Decades ago, before my first trip to London, I was at a dinner in Boston to plan for Suzie’s return. We would pick her up in Finland, joining a family group for a wedding. Suzie had been in Denmark for our junior year of high school – one of the more trying years in our lives for many reasons – and my Mom and I were joining Suzie’s Mom on the trip.
At that planning dinner in Boston the adults went over their plans, and though I didn’t quite feel like an adult yet, I was at the table, listening and watching and learning how to pass as one. It was there where I heard the Cowboy Junkies for the first time, and their album ‘Black-Eyed Man’, which quickly became a pivotal collection of songs in my life. This song spoke to me from the near future, when romantic entanglements would, if all went according to plan, cloud my trajectory.
If you were the woman and I was the man
would I send you yellow roses
would I dare to kiss your hand?
In the morning would I caress you
as the wind caresses the sand,
if you were the woman and I was the man?
Lately I’ve been thinking of London, perhaps some wanderlust before the weather warms enough to get me outside more. Spring and summer usually calm the itch to travel, especially when the flowers start blooming and the pool looks like the only relief when the temperature inches into the 90’s. But London has been calling for years, and in my mind I went back to my first trip there, when I was just 21, on a group trip with all the tourist trappings, uncovering these photos, actually taken in Wales on our way from London to Dublin.
If I was the heart and you were the head
would you think me very foolish
if one day I decided to shed
these walls that surround me
just to see where these feelings led,
if I was the heart and you were the head?
Whenever I could get away from the group, I ventured around on my own – sipping cups of tea, browsing bookstores, walking around Covent Garden and stumbling into magical puppet shops that may or may not have been real. London cast a spell over me then, and all I wanted was to share it with someone. The stupidity and futility of finding a boy halfway around the world impressed itself upon my mind; that didn’t stop me from hoping and wishing and wandering the gay bars to no avail.
Something made me certain I was destined to meet someone there, or find something, or discover some secret that would unlock my future. By the time we left London for Wales, I was almost panicked that it hadn’t happened, as if I’d missed something when maybe the thing I needed to learn was how to be on my own. In a way I had done that.
On my next solo trip to London several years later I was ok doing it alone, but this song still reminds me of that first trip, of London in the spring…
If I was the woman and you were the man
would I laugh if you came to me
with your heart in your hand
and said, ‘I offer you this freely
and will give you all that I can
because you are the woman
and I am the man?’
