Exploring

'I should see the garden far better,' said Alice to herself, 'if I could get to the top of that hill: and here's a path that leads straight to it -- at least, no, it doesn't do that -- ' (after going a few yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), 'but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It's more like a corkscrew than a path! Well, this turn goes to the hill, I suppose -- no, it doesn't! This goes straight back to the house! Well then, I'll try it the other way.'
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

The reports of the Stanford House have not been exaggerated. It's an old brick building--actually, three houses built together with connecting doors--with a red front door facing right on High Street. Inside, it feels coiled around on itself, up and down and around in terrible snarls of stairway. Clearly this place was built from end to end and back again over a couple of centuries without the planning foresight of an earthworm. A room would be finished, and the next tenant would say, "By jove, I've always wanted to have a kitchen in that corner. A pity the bedroom's in the way." And the foreman would reply, "Not to worry, sir, we'll just bung a stairway in around back. "That's jolly, but I'd really like it to be midway between the levels of the two floors." "On the nose, old chap; my thoughts precisely. If we come at it from beneath, I think we can wrap it around the alcove while hardly cutting into the library's ceiling at all." "Right-ho, my good man. Capital, what."

They built rooms around, on top of, and through each other every which way and tied the whole package together with snaky little halls and stairways. If you walk from one end of the so-called "first floor" to the other, you traverse about a dozen undulating staircases. I've been lost twice, the first time when Dan the junior dean was showing me to my room. The clearance is low everywhere; I've knocked my head four times so far, and instated a universal maxim: Never back through a doorway.

Oxford is the same thing on a grander scale. Since my circadian rhythm is still in cut time (more like 11/16, really), I woke up at about half past four this morning. After unsucessfully dozing for a while, I left the house at sunrise to go exploring. The streets are built on the same principle as the Stanford House's corridors, but with a bit more versatility in the width department and not quite so many staircases. You never know whether a road, lined with stone walls, or shopfronts, or gothic (pardon my architectural ignorance) churches, colleges, museums, and libraries, will suddenly twist into a car park or a blind alley, or open into a thoroughfare, or be blocked by an iron gate, or drop off into the Cherwell. I wandered down Merton Street, then cut north through a crack of an alley and crossed High Street into Radcliffe Square. I gawked at the Radcliffe Camera, a great circular domed thing, and rambled northward and eastward through the streets past all sorts of wonderful buildings I don't know the names of, until I found myself smack against the Cherwell. After poking around a bit I found a footbridge, and crossed over into some great meadows that extend I don't know how far. So I walked along overgrown pathways around these meadows, on the banks of the Cherwell where ducks and swans and little black and white ducklike birds that honk to each other like old bicycle brakes [J.R.--the tour guide this afternoon told me they were coots].

The parks and meadows stretch much farther than I guessed when I first saw them. When I started my walk northward I saw a biggish lawn out to my right, and thought it would be nice to walk around it and head back. Some time later after having followed roads that more or less paralleled the edge was when I crossed the Cherwell, only to find the bit of green extending in every direction--I wandered around "that bit of green" for more than an hour, i'd guess, and never spied the east end of it. By this point I had set the Magdalen bridge back to the west side of the Cherwell as my eventual destination, but it turned out to be more difficult to attain than I'd expected, between paths and gates and trees and lots of bits of water with sporadic footbridges twisted up together. At one point I thought for sure I'd reached it, and suddenly found myself with fifteen feet of water separating me from the arch of the bridge as the path bent back like a horseshoe. I followed this new tributary looking for a bridge; at last I found one, only to confront a notice:

Magdalen Fellows' Garden
Visitors are welcome to the Fellows' Garden, but they are advised that there is no way out at the other end. Please do not pick the flowers.

I did eventually find my way out, not by way of the Magdalen bridge, but a footbridge a bit upstream, through the college itself. The journey involved climbing around an excitingly closed gate in the middle of a bridge, and returning to the street sheepishly stepping past a sign reading, "Closed to visitors until 12pm". It seems that somewhere in my ramble I inadvertently got behind the "stay out"s, which added immeasurably to both the beauty and the excitement.

Among the parks I also saw the Magdalen deer park, and met a cheerful man who was picking up conkers from the ground--according to the internet, the american term is "horse chestnuts". "I love conkers," he said, tossing them across the fence to the deer (blithely ignoring the "Do not feed the deer"). "The deer love 'em. Those deer'll eat about anything that doesn't eat them first." It wouldn't have been anything to write home about, except that he was so friendly and his accent so charming (so be sure to read his lines with a charming accent). I'm a sucker for a good accent. Wonderful country, this.

[Note on the parks: evidently their original reason was that the rivers' seasonal flooding made the land not much good for building on. But even with today's tremendous property values, Oxford has kept a high value on preserving these acres of beautiful meadows, lawns, woods, and gardens in the midst of the city. Some of them are still used as pastureland. So I've got loads of trail and green space within a couple minutes' walk to the north, south, and east of here, even being in the heart of urban Oxford.]

Status Report

Alive. At Oxford. Exhausted. More later.

Woohoohoo!

One of my longtime dreams has today been realized: Today I sang in harmony with myself. Four parts. Barbershop. My brother downloaded a trial version of Adobe Audition (a pretty neat piece of software), and he's got all sorts of random sound equipment he's collected over the years, so I decided that The Time Had Come.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Jeff Russell, Jeff Russell, Jeff Russell, and Jeff Russell, singing an arrangement by Jeff Russell. Jeff Russell directed, and the recording engineer is Jeff Russell. Special thanks to Brian Russell.

Kinda spooky, no?

