It was time to go! Everything had been happening quickly, chaotically, all too suddenly. My suitcase was jammed-packed, hasty goodbyes had been said to friends if they were nearby (alas, with no goodbye for some) and two of my closest friends were waiting to accompany me from Edinburgh to the Glasgow Airport for the long flight home: my musician roommate David and my pot-scoring Buddhist-meditating buddy Ron.
Just as we were ready to leave the attic-turned-bedroom of our little bed-and-breakfast lodgings, I began searching my tweed sports jacket frantically as I could not find my airplane ticket!
I was about to tear apart my suitcase and toss all its insides helter-skelter when David held up my ticket with an impish grin on his face! It struck me extraordinary that he should pull such a prank at that particular moment but there was no time to waste any emotional grief on the joke; the ticket was found and we needed to hurry.
I did not even have time to say a proper goodbye to many of the persons I had come to treasure as good and remarkable friends–as only the good Scottish people can breathe full life into the bonds of friendship–nor did I have the time to say a fitting goodbye to the wonderful magical city of Edinburgh herself.
The academic year was only two-thirds over but an emergency forced me to make returning home my top priority, even more important than remaining to complete my year abroad. I had been so proud, having been selected for the Education Abroad Program, following in my sister’s footsteps; Robin studied in Bordeaux, France as a French major, and this experience of hers helped provide me the foreknowledge and drive to achieve the same honor: no France for this linguistically-challenged junior, of course, but only an English-speaking country such as England or Scotland would do for a history major.
Lady Luck ran faithfully by my side so that I not only got accepted but even received my first choice of Edinburgh, Scotland—having first represented myself to the selection committee as a future historian bedazzled by British Medieval History. And yet before the year was out, I was faced with a friend’s personal crisis and chose to leave the Education Abroad Program to return home to help locate and stabilize another, if I could.
It wasn’t my own family in danger or emergency but a young woman named Jill Holden I had met that summer of June ’67. We hit it off and went camping at Yosemite and all was going great until the night we had a long intimate conversation and bared the secrets of our souls. She told me she had tried to commit suicide twice; serious attempts, sufficient unto her purpose, save that the circumstance of each attempt was foiled by an unexpected twist of fate.
For the first effort, she had cut her wrists while sitting by the edge of a river, her final goodbye to be Nature communion’d, but rolled into the water after losing consciousness. The cold water slowed the bleeding sufficiently for her to be discovered and rescued! She spoke of such moments ruefully, apparently somewhat ambivalent in balancing the failed attempt against the newest chapter of her redeemed life.
The other attempt was better planned; she would expire peacefully within the confines of her own home with her parents and brother away, a victim of a total overdose, when once again “Mistress Fate” intervened. A friend she had not seen for years, without invite or advanced notice, chose to visit on that very day!
Her friend entered the let-yourself-in latch-key house when no one answered the knock and soon discovered Holden’s limp, senseless, and overdosed body—and once more raised the alarm in time. (The two failed attempts gave Holden some slight pause . . . and made her wonder if she were destined to die by her own hand or answer some other greater purpose?)
These stories and others were exchanged as we sat in my car high up on Grizzly Peak above the UC Berkeley campus so we could look out at the lights of Berkeley and, across the bay, San Francisco and other far points along the peninsulas on both sides of the Golden Gate Bridge. Nonetheless, a love relationship began which neither of us could or wished to put aside.
After our week-long camping trip to Yosemite she “flipped out” again (as I was later told), flew home to western Massachusetts, and finally agreed to her parents’ wishes she be committed to a psychiatric hospital for as long as it took to help her resolve her problems.
She was diagnosed as manic depressive (the forerunner of “bipolar disorder”) and settled in for what would prove to be a many-month’d stay at the Institute for the Living in Hartford, Connecticut. By rare coincidence, her doctor and I shared the same surname (Rosenberg) which tickled Holden’s sense of humor. She quickly nicknamed him “Curly” for this attribute of his black hair while I earned several different nicknames, including such terms of endearment as “My hairy pithecanthropus” while she occasionally styled herself as “J. Holden of Loki” (a mythological reference for those inclined to learn more—the Norse goddess of mischief, if memory serves!)
For better or worse, that summer of 1967 brought the two of us together and facing a crossroads almost immediately; she consented to the Institute of Living (a name she described as “appealing to parental types”) while I prepared to depart for my academic year at the University of Edinburgh in the fall. This was a challenging separation, to be sure, but nonetheless a great bond had formed and was holding fast even while outside forces threatened to overwhelm us.
I visited her in Hartford on my way to New York to catch the student ship “Aurelia” to Southampton; something magical transpired between us during that first warm embrace in which nothing else had to be said: our union was joined and our futures were sealed together.
During my overseas year we exchanged long letters constantly–several per week–and explored every aspect of our most private thoughts, beliefs, and desires. Part of our future relationship as a couple was based on those shared intimacies even as our physical longing for one another continued to grow, both wishing to speed the day when we would be reunited.
