Homecoming
I
Today I return to St Andrews for the first time since I was there last. I’m in Paris (a fun time was had by all — I looked up and met up with an art gallery intern I met in Rome and we went to a street party for fête de la musique) and my flight to Edinburgh is about to board (grr — Eurail got me again). I’m nervous.
When I was in high school, I boarded at the school. When we came back from breaks, the school would send a van to pick students up at the nearby airports and bring us back. My excitement would mount as we approached the campus: this familiar road, that familiar gas station, these familiar fields. The feeling is in my chest. My heart feels warm, and the base of my throat tingles. It’s like the feeling of needing a cigarette and nothing like being in love. It mounts as we approach: my heart beats faster. My solar plexus inflates and glows. The balloon lungs grip the not-quite unhome air. The van bumps and rattles down the road and I see the street names I know (funny how the arbitray names of places become metonyms for the places themselves) and I count down the distance. The other people in the van fall silent as we approach. Arrival. The smell of home. I can still smell the sticky sweet smell of earliest fall: the building, the grass, the pond, the people.
I’m nervous about going back to St Andrews: how have I changed since I left? How much am I still the same? I imagine that the town will be the same as always — I believe it’s been the same for centuries. How will the people be? I don’t want to be the same person I was when I left, but that person wasn’t so unlikeable. But I don’t want, being in the old haunts, to fall back into old patterns. I want to have learned something, to have grown.
I don’t want to be like everybody else — this was the latent content of a dream I had the other night (the manifest content was that I miss my cat and had a room on the top floor of the hostel that I had to climb the stairs to get to). But who is “everybody else”? There were some pretty cool people in St Andrews — I’d like to be like them. But there’s bad, too: one of my theology professors (was it church history? christian ethics? patristics?) was recently accused before a court of law of abusing his wife; the court cleared him. After a ticketed party last fall, several police reports were filed by people who alleged that they had been drugged by the party’s hosts. These are extreme instances, but not outliers.
It’s odd to be back in Scotland again — it feels like a foreign country. I never was from here, even though I lived here a while. The airport hasn’t changed, nor have the trains. The countryside still looks the same, as do the people. But it feels less like home than it used to. As I write this very paragraph I am on the train crossing the Firth of Forth, heading north from Edinburgh to St Andrews. The Scots are a funny people, with terrible haircuts. It feels much less like a “real country” than France does.
I don’t feel any nervousness, but that may change: the familiar place names have a powerful effect on the psyche. And I’m still relatively far off — it’s another hour or so by train, then a bus into town. It isn’t until the last minute that the anticipation becomes unbearable.
Time passes, and the names become more familiar: Queensferry, Kirkaldy, Markinch. Someone next to me on the train is wearing a University of St Andrews sweater. The tension mounts.
II
I graduated from university today. Technically, my degree was “confirmed.” They were very clear about that. But beside the changed word (latin: confirmo and … ?) the ceremony was the same. The chaplin, when I spoke to him, refered to the ceremony as a “ritual.” Last year’s “paucity of quintessential festivities” — the in-person ceremonies were cancelled — only sweetened the eventual celebration.
Last night I went to a party with Ben, who wrote a recommendation for my application to the University of Illinois. I met him for a trivia quiz at the student union’s bar; we didn’t do so well. We went back to his flat, since he was leaving the next day, and I provided moral support for his packing.
The party was at the rugby club house; student DJs played; the sound system was good, as was the music. It ended quickly, but we found out where the party continued: a place called “the rat’s nest.” Some of Ben’s friends were out and we went to meet them at a student pub I used to haunt.
My first year, most of my friends had wednesday off, so we’d get a drink on Tuesdays. Nothing wild, but it was nice to socialize. We’d go to Aikman’s, in St Andrews (I’m not bothering to hide the name).
Aikman’s is on a side street in St Andrews, cutting between South and Market St, the town’s two main active streets; North St is more residential and has more traffic than South and Market Streets. There’s a taxi queue, a kebab takeaway, a neapolitan-style pizza place, and a couple charity shops on the street. The door is narrow, and you have to step up a bit to get in. The tiny six-stair staircase, hardly wider than the ordinary-sized door and carved into the stone building, is the smoking terrace. Posters for local (non-university) events line the walls as you step between the people who are spilling onto the sidewalk.
A narrow junction (the Aikman’s neighbor was originally a greengrocer, and what is now the pub was then the stock rooms) goes left to the groundfloor room or right, down the stairs to the basement bar. The downstairs is cooler and more crowded, the upstairs more conventional and calm. They serve edible but not excellent food; we loved their curly fries. They specialize in European beer.
Ben and I went down to the Aikman’s cellar last night to meet his friends, five in total. They were wrapping up in the pub but were interested in checking out the continued party, especially since it was close by. We went over to the basement apartment, set down and back from the street in a small townhouse towards the golf end of north street. A couple dozen people were there. There was no cover, so we walked right in, though Ben and I had wrist bands from the earlier part of the evening. The music was excellent. I had my earplugs so I was comfortable. We danced another hour.
III
little man
(in a hurry
full of an
important worry)
halt stop forget relax
wait
(little child
who have tried
who have failed
who have cried)
lie bravely down
sleep
big rain
big snow
big sun
big moon
(enter
us)
— e.e. cummings
I came back to St Andrews as a traveller this week. I haven’t been here since I left last October. What was it about “seeing new sights” and “seeing the same sights with new eyes”? Is that Balzac or Voltaire? St Andrews is the same as it was when I left, though there hasn’t been no change: shops have closed or opened, restaurants have burned up, and construction projects continue. But the pace of change is very slow, and a year isn’t long at all on the scale of centuries.
I came back to St Andrews as a tourist. It’s a place that I know well, but it’s not where I live anymore. It will always be my former home. There’s a certain permanence: I will always have gone here — and a certain transience: I no longer go here. The history of the town recedes from view and I go with it.
The eastern coastline of Fife is beautiful. Little towns perched on the sea. Hills rolling under green. Big blue sky. I saw the sea again and it felt as though I had never left. I walked down to the beach in the evening and it was exactly as it was last summer; I felt like the same person, but more: I (and I don’t know yet in what ways or how) have grown. I see the same things as though for the first time. And I am a guest here.