For those interested, this eight track (the four parts are all doubled), one minute song took something like forty minutes of recording time, and with a total novice in the driver's seat, around two and a half hours of mixing. Besides some basic balancing, I filtered noise, added reverb, and did some pitch correction (pitch correction is fun!). The quality's not exactly professional (and it's in mono), but speaking as a wet-nosed newbie with no equipment outside of a PC, one mic, one amp, and some free software, this really ain't so hard as I thought--Testimony, consider the Knoll again.

At Home

i think the accomplishment of the summer that i'm most proud of is all the reading i've done. at school i read christ and culture and the scandal of the evangelical mind and the first half of warranted christian belief (with david jones) and prince caspian and winnie-the-pooh, not to mention essays and occasional blogs and emails, as well as papers for my research. since i've been home i've read the wonderful wizard of oz and cheaper by the dozen, both for the first time, and the phantom tollbooth, not at all for the first time, which are all three delightful books. also, i watched nicholas nickleby with the gang (rob picked it), and pirates of the caribbean for the fourth or fifth time--a wonderful, well-executed, and inspiring movie, even speaking as a boy with no great love for disneyland. and there were quite a few movies at school, too, several of them quite worth seeing (i still really want to see the second half of spirited away). all in all, i'd have to say that's a pretty good haul for one summer, and better than i had any right to expect.

i've also started sight-reading whatever music we have around the piano, as i usually do after i've been home for a little while. hymns, showtunes and etudes, and when i get bored i start adding sevenths and dotted rhythms or switch it into minor. it helps that my family has the best electric piano i have ever played anywhere, with the exception of my grandparents' house, and that's only because theirs is almost identical. the piano was a christmas gift from grandpa years ago, and its bench is my favorite place in the house, the place that feels most like home, most spontaneous and relaxing and secure. in that seat i have violins and vibraphones and voices under my direction, and i have endless jokes with myself and with my family (this afternoon i played "do re mi" on a jazz scale and "we shall overcome" as a dirge), and operettas to invent with rob, and the endless quiet discipline (which i've never mastered) of scales and study. sightreading from the orange classics book, especially when it gets dark and the lamps come on, reminds me powerfully of high school--the winter nights (in bellingham, winter starts in october and winter nights start at about four in the afternoon, so about half the year seems to consist in winter nights) when i would play from the same book, and with it the feeling of structured time, order, direction, certainties, leading youth group and working at the library and waiting for buses in the rain.

which of course makes me think about Home and Place--the constant themes in the past three years since stanford and the past eight since morelos. when i flew out of san jose, i recognized all the surrounding geography--the suburbs (though they all look alike) and the bridges and the bay and the soft wrinkled tan ridges, and point reyes and tomales bay sort of in the distance--i knew their names, but also they were places that meant something to me, that conjured images and smells and feelings. and it struck me as i descended a couple hours later into sea-tac that i didn't know puget sound geography nearly so well as i know san francisco bay, despite having lived two summers in seattle and seventeen years in bellingham. as we banked into the descent i completely lost my bearings--i didn't even know what direction i was facing (except that it couldn't be east since i didn't see mount rainier).

and while i left the santa cruz mountains, a snatch of a song i once heard had come unbidden to mind: "these are my mountains; this is my home".

this is very strange to me.

being home (by which at the moment i mean being in bellingham) is wonderful--lots of reunions and sleeping in and being with my family and of course the piano, but i also feel a little out of place. i'm in a place i haven't been since christmas, and not for longer than a couple weeks at a time for about two years. my room has been home to two (three?) boarders in that time. the two pets we had are both gone, and a new dog is in their place. many of my friends are already back at school. brian is in mexico (though he'll be back in a week), and elizabeth went and became a sophomore in high school some time when i wasn't looking, cut her hair short, and started going by "liz". my church is in a new building (i got lost when i tried to drive to it last week), and my little town is growing up with new housing complexes and parking lots and thirty-five zones. i don't think me and toto are in kansas anymore.

and i'm the worst of it. i'm allergic to the closed up dusty houses, and can hardly remember to bring kleenex with me when i go out. i've been cold all the time, and when it rains (every other day or so, though everyone tries hard to convince me that the summer was beautiful until i arrived) i feel like going out would shrivel me up, and i wouldn't even consider biking through that sprinkling deluge. the brave and hardy pioneer of old is gone--

Where now the bike and rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helmet and raincoat, and the tail light glowing?

--to paraphrase Tolkien.

you'd think a person would get used to changing, or at least get resigned to it. but i've been changing for twenty-one years, and other people for a lot longer than that, and neither phenomenon seems remotely natural to me. and the prospect that the next year, the next two years, the next three years at the very least, will be chock-full with the worst kinds of changes--homes and vocations and relationships--well, i can't say i like it. not one bit.

i think i'd give up and just move back to ... to somewhere, and work in the children's library forever and live in my basement and fend off would-be boarders with a lego arsenal, except

except for the thing that i can't express without falling back on quotations, but fortunately i have many to turn to--these thoughts are nothing beyond what is common to my age and station. like natalie recently spake, "uncertainties behind, uncertainties before...and what does it all come down to? holy." or tina: "i know i'm confused...but at the end of the day i can rest assured..." or the writer of hebrews: "by faith ... abraham obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going." a friend asked me yesterday if i was worried about the future. she called my answer a cop-out, but it's the only answer i've got. yes i'm scared, but i know him who holds the stars. in the words of the old hymn:

"Let not your heart be troubled,"
His tender word I hear,
And resting on His goodness
I lose my doubts and fears.
Though by the path He leadeth
But one step I may see,
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me.

this seems like a fitting inauguration to the upcoming year.

so much for brief.