisle seats were available when I checked my bags. “Ask again before you board,” the woman at the counter said, seating me in row 48. I followed the woman’s instructions. “Yes,” the clerk at the gate said, “there is one aisle seat free, 62F. If you don’t mind seating near the rear of the plane, you can have it.” I took the seat. Alas, the clerk was mistaken. 62F was the middle seat in a center row of three seats, located at the back of the plane at the point where the aircraft narrowed to a caret. I was the lone adult in a toddler’s pool of splashing babies, all sinking under backpacks, camping gear, and computer bags. On my left sat a girl from Boston College; on my right a boy from Wheaton. Traffic jams of wires wrapped their heads, heavy metal and hip-hop throbbing and honking. To get into my seat I climbed over roundabouts of carry-on luggage. Once the flight took off the student in front of me slammed her seat back, locking me in place. Not once during the flight did I leave my seat. I was stiff as a corpse when the plane landed in Britain. My feet cramped; the veins behind my knees pumped themselves into fists, and disks along my back clattered. Virgin Atlantic left Boston late. When the plane’s wheels lifted off the ground, the flight was forty-four minutes and eleven seconds behind 2 Edinburgh Days schedule. Consequently, after the flight reached London, I ignored the pain racketing along my back and through my knees and scampered through Heathrow to British Midland. I need not have hurried, as my flight on British Midland departed eighty-four minutes and thirty-nine seconds behind schedule. At Heathrow I pushed into lines, my hearing not sharp enough to distinguish mutterings from the general airport hubbub . In fact I let other harried travelers nip ahead of me. “God bless you,” a woman said, racing to catch a flight to Cyprus. Flying Virgin Atlantic was not a serene experience. The airline neglected to book me on British Midland. Because I had a valid ticket, however, a clerk found a place for me on the plane, an aisle seat on the last row, 34D. While waiting for the flight to be called, I went to the lavatory and brushed my teeth. While I stood in front of the sink, a toilet behind me overflowed, a wave of water gushing frothy from beneath the door and sweeping over my shoes, soaking my socks. The flight to Edinburgh was bumpy. The plane sloshed about so much that the girl next to me wept. In verse, poets are often compared to harps. As the winds of life blow through the poet’s mind, he transforms them into stanzas, ordered and usually zephyrous in tone. The winds of Scotland are not poetic. They carom around stone buildings, breaking quatrains, and pushing people about, turning walks into free verse and broken lines. I have now spent three days in Edinburgh. The first night I slept fitfully . I went to bed at 6:00, then woke up at 8:00, 10:12, 12:00, 1:26, 3:14, and 4:40. Finally I got up at 7:22, ate breakfast, then walked to the Institute for Advanced Studies, counting my steps on the way, 1,629 from the door of my flat to the entrance of the institute. Yesterday in Armchair Books, a border collie mounted me. “A traditional Gaelic greeting, I presume,” I said to the man running the store. When he did not respond, I forged ahead, saying, “This is unexpected but extremely pleasant, a treat that makes me eager to make the acquaintance of the two-legged and kilted.” When the man remained silent, I started laughing , thrusting the dog aside and sliding onto the floor into a fit of giggling . At Armchair I bought a secondhand copy of Duty, a book written at the end of the nineteenth century by Samuel Smiles, a British moralist and social critic, best known today as the author of Self-Help. Almost...