"An English Wedding" (July 2008)

I am keenly aware of how fortunate I am to make a life in music. It is full of surprises - between the concerts, and the teaching and the recording, and the endless business work come many unique and surprising moments, great and small. They are all worth remembering, but the big moments especially do linger fondly in the heart and memory hopefully for the rest of my sentient days.

So it is this month, for my family and I have just returned from a magical week in England, thanks to two fans from the UK. The groom, wanting to give his fiancee a life-lasting gift, arranged to surprise her with a live performance at their nuptials. So with stealth and secrecy worthy of Scotland Yard (or at least James Bond!), for a year we planned and made arrangements across the pond, surmounting logistical hurdles and at times maintaining the surprise by the thinnest of threads. It has now past, and now I am free to share with you a few highlights from my first adventures overseas.

I quickly surmised a key difference between our two lands, bound though we are by history, language and culture. We Americans know little of what constitutes "old". The wedding was held in a 500-year old church, near the village of Amersham in the country west of London; a place continuously occupied for over a thousand years and likely far longer. It was a typical gloomy wet English spring day - the solstice, to boot - and the gray sky and greenery were magnificent contrast to all the classic colorfully flamboyant English gardens at the church and manor house. My presence was finally revealed to the bride when her new groom called up to the balcony from the receiving line and asked, "So Andrew, would you play us a tune?". Brilliant.

Meanwhile, I also came to the conclusion after the taxi ride, the hotel room and a few other introductory experiences that our British brethren, perhaps through many centuries of the realities of living on an island, don't know much about "big". While I didn't have any sudden out-of-body SUV cravings, I was longing for the size and space of your average American motel room! The surplus of cases and bags brought from the states for a traveling musician and family including a year-old baby easily swamped our rooms wherever we went, and made our plan of traveling on trains and the Tube (London's underground rail) fairly impossible.

Somehow between the kindness of our new English friends and their families, and friends American and Irish living in and around London, we managed to have a splendid adventure. We spent one gorgeous sunny afternoon in London seeing the sights from the Eye (the giant ferris wheel on the banks of the Thames near Big Ben), the river boat, and the double-decker tourist bus. Freed from the prison of our luggage at long last, we Tubed in the next afternoon for a long walk through Soho, Trafalgar Square, and a series of parks leading to Hyde Park and a late afternoon high tea before heading back to our friends' flat. The walks in Woodford to a different pub each night, the internet cafe, and to feed the ducks and geese with baby Madeleine, were also marvelous highlights.

We took a cab ride from London to Woodford with a young father from Zimbabwe. He had planned to go home this summer to visit his family, but like most Zimbabweans, they are terrified of what is to come, as their dictator tightened his grip on his country's throat. What had seemed like a real possibility of democratic transition but a few weeks ago was crushed by gangs of thugs, intimidating and coercing the people into a sham validation of the rule of terror.

We read about these things in our news, and see the videos and images on TV. But to hear from a young man far from home and worried sick about his family, gave us new meaning to take home with us from the island empire where the ideas of freedom took hold, the motherland Americans had to reject to assert our own, and where we gave together of our national selves in two World Wars.

We got to spend some time with bride and groom's parents during the wedding weekend, and knowing that her parents lived in nearby Reston VA, and that his parents were coming stateside soon after to visit them, we invited all out to the country for an afternoon and return some of their hospitality. We spent part of our Independence Day weekend with our new English friends enjoying the dirt roads and rolling hills of home, a little too much ice cream, and a good ale to cap it off. We found that 230 odd years is more than enough time for any animosity between our two countries to have faded, but it also seemed particularly poignant to welcome them here on the weekend that we celebrate the improbable beginnings of the American story.

It strikes me in looking at our pictures and reminiscing about our time in England, that despite the hard times and the high cost of everything that we are enduring, there is much to be treasured on daily basis right here at home. Our garden will soon be brimming with enough food to keep us deep into the winter. We are safe and secure and hard at work to bring the music to you in new ways as well as the conventional means of coming to your area and doing concerts.

And the freedom to travel as we wish, to be present in a old country churchyard where two people choose to wed. From our homeland far away to yours, Anna and James, congratulations, and all our best.

And Happy Birthday to you America!