Wednesday night, November 5^th: we are riding the London Eye with dear friends of our youth. The night is dark and calm, there’s a full moon shining over the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The River Thames is below, reflecting the blue of the Eye and the sparkling golds and pinks of the buildings on the banks—the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey. It is Guy Fawkes Night, so every few minutes, away off on the horizon, there is the instant flare of fireworks. The wheel turns slowly, slowly and the view is breathtaking.

Thursday night, November 6^th: we are browsing the offerings of a few dozen food trucks and beer trucks parked in the Streatfood Park of San Francisco. The night is shirtsleeve warm and the moon is still full. Streatfood Park is a big asphalt pad, fenced by chain link, located under the overpass of the highway. Thai food, burgers, Chinese, handmade tortillas, chilis, all kinds of brews. We are meeting up with our son Rhys and his pals, all of whom are in the Saturday wedding of another of this lifelong pack of friends. This is the post-rehearsal meet-up and we have flown halfway around the globe to be here.

To step back: our friendship with Maureen and Martin dates back to our earliest days in graduate school at Penn. When, believe me, we were kids. Roger and Martin had both received Thouron Fellowships to leave the UK after their bachelor degrees and spend a year studying at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. They were cabin mates crossing the Atlantic on the USS United States. Meanwhile, Maureen and I were part of a small contingent of women who were the first women accepted for PhD study in the Graduate English Department at Penn. There was ONE female assistant professor and few of the old boys of that then-chauvinistic department knew how to deal with these women students! Maureen recalls that they must have expected a humble, deferent group. Oh, so wrong! We were bumptious, opinionated, ambitious, and very loyal to each other. We were also hot little fashion plates, very different from the plain girls in ripped jeans you see in graduate departments today. This was, after all, 1969 when hair was long, skirts were extremely short, and we were accessorizing with colors, paisleys, and oriental jewelry for the first time. Maureen (as she does to this day) set the trends with us, teaching us how to shop discount, tie scarves, and color match.

We settled in and realized that we were just as able, just as smart, as our male counterparts. That settled, Maureen announced that it was time “to meet some dishy men.” One of the girls from our department was one of those Thouron Fellows. They threw a party six weeks into the fall semester. Neither Roger nor Martin had much of a chance. We have been married 44 years, they 43. Rog, of course, never went home, except to visit. Martin and Maureen wound up in Hong Kong where he is a banker and she has just retired as full Professor at the University of Hong Kong. We have five kids between us—all boys.

We’ve stayed in touch, but seeing one another is rare. We always seem to be just out of synch for British family visits. This time, however, we are here on Roger’s sabbatical while Maureen and Martin’s youngest son was to be married in London on November 1^st. An overlap! We’ve met all three of their sons, their new daughter-in-law, and some family members we haven’t seen since their wedding four decades plus ago.

On the 5^th, their son Tony snagged matinee tickets to the play King Charles III, by Mike Bartlett. It was tremendously good! The play explores, in elevated blank verse no less, the accession and reign of Charles, Prince of Wales, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. It speculates, basically, on what will happen when Elizabeth’s reign is over after, say, 70 years—when most Britons have never known another monarch. What would happen when Charles, after waiting his entire adult life, becomes king.? It featured the entire Royal Family in devastatingly good interpretations. Such excellent direction! It cleverly referenced the Shakespearean histories without becoming a pastiche. It was both comic and tender and tragic. The new King Charles almost immediately clashes with his Liberal Prime Minister over the issue of signing an act of Parliament that he disagrees with. Things escalate into a real constitutional crisis that affects the very identity of England post-Elizabeth II. Of course, political manipulators emerge (some quite surprising!) and there’s the examination of the Royal Family as real people in real relationships while they are also the figures of state that tie everything together. It’s really an extraordinary play—but I can’t figure out whether it can or will successfully cross the Atlantic to New York. Anyway, a fabulous afternoon for us!

Then, over to the London Eye, where Martin had had the foresight to buy tickets in advance, allowing us to waltz to the head of the queue and ride just as darkness came on. Afterwards, drinks in a noisy pub followed by a great Turkish restaurant, where we each ordered something different so that we could pass dishes around the table.

We were out of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 the next morning and off to San Francisco for a long weekend of wedding events and mooching around doing touristy things like riding the cable cars and exploring Fisherman’s Wharf. It was so nice to be a part of the Newport contingent, remembering Pat as a boy and backing up Donna and Terry, his parents. All those groomsmen, our Rhys included, have been friends of Pat since they were all very little boys and today they are a band of brothers. The wedding itself was in beautiful St. Patrick’s Church right off Union Square. Marjorie and Pat had labeled themselves with the hashtag “JustMurphied” and this was the banner on the cable car they used for the getaway vehicle to the reception. Roger and I linked up with Barbara O’Neill, the other mom of a Newport groomsman, and—to our delight—found that we were the first to arrive at the Lookout Post (the officers’ club) at the Presidio. We had arrived when there was still sunset light and there was the Golden Gate Bridge waiting for us as we opened the bar! What a view. The entire evening was a lovely send-off for the newly-weds, a perfect couple in a perfect city.

Our lunatic trip to San Francisco right in the middle of the English sabbatical was topped off when we arrived at San Francisco Oakland International Airport for Monday’s return flight. Rhys accompanied us on the BART and we met up—for an hour!—with Nye and Lisa! They had flown up from LA because Nye had a talk to give at the Academy of Art University (his alma mater for his master’s degree). It was AAU’s Alumni celebration and Nye was featured, since it’s been 10 years since his student animation (Magnetism) won all those awards and landed him his first big job with Sony. The five of us sat around one of those plastic airport tables for an hour, drinking soda and catching up. Then we hugged and kissed as Rog and I headed off to security for the flight back to England.

In Rhys’ words: “Well, this is a very Warburton thing, isn’t it?”