We’re not in Narbonne anymore, TotoIf one of the strangest experiences of my life was leaving Toronto for France, not much can touch the strangeness of returning to Toronto for a mere week, in February, on “business”. There is a blog for Consolation and all things literary, so I won’t go into much detail here on what I did at home on an official level, except to say that leaving Canada turned out to be a fine career move. It puts an interesting gloss on that old joke, “How can we miss you if you won’t go away?” The folks at the Toronto Public Library put on an incredible show and their support for the book, their inventions to help people get into the book, both real and digital, turned my head. This alone was worth the price of admission, an interactive map of Consolation’s Toronto, both the fictional and real city of 1858. Wow.
The week kicked off with an incredible event at the Metro Reference Library, with about 250 people in attendance. Ross Manson did readings from the book, and Mary-Lou Fallis did some period songs. Tina Srebotnjak interviewed me from the stage, and folks asked questions from the audience. A nice welcome home.
Redhill and Manson try to look attractive for the camera
People who thought they were getting a free turkey
During the week, I did a bunch of readings, got very sick, went to parties and dinners, visited individually with family and friends, sat with the mayor in his office for half an hour, and shopped. I brought back to Toronto 12 bottles of wine from France, and my suitcase weighed more heading back to Narbonne than it did when I left. There were some celebrations this week, too (who said I didn't have good timing): Mark's 40th birthday, Dad's 71st, and my neice Lily's first. Her father made her a duckie cake. No one ever made me a duckie cake. Thanks Mum.
"I hate Consolation! It's pedantic and unconvincing. And the present-day sections are, like, totally ass."(People turn one and suddenly they know everything.)
I think I managed to see almost everyone who mattered in Toronto. The two or three folk I missed know how hard I tried to get to them and I hope they’ll forgive me. We had a particularly marvellous night at Alana Wilcox’s house the Sunday after I got in, a gathering of about 25 people and a bottle of wine for just about every person. Left to right, that's Susan Glickman, Kevin Connolly, Darren Wershler- Henry, Gil Adamson (who's brilliant novel from last year, The Outlander, should be on your bedside table), and our host, Alana Wilcox. After being away for six months, you mark the oddest little changes. Okay, so the belly on Laura Repas wasn’t exactly subtle, but lots of other little things were. A changed hair colour here, an ex-smoker smoking again there. The sly look on the face of the person who had to leave early because he had a new lover he wanted to get back to. The one with unexpected good news, the one with dreaded bad news. These things you mark day by day when you see folks moving through their changes under your gaze, but noting them in person after an absence introduces a bittersweetness to one’s friendships and makes you wonder how you have changed to your friends, in ways you don’t see day by day in your own mirror.
Bellies. Redhill on left (subtle), Repas on right (unsubtle)
Claudia and Don. Not on drugs. Always smiling. They're like that.Two nights before, the experience of seeing lives change was even more profound, when I had dinner with a small gathering of folks whose kids have grown up with ours (and so we adults have grown up together). Two little girls turning into women, Maxime’s best friend without his baby-fat, Ben’s best friend looking yet more muscular, and three brothers keeping pace with each other, their faces just a little bit older. That hurt to see, because we mark the passage of time in our children and in the children of those closest to us, and I realized how many people are missing a chunk of Max and Ben’s childhood, and a good part too. A blog doesn’t cut it for those who wished they could bear closer witness. Even I see now, in Ben, the teenager lurking under that bright, soft flesh. Soon, he is going to start retreating into that secret world we were all once a part of and will never gain entry to again, and I am not going to be the coolest person in his life.
(Yeah, that's Ben, and he's still only nine. You know you're in trouble when one of your child's classmates, a girl, comes straight up to you after school and says, matter-of-factly, Je suis amoureuse de votre fils "I'm in love with your son.")
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That was the week that was in Toronto. And now that I’m back “home," it's, well, weird. Naturally, it’s a bit odd to pop back into existence in the lives of our friends and family and then pop back out, but more than that is the feeling that I’ve broken the French spell. I keep waking up thinking I’m just a Torontonian pretending to live in France. And of course I am. But I just found it a little more convincing before I went home.
I do remember feeling this right after arriving here last summer: I can recall sitting bolt upright in bed that first night, August 3 2007, and wondering what the hell I was doing. I went upstairs that night and poured a large scotch to stop my heart from hammering, and I wrote in a diary: Good Christ, I’ve given someone my house and I’ve got nowhere to go back to. It took a while to settle—it was a big change—and it took about a week this time too. (By the way, last week I saw that house, and the folks in it are actually living there, among my things, and that was more like being posthumous while still alive than I’d ever like to feel again. I don’t think I’ll mind being posthumous when I’m actually dead, but walking around like you’re your own ghost is pretty strange.) Anyway, this is the kind of thing that takes extra doses of red wine and cheese to fix, but luckily you can get that prescription filled anywhere in town.
And now I'm back under the February sunshine, Charlot at my side hoping we’ll go back out into the garden and chase each other through the artichokes. It’s February 17 and I’m finally digging out the clods of grass in the patch I want the garden to go into. We have the artichoke toilet (Charlot will pee and poop nowhere else in Narbonne but in these artichokes) a patch for all the things I want to grow, a zone reserved for the pool when we put it back up in June, and then the rest of the place, with its fruit trees already in bud. No wonder I feel a little like Keanu in The Matrix, when he wakes up in his pod and realizes he’s dreaming his life. It’s a nice dream, but there’s a nagging voice that says, You’re supposed to be freezing your ass off right now and not liking it one little bit. What the frig are you doing in France??
For an answer to that question, stay tuned. At the end of this month, after a week in the Canaries (I foresaw that a mindless week on a beach might be necessary after the madness of February), we replace our front entrance with a revolving door and the spring visiting madness begins.
(PS: for those of you who have been getting impatient for a new entry, here it is, and I promise another one before we leave for the Canaries that is more about the Redhill-Simards, their hopes and dreams, their dinner parties, and especially their dog.)
(We end today's post with three photographic proofs:)
I really was in Toronto
Michael Helm has stalker, who is none too careful these days
and Ken Babstock is really going to be a father ...
