Zebra Stripes

We were supposed to sleep on the flight from Newark to Heathrow. But it mostly didn’t happen. Also, we didn’t really eat. So there was some hunger and some groggy. And some agitation and some loopy. There was some dazed and some thoroughly, ridiculously confused.

Then…

There was some traditional English food for lunch, and some Bombay-style Indian food for dinner. There was wine. A scotch. A Guinness. On top of sleeplessness.

We visited a high school C attended for a year in St. John’s Wood, a school that was only blocks from Abbey Road Studios, and we wondered at the fact that she spent that year so close to this place and never even realized it.

We walked to that holy spot at 3 Abbey Road and we crossed the busy street with the famous zebra stripes painted on it. And when the goofy tourists (including us) would run out in the road to get their shot crossing the street, the motorists would pause and let it happen because …how could they not. And we looked at the studio from the wall that surrounded it, a wall that was painted with graffiti…lyrics, drawings…offerings to Paul and John and Ringo and George and it was kind of a beautiful thing.

Then we visited C’s college campus and the bar where she used to hang-out and I wondered in which of those places she had learned the most stuff.

Our eyes burned on the Tube back to the hotel. But I got my third wind at dinner. And now I’m listening to crowds of tourists (mostly French, it seems) in Piccadilly and Leicester Square from our fourth-floor room and wondering when the tired will return.

And I’m pretty sure it won’t…