Today made it official. Today, we booked our trip to England.
My mother is the biggest anglophile I know. She quotes Byron, Shakespeare, and Conan Doyle. She wishes me a Happy Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth of November (”Please to remember the fifth of November”) and English breakfast tea is the only tea worth drinking. And drinking all day long. Her major in college? English.
In sixth grade social studies, everyone chose a country to do a report on and I chose England. The English teacher, in her cleverness, had us write travel brochures for the country we had picked in social studies.
It seemed that everyone else’s parents were good at helping their children with science projects. Not mine. I don’t think I ever entered a science fair, but I sure did reap the benefits of having mom as my editor.
I remember writing that brochure. Mom sat with me and had me write down the things I thought of when I thought of England: castles, Shakespeare, the Queen. She got a hold of some travel brochures for me to look at so I could get a feel for the language and format used in a brochure. I learned new things about England, such as what the heck a moor looked like.
We fleshed it out over the afternoon, an exercise in the writing process. Writing and re-writing. New paragraph, comma, semicolon. “Come to England,” it invited, “the land of moors, Shakespeare, and Stonehenge.” I drew a recognizable enough picture of Big Ben on the cover and was proud to turn it in.
When our assignments were finally handed back, I wasn’t nervous. I was sure we had done well. I got my brochure and turned it over to look at the grade. I was crushed. D-. I scanned the list of comments with their corresponding deductions. Small stuff, “sloppiness, -10″ (my hand got tired from all the writing, this was true), “spelling, -10″ (Only one or two mistakes, but my hand was already tired, no way I was going to re-do it). Down at the bottom, “plagiarism, -20″. Along with a note that told me to “bring in my sources” and she would work with me to re-write. Re-write! No way lady, I went through that process already. With someone who would teach me more about writing in that little session than you would all year.
Really, it turned out to not be a big deal. I went up to her and told her I hadn’t plagiarized and that my mom had helped me. I had to bring in a note from my mother explaining the situation and her role in helping me, and I got my 20 points back. It was still only a B-, but that was the fault of small spelling mistakes and sloppy handwriting.
But, the point isn’t that we were so awesome we tricked my English teacher. The real point is that working on that brochure, sitting in our dilapidated little house, surrounded by various types of shamble-ness, but also surrounded by books, books, books, my mother painted a picture of England so vivid, you’d think she had lived there. Of course, she had never stepped foot on European soil, or any soil outside of the States, save for a childhood trip or two to Tijuana while growing up in California. Mom try to get to England? She may as well have tried to get to the moon.
For all my wanderlust through high school and college, dreaming of the day that I would finally have the means to travel, I always knew where my first trip would be and who it would be with. This year, for Christmas, my brother Todd and I were able to send my parents to England. And I’m going with them.
