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Josh and I went to see Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody interviewed by their son Gideon on Valentine’s Day. My favourite moment came in the middle of the show when their son talked about his father’s love of quiet and asked us to give him 45 seconds of silence. He pointed out that it’s rare to get 45 seconds of silence while surrounded by 2000 people.

People did it, and it was beautiful. Just 2000 people, not moving, not speaking, not coughing or shifting or trying to have their voice heard. It reminded me of what I love about silent book club vs. reading alone. Quiet is heavier when you get it around people.

I always have profound moments at Strathmore. The last time we were there, Alan Cumming got the whole audience (2000 people!) to sing “Tomorrow” from Annie with him. Which started out silly and ended up being oddly moving and hopeful.

I bookmarked my friend Neil’s post on Facebook because it made me think deeply. (And it’s public, so now you get to think deeply, too.)

He wrote about deciding to skip a museum in favour of seeing a train station, kicking off a list of what he did and didn’t do. These tiny decisions change his experience with the place. He writes:

Travel is interesting because of all the choices you need to make as a tourist. That’s why I never know what to answer when you ask me what to do in New York. What’s more important to you, a big museum or pizza in Queens? It’s hard to do both in one trip.

It’s one of those things that I clearly knew — travel, like all of life, is just a series of decisions — but it’s also mind-bending to think about how you could have an entirely different experience due to those choices. You could walk away from a place thinking you know it, and another person could walk away thinking they know it, and both of you have gone to entirely different spaces and seen, eaten, and heard completely different things.

ChickieNob’s college gifted her with a plant at move-in, and she brought it down in a bag over winter break. My grandplant looked a little scraggly, but we nursed it back to health while she was home.

I am currently watching my grandplant so she does not have to schlep it back and forth during breaks. It’s like having a little bit of the ChickieNob here. I sit and talk to it as if the plant is a direct line to my daughter’s brain.

I have big plans to re-pot my grandplant soon, along with one of the clippings I took from her back in October. It’s just nice to see her reaching out toward the sun.

Five minutes before a small gathering of Egyptian geese in St James’s Park attacked us (It turns out that when you bend over and coo at one, every Egyptian goose in the area believes you’re on the verge of feeding them), I declared to Josh and the twins that I’m most myself in London.

This is probably an odd thing to say because I’m usually not in London.

But it’s true – I feel most myself when I’m in London, especially when we’re at the Tower of London. If we lived in the city, I would spend a portion of every day at the Tower of London.

But why do I feel at home in a place where I do not belong? Where I’ve never lived? Where I’ve only visited?

The only thing I’ve come up with is that the people around me sound like characters in a C.S. Lewis book, which reminds me of books from childhood that make me feel comfortable and safe.

Though I suspect my feelings may change if I had to live there. It’s always fun to be a visitor and have time for museums, book shopping, and hot chocolate alongside the Thames vs. going to work or dragging home grocery bags on the Underground. Just as any hobby can stop feeling good if it becomes your job, I assume a favourite setting could become a drag if you had to live there indefinitely.

So visiting it is!

It’s good to know what you like. To know a real place you can access and feel like you’re getting back to who you were when you were curled up reading a book.

I tried to get the Wolvog and Josh to guess my favourite Pete Seeger song, but they couldn’t get it after three guesses.

“It’s his cover of Garden Song,” I told them. “But my friend banned us from singing this at camp because I would always burst into tears at the same line.” I hit play on my phone, and the song filled the kitchen.

Sure enough, even though I didn’t feel sad, when I heard the line, “We are made of dreams and bone,” I burst into tears, and we turned off the song.

I don’t know why that line still gets to me almost thirty years later. That idea that everything feels so precarious; we’re so small and insubstantial: dreams and bones, soul and body.

The friend who banned the song died a little over ten years ago. I knew he died at that time, but I didn’t Google him until after I cried listening to the Garden Song, even though I’ve thought about him a lot over the last few years because we keep returning to the camp area.

I found a Twitter account he set up a few days before he died, with about ten tweets in quick succession, most of them links. Five people followed it: The man’s other Twitter account (a replica of the one I was on but under a non-English version of his name), three other people, and Yoko Ono.

My first thought was, “What is the story there? How did Yoko Ono find your account?” And I wanted to write to him and ask, but I couldn’t because we’re just dreams and bones, and he’s gone. There was this great story in the universe, and I would never know it because he was not here to ask him about it.