Across The Smoke

Crossing the street in England is like taking some song and changing it from a major to a minor key.

Wandering around an airport two days ago (all right, three, but sitting back in an airplane with my eyes closed doesn’t feel as though it should count as a night) I amused myself by humming the Star Spangled Banner in a minor key. I wanted to know what it would sound like. All that means is you take the thirds, sixths and sevenths and shift them down by half a tone. It’s a way to turn some happy happy joy joy song into a funeral dirge. Doing this to our national anthem didn’t improve it.

Humming a song you know takes no thought. You just do it. When you change from major to minor (or vice versa) you change the relationships between many of the notes. This does take some thought. But after ten or twenty seconds of concentration, the new relationships were set and I went ahead and hummed this new tune without thought again. I could release myself from thinking about it and just hum the tune as if I’d always known it.

Until another few minutes passed. Then suddenly I realized I wasn’t thinking about it, and had to think again to make sure I had the right note. Wait – where in the tune is the primary? Is this next note a third, does it need shifting downward? Or have I already shifted it downward and am about to suppress it into second-dom? Is this progression up TO the primary, or up FROM the primary – do I minor-ize the notes in between or not? Needless to say all this concentration ruined me and I started getting the wrong notes. I had to relax, release control to the ill-trained but instinctive inner musician, and start over.

Just like crossing the street. When Americans are at the crosswalk they look left because that’s where the cars are coming from. It’s become an instinct – we don’t think about it. Scores of them have been splattered across English roads because of it. So we have to think about it when over here and force ourselves to defy that life-preserving instinct and instead look to the right. After awhile it becomes more natural, and at some point we are looking right without thinking about it.

I did that for a little awhile. Twice, maybe. But my inner desire to live wouldn’t let me be so complacent. This meant always thinking about it and this meant getting confused. I really didn’t want to get hit by a bus. So at every street I looked left – no, right! Which way? Where are they coming from? My inner monkey would not let me cross the street without looking left. But was it the American monkey or the American-in-England monkey, adapting to a new country, looking the correct way as effortlessly as if humming the S.S.B. in minor? I couldn’t be sure, so I’d look left, no right! Left! Right!

I wandered about central London yesterday as well as across Slough to get to and from the train station, and at every street I looked one way, then in a panic the other, then got embarrassed by my obvious Yank-ness and held my head still and crossed with my eyes darting back and forth, looking for danger from all directions. Now my eyes are tired. I guess crossing the street isn't so much like humming a tune after all.

* * *

"Wandered" is correct. I am absolutely not a sophisticate. I didn't come to the world's premier city with a plan to Do this or See that. I know and generally care nothing about what to See or Do. I was here a few years ago with my family and we saw a bunch of the stuff you see, such as the Tower, which was interesting as hell but took all damn day, and rode the Eye and so on. But those are the things you do and when left to my own devices, I don't care about the things you do. I just sort of live from moment to moment.

Which is a terrible plan but there you are. I walked all about, feeling vaguely lonely, taking pictures, and being butt-ass cold. That's because it was butt-ass cold yesterday. The patches of snow in Trafalgar Square were not melting very fast, and there was a breeze up. Still, I couldn't help laughing at the day's big headline:

INCH OF SNOW BRINGS CHAOS

Heh. An inch? Ten inches I could see wreaking some havoc. Four or five. But ... Come on, guys.

All right, big talk from a guy who lives in a place where the first freeze leads to fourteen thousand stupid and totally avoidable accidents. But still. They could have made it read a little less ridiculous: "Two point five four centimeters of snow brings chaos!" You can't have just "one".