o, canada
I don’t know if it’s jet lag or just the fact that it’s me, but I went to bed at the completely reasonable hour of three eh em and woke up like a shot again at five. Half an hour later, here I remain, poring through old emails and thinking those frustrating thoughts that always fade out like a guy talking as he’s meandering down a hall. So what’s better than thinking?
I’ve been safe at home in London again for four days now. I thought my trip back to Canada would be any mixed bag except the kind it was. I went through short eras during which I felt sure that our little flat was a dream that I had just woken from, others during which Edmonton was a window to alight on. I’ve said on these e-pages before that it takes leaving the country to turn me into a patriot, and never was this more true than during my short sojourn: it was an absolutely new experience, visiting Edmonton, just enough time to appreciate it and everyone in it before jumping back on the plane.
I spent a lot of time listening to music. A friend made me five - five - discs of music, nothing but Canadiana, everything from Gordon Lightfoot to Helix, from Bob and Doug MacKenzie to Kathleen Edwards. It was a perfect soundtrack for driving towards long, low horizons, almost impossible to avoid in Edmonton and absolutely impossible to find anywhere else. Armed with wise admonitions that I’m too prone to free associating with songs, I can say with absolute certainty that had I a therapist in 2004, “Hockey Skates” could have been lifted wholesale from his notes.
Both ways of life remain more or less unaffected in my head because they are so different; I was driving there, and that’s a big deal. I believe I will live and die without ever having attempted driving in England, which terrifies me, but in Alberta - anywhere in North America, really - it is such a marvellous and liberating exercise that I did hours of it for its own sake while I was there. I’m quite sure that I haven’t yet plunged headlong into London life, won’t be able to until I have a proper job that doesn’t involve fitting myself into Thomas Cromwell’s head for a given number of hours every day. My first experience with rush hour on the tube was, ironically, on the way to Heathrow for my flight. One hopes that I won’t be carrying a very large green suitcase to whatever my job ends up being, because chivalry is definitely dead in this fucking city.
But I do remember, on the way back to our little place, almost craning forward on the train because I thought it would get me home faster (no fear!). I did have a deep, huggable sense of being home again. It was mingled with relief because I was in a remote way terrified of not wanting to come back. There is certainly more that is concrete in Edmonton than there is in London, for me: I could return and have no trouble finding work, have far more friends, have all my rights. But the night that I returned here, thinking that I would be out of my mind with fatigue, I found myself donning the soup and fish for a night out as though I hadn’t seen my friends in years, as though I had to go from tree to tree in Parsons Green and touch to make sure that I was back and it was all still here. To hug everyone I could find, to talk, and not just chat, but actually talk about all there was to talk about.
I’m not going to quote Leonard Cohen. I was about to, but I will not because I have been told by two different people now that I pull that shit too much. But I will say that I can almost see Canada across the sea, and feel peace and fierce pride that Canada is where I am from. I love feeling that; almost never happens in Canada. But I can have the best of everything here, potentially: everything I love about the Old World and the sense that I have run to something, not away from it.
Christ, it’s six in the morning now, this post hasn’t made any sense, and I’m not really that much more tired, but certainly far more useless than I was half an hour ago. So this, as they say, is the end of the album.
Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.
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