This place is no longer the city where I grew up. We’re going back to the 1960s, when the population stood at half a million. Today it’s five times that.
The neighbourhoods of my youth have been decimated. None of the families who lived here remain. They’ve all scattered, driven out by high real estate prices. An entire community on the west side simply gone in a generation.
The relentless construction that never keeps up with in-migration, the traffic, the appalling lack of affordable housing, and a culture that no longer embodies the civility it once did… People brush past you on the street without a word, not even a brief glance of recognition, as though you don’t even exist, or that you are no more part of their day than a fire hydrant. At bus stops they keep their eyes buried in their portable devices, their hearing sealed off by ear buds. In a region of two-and-a-half million people, individual isolation seeps ever more into the character of the place.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but this city no longer has the hold on me it once did. My parents are gone, as are my aunts and uncles, and the coterie of friends and associates who made up their generation. My cousins, too, have moved away, and most of the kids I grew up with. Two brothers remain. That’s all.
Then there is the ubiquitous presence of how it used to be. I walk through memories every day, the places of my childhood, old family homes, parks and schools and streets of my yesteryears. At times I feel like a tourist in my own past. I feel vaguely out of place, not dressed right for the event.
Increasingly, I feel almost trapped by these surroundings, by the routine, by all of the in-the-box habits, by my inability to escape the deeply ingrained expectations of the daily routine. I am diseased by it.
The juxtaposition of this growing disorientation and entrapment by habit— it grinds much more noticeably now than it did a decade ago. The place is no longer flush with attraction for me. So I have been more inclined to notice its flaws and blemishes.
When we travel lately, I no longer look forward to returning home, other than to sleep in my own bed and reunite with our dog. But this experience could be real anywhere. I also see the place, for the first few days on return, with a different perspective. It can’t offer the history, culture, and civilization I enjoy and which can be found only in other parts of the world. This is a young place, built of wood, and more recently of shiny metal and glass, but there are no bricks or stones of the centuries past to be found.
It is a noisy place now, and each time we go away, only to return a few weeks later, this place feels more irritating.
I have been unable to write for several years. It is only now, with the prospect of moving from here, that I can pay even the slightest attention to the muse. That I can at least hear the voice again, even for a few moments, lifts me.
If you were to ask why do I write? I write, not with ambition, not with intention, not to some artifