In that long ago year of 2001, I made my first trip overseas. I was in high school and was to stay for a semester and attend a school near Canterbury, England, for the first few months of that cold, dreary, Foot-and-Mouth diseased year.

During that time the family I was staying with took me to Paris for a long weekend. They also expected that I would be gallivanting off across Europe for most of the time; because, I suppose, who cares about England? I don’t know. Being from Colorado, though, and not having traveled much ever before and never on my own, and being quite quiet and shy, I was certainly not planning on losing myself in Europe. There were murmurings that the class would take a trip to Switzerland, as had been the custom at that school, but of course that was the year that particular custom was broken. No visit to Switzerland.

As some minor consolation, and/or as some way of getting me out of the house, it was decided that I should take a few days and go up to Oxford University, stay in a hostel, wander a bit. I don’t honestly remember how much of this was my idea and how much was at the kindly-meant insistence of the family I was staying with.

Their son had taken me around London on the Tube, the infamous London Underground, and challenged me to find our way to where we were going and he would mutely follow. I did ok then and nobody got lost. The same general tactic was used for this Oxford trip but alone. I already knew how to get to London via the bus into Maidstone proper from Barming (where I was living), and the train from there to London. Once in London…

But why Oxford? Because I had a growing fascination with Oscar Wilde, who came into his own in many ways while studying at Oxford. Magdalene College, specifically. He had died 101 years prior, in 1900. In 2000 the British Museum had, apparently, had a stupendous Wilde exhibit that I would’ve given my left foot to experience.

I remember this trip not for these reasons at all. In fact, I often forget that my end-goal was to spend some time in the same air as Wilde did, back in Victorian times. I forget, I think, because I have always been frustrated and saddened that I never made it there. I did not know how to plan a trip like this, did not know just how much I did not know, and returned in shame.

Once in London, my idea was to look for buses or trains going to Oxford. Easy, right. Well, that didn’t really pan out in my favor that way. I also should have, you know, looked at a map to know where I was supposed to be headed at all and not rely on the bus that said OXFORD on what I supposed to be the destination sign. I should have, you know, maybe asked the driver, or fellow passenger. Or anybody at all.

Afterwards I was acidly thankful I hadn’t tried venturing into Europe on my own. Those days, I didn’t have a cell phone, and I wouldn’t have one for several more. The most tech I had was an MP3 CD player: so it looked like a regular portable CD player, but could play data CDs with MP3s. Trouble with that piece of tech is that it took proprietary batteries that stopped being made a long time ago. So at least I had a soundtrack for losing myself in England. I must not have taken a camera.

In the 24 years that have elapsed since, I’m not sure I’ve dwelt on exactly how frustrating it was to miss out on that experience/what I imagine that experience to have been, and what it would have meant to little 17 year old me, still very much finding himself. Not that I presume to have “found” myself at 40. (Might this be a millennial thing? Prizing the journey over the destination? The seeking over finding? The assumption that the ideal, or even slightly more than comfortable outcome is maybe just… unattainable?)

I still would love to visit, for the same reasons, but inevitably the experience would be much different. Oxford’s probably not significantly changed since, altho so much of England and the world has changed around it. I am a lot different now; maybe I would actually get more out of the experience, but I’m not sure it could act as the catalyst it might have been if I had visited back then. This is with the assumption that back then I had more options, and options feel more limited now. I've now got bills, debts, a wife to take care of, a full-time job working the graveyard shift.

So: what would it have meant? …presuming it went without serious hiccup? What would it have catalyzed? Might it have given me some focus, some inspiration, drive, personal direction? At this point of course it’s entirely hypothetical. Maybe, though, if I could credibly answer that I could use it to renew my enthusiasm and motivation for my personal projects now. Maybe give them more focus. Knowing that Oscar Wilde had walked those streets, studied in those halls, that I would’ve been wandering in? Let’s just say there’s nowhere in Colorado that can compete with that. And not only Wilde, of course, but literal centuries worth of academia and brilliant minds haunting the entire place (J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis not least of which). I wanted to feel the weight of that. I wanted to be imbued with some of that spirit, even if I never visited again. Realistically I don’t think it’s like I would’ve been able to ever attend the place. I never became an Oxfordian, just a humble Beloiter.

The closest I got to the experience was wandering around Canterbury, for some reason I can’t remember. And honestly I don’t remember much of that trip except that I didn’t spend nearly enough time there.

Otherwise the closest I can get is through literature. I’ve been reading some of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Wimsey books, and watching some of the old BBC shows from the 1970s and 1980s. Sayers actually attended Oxford, specifically the all-women college of Somerville, in the 1910s. One of the later Wimsey books—Gaudy Night—is told from a woman’s point of view, Harriet Vane, a mystery-writer proxy for Sayers, who is revisiting Oxford and naturally gets embroiled in a mystery she has to solve. Sayers imbues the book with a lot of love for Oxford.

Oxford, anymore, is just a proxy idea for other potential life-altering experiences. Not all of those have to involve travel or significant expense. I hope. Is there a level of humility too humble. I’m not Blake; I can’t see the world in a grain of sand or heaven in a wildflower. I can’t fully live into that small of a moment and imbue it with so much meaning that it affects my whole perspective on life.

But I might have to spend some time figuring out what those experiences would be. Beyond reading. Because reading can absolutely be that type of experience. I might also have to just wait until those experiences happen of their own accord and recognize them as such at a later date...

I don't know. I'll figure it out when I'm 80, or something. For the moment I'm left wishing I could think of a decent Oxford comma joke for the title of this post. Oxford Comma sans Oxford? Just Comma? Oxford; or, Comma?

Epilogue: You may be wondering where I ended up instead of Oxford. King's Lynn, man. King's freaking Lynn. Halfway to goddam Scotland (or what felt like). I spent the night wandering the town before catching the next bus back to London in the morning. It was a long night. And then from London I got off the train one stop too early in the middle of nowhere, in the dead of night, and I couldn't be sure if it was one stop early or one stop too late (and there was only the one long road before one following the train tracks). That was another long night. I listened to Phil Collins's In the Air Tonight a lot on that walk; that's the soundtrack that kept my feet going that night. I picked up a broken rear-view mirror on that walk because it seemed a bit metaphorical. I think I still have that somewhere.