I will begin by telling you that pending the usual - we've sold the house... in less than 2 days. So, I guess Canada has somewhat recovered from the so called credit crunch. Well, I certainly hope so and good luck to everyone.
So, it appears I'm up to my old tricks again. I'm leaving a place; community if you will, just as things were beginning to feel familiar however let us not romanticize familiarity as we all know what it can breed except let me, if I may, differentiate between transient familiarity that leads people to take stuff for granted and the sort that makes you yearn for the comfort of friendly faces and places - as I understand it. For instance: I have discovered some shortcuts around town, yes that is true and much obliged am I to them and I know where to find secret ATMs or cheap parking lots that you only discover with time and the help of a little local acquaintance. I can also unreservedly recommend the bulgarwheat salad at Cultures on Simcoe and King and while these insights are a product of 'familiarity', they are passing commodities with no lasting resonance.
Let's see. There is a place on Charing Cross Road in London called Gaby's that makes the best tabouleh salad I've ever tasted, never found a comparable tabouleh salad anywhere else in the world (or the parts I've visited). I believe the secret is in the hint of mint, the quantities of which are known only to the chef. Anyway, this tabouleh salad was purchased one late night in 1989 in London and consumed on the night bus to South London with my friend Monkey Girl after a night of abandon at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. It was so delicious that well, here we are 21 years later and I still think about it every now and again. Or do I? Am I really that enamoured with the salad? I think you know what I'm trying to say.
So you see, the memory of the bulgarwheat salad on Simcoe and King, purchased alone on a cold trek back to Union for a long and tedious ride home after a day of more lone anti-adventures won't last past March 4th; though I hasten to add, it is very tasty. No, in the words of Madonna - "I want more" ...from a memory.
That isn't to say that I don't have memories from my time here and I'm going to break from tradition here and actually have something nice to say without a sniff of sarcasm - even though I have been to hell and back and may have, just may have, suffered the teeniest of nervous breakdowns around September of last year induced by isolation and despair - no I can tell you that I will fondly think of my colleagues at the bookstore who are constantly devising ingenious ways of amusing fellow co-workers. I daresay some old man in Burlington is reading 'Scouts in Bondage', (recommended as a Staff Pick) right now thinking; "This is not at all what I expected!"
I will not fail to regail friends with the story of how I must be the only person (aside from my fellow yogi graduates) to have been in a graduating class that had someone dismissed for gross misconduct! A yoga student!! Can there BE a bigger contradiction in terms? I will dine out on that anecdote for some time. And then I will tell everyone about the wonderful teachers I studied alongside.
My friends at that awful place that I mistook for an office of business and whiled away 5 months of jumping through hoops like a poodle in a circus tent will also people my thoughts as I leave. They don't deserve the treatment they get but thankfully two of my four closest collegues have moved onto bigger and better things...which believe me doesn't take much when you are benchmarking against that place. This is my OPINION and god damn it all to hell we fought two wars that I may have the freedom to express it. So that is mine. I thank you.
I have sobbed at the thought that The Lish will not so easily get to paint and play Cookie Monster Bingo with her 'mannie' quite as often as she has been able to by being 20 minutes down the road. Mannie is The Lish's name for her grandmother, the world's greatest grandmother I might add. But I know the bond that has been forged between them these past two years is unbreakable and for that I do not regret coming. Leaving however is the right decision, long term and I know that in my soul too.
I aim to live the rest of my mothering, wifely and human days in an attitude of gratitude with that knowledge.
Like Paolo Coelho's The Alchemist, I travelled half the world to find something I realise now I never lost just misplaced.
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