Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy

Author:Michael Murphy [Murphy, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453218815
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

BUT THE STORY DID not quite end there (indeed in many respects it is not over yet). During the following week a remarkable incident occurred in the cathedral of Rheims, one which seemed related to my adventures in Burningbush.

In London I met my companion of the Île de France, who was surrendering herself to the surprises of a European summer. She had rented a Morris Minor and was a jaunty chauffeur for a merry ride to Canterbury. We had not been together for more than fifteen minutes before I began to relate my story of the previous two days. Perhaps it was the shock of those events to my nervous system or the lack of sleep but I told the story in two or three different versions. Her woman’s eye for the absurd and her general good spirits cast a warm spell around me and I began to sort out the deceptive complexity of that brief visit to Scotland.

While she drove, I fell into a reverie. Pleasant and seemingly random thoughts softened by the green English countryside, then vivid scenes from my past forming and reforming, sorting themselves out, leading me back to childhood like hypnotic regression. I was in warm, unaccountable spirits, anticipation spreading in my cells as if I knew this reverie would bring some marvelous secret. Both of us felt that sense of zero gravity that comes when you are traveling without an immediate or particular goal. In Canterbury we got into the old cathedral sometime after midnight because the wizened caretaker liked the gleam emanating from this loosening of my brain.

The next day we drove to Dover and crossed the channel to Calais. I still remember the smell of a store there, a smell that was familiar at once for it was the one I grew up with in my grandparents’ fragrant kitchen—salamis and parsleys and spices and consommés, a combination of ingredients I could never forget. The store in Calais brought memories of vacations in San Francisco when I was a child, with my fun-loving, pleasure-loving Grand’mère and Grand’père and all their children and cousins (many of them gourmet cooks); a peasant world, a breath of air from the Pyrenees, full of the very same smells I found in this store in Calais. These smells from the past gave body to my reverie as we drove toward Rheims, absorbing me all that day until we arrived at the great cathedral and I saw the banner and figure of Saint Jeanne d’Arc.

The memories began in earliest infancy, feelings with no graspable image or event to hold them: feelings of cradling and rocking and my mother’s pleasure, a time of membranes’ sensuous stretching, with textures of reassuring blankets and diapers like warm water-beds, adventures of water and air, a trip well begun; then an image of a kindergarten class, watching all the others on the merry-go-round but too uneasy to get on myself, the shy one standing near the teacher while most of the kids screamed and

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