You can't go home again

Oh, my darling Toronto, I've been gone not six weeks and what has become of you? I returned last Thursday for a week to find my favourite bookstore gone, one of my most frequented restaurants trashed and burned, my former employer 1.5 publications and 20 people thinner, and my friends jumping at any sight of an unmarked van. Oh yeah, and then there was that earthquake...

That some of this was no surprise made the other bad news harder to bear. I found myself a tourist in my old town, naked without the bill-paying and other demands on my time that stymied me while a resident (still easier than wandering rootless in New York, where I am just a tourist with a local phone number). I would have felt better if I could have dropped in on Pivot for (not that) old times' sake, but they're off for the month. At least the Scream Literary Festival went off without a hitch, and that people are still drinking and fighting as ever. Next year I shall attend as a member of the paying public, and my liver will thank me.

The fundamental point here is that I loathe change, when I am not its agent. That cities are alive is what I love about them, and a bit of death and decay only makes room for new growth (if only the new wasn't so often in the form of branded collaborations and pre-fabricated real estate), and none of this would have been any easier to take had I been around to witness it firsthand. So maybe it's not the change, but the insult to my ego that my old room won't be preserved just as it was when I left it. Sniff.

Thanks to Jenny, Aaron, Elisabeth, Luke, Lindsay, Allison, Em et al for couches, hugs, frisbees, one-speeds, slow dances -- all salves to the scabby little wounds on my heart.

Approaching normal

As moving madness blurs into holiday madness, I can feel a shift to a new stage in our little immi experiment. We're mastering the morning rush, we know which shops have which stuff (we even made rye bread and squeaky cheese), we have our brunch place and a few well-kept secrets, our friends are used to our being in the same area code. I've even been back to Edmonton twice already, with another trip coming soon. And if Mr. O gets this job, which is (dare I say) likely, then things will be different/improving/almost normal.
Okay, so Mr. O is still judging Finland vs. Canada matches in his head on a daily basis, but he's also starting to see that both places have both advantages and disadvantages. A woman I know who moved here from Denmark more than 40 years ago told me the other day that the thing that appealed to her about this place was that nobody was going to carry you through, you really had to make your own way. And it's true. While I'll never stop believing in the basic social net that the Nordic countries have so perfected, and you'll never convince me that free universal daycare and post-secondary education are anything but pretty damn sweet, I can see a point there. Living in Finland, you start to expect that the government will clean up every mess - the rampant alcoholism that spread its ugly all over our old neighbourhood comes to mind - and so the individual need not ever stick his neck out. Canadians, with their head-up-ass time-waste of a government, suffer from no such illusions. Even in Toronto, which is the quintessential every-man-for-himself city, people still help each other out. It's a ultra-thin lining, but there it is all the same.
A week ago, we were seriously talking about picking up and heading back to Stockholm, where Mr. O would have a sweet job and I'd take a Swedish course, make meatballs. In a way, it feels like the easy option. On the other hand, the thought of packing alone gives me vertigo. And Mr. O, fed up as he was, couldn't give up on the few plans we've already made on this continent next summer: a trip down south for a family wedding, a weekend at the Folk Fest with my sibs. There are still things we need to do here, and so Stockholm will have to wait. So will Berlin, and Helsinki, and all the other places we still want to go. Now that things have calmed down a bit move-wise, we can take a bit of time to have a good time, or just do nothing at all.