She went AWOL two or three times during that year, usually just a brief sojourn outside the hospital grounds. One escape was longer and evolved into quite an episode–the details of which are unnecessary–save to note that Holden always had the requisite intelligence to escape when she wished (alone or in cahoots with others!) even making it to a pre-determined safe house for some fun on her longest escape.
Ultimately found by the police and “busted”, she seemed quite bummed out by this earlier-than-planned return to the psychiatric hospital. Yet at the same time, her ability to describe such episodes in lively prose with a flavorful sprinkling of humorous insights and inventive use of language showed a healthy brilliance emerging that compared favorably with the dark, confused thoughts of her earliest letters.
There was an unmistakable movement toward greater self-understanding until she had created for herself a new optimistic philosophy of life, while the love between us kept growing. It was then I knew that Holden had transcended her self-destructive impulses and was going to be fine . . . but at the zenith of my certainty, a new crisis occurred!
I was not privy to any of her planned-escape details; the first I heard anything was from my family, my sister being a friend of Holden’s Berkeley roommate. The roommate let my sister know that Holden had gone AWOL and this time her whereabouts were truly unknown, although there did exist a wisp of a rumor that she might have headed for Big Sur, a beautiful scenic area in the mountains southwest of San Jose. While in Edinburgh, I only knew that Holden was gone and no one knew where she was!
Family and friends appeared greatly worried about Holden and wished to know what I intended to do, which of course became the great question. Although I did not know where she was or why she left or whether I could help find her, I believed my moral obligation was clear: to drop everything, withdraw from the Education Abroad Program, and fly home at once in the hopes of finding Holden and discussing her future–our future—together. This was late February 1968 and that is the background story to how I came face to face with having to make such a decision of this weighty nature.
I’d been warned by the program head that I might not receive any credit for the first two terms should I depart, and furthermore I would not be allowed to enroll at Berkeley for at least two more academic quarters. For a young man of 20 with a military deferment based on college status (“in good standing”) this would mean loss of my deferment and reclassification by the local draft board as eligible cannon fodder for the unthinkable nightmare known as “The Vietnam War”. Soon enough “the war” and “nightmare” would be permanently linked in the minds and lives of thousands of Americans.
Dr. Griggs, head of the EAP and a fair-minded gentleman if ever there were one, nevertheless had to warn me that I might lose all credit for the year including the two terms already completed. I thanked him, asked for time to think it over, and informed him shortly thereafter of my decision: I was going home. (Later, I learned that I was to receive full credit for those first two terms—straight A’s for all work—and this no doubt was based on Dr. Griggs’ conversation with my professors, review of papers and exams, and his personal recommendation to grant me full units: were there a way to bless him and his descendants forever, he has my blessing!)
I was a young man back then, this time I’m describing, more than 40 years ago. Although from this prologue it may appear I wish to tell the story of Holden and myself, such is not the case. Actually, I wish to tell the story of my three-week visit to England and Scotland in June 2014. Now part of the reason I decided to undertake this vacation was this vivid remembrance of once having to leave Edinburgh under such hurried circumstances, as described above, that I never had a chance to prepare myself emotionally for a real and full goodbye.
I do remember dashing off a one-page note, perhaps intended as a letter home since it was written on especially thin blue paper used for air mail correspondence in those days—but never sent as it remained forgotten among my papers, only to be rediscovered years later. It was at best a bit of sentimental writing that could not pass muster at a school for beginning writers and part of me is properly ashamed at its unrestrained attempt to create tears without sufficient foundation to warrant such an emotional appeal.
This was juvenile self-indulgence and could never serve double duty as my true goodbye to Scotland. I did, however, promise myself that I would return one day when time and circumstances allowed, and it was only this summer that the long-awaited opportunity occurred. I had retired from a full-time professorship and had both the time and money to make the visit happen. I had not forgotten my promise, even 46 years later!
I began the preliminary work months in advance and even emailed a friend from that University of Edinburgh college year to see if a visit would be possible, to which she readily agreed. She had re-located to Bristol and so we decided to visit Stonehenge together . . . but that gets me ahead of my story!
I decided to combine a 10-day coach tour of England and Scotland with an equal number of independent days on my own, primarily divided more or less evenly between London and Edinburgh. While I wanted to explore and marvel at great sites like any other tourist, I also felt as though I was going back “to say goodbye”, as odd as that might sound.
Thus, what I have written heretofore is merely meant to give the reader a sense of the “back story” and multi-purpos’d nature of this trip, its raison d’etre so to speak. In brief, this is how my anecdotal recounting of numerous breathtaking and magnificent highlights of a whirling coach and freedom-loving tour all around the British Isles came by its title: “A Proper Goodbye”. I was going home to Scotland . . . to say goodbye!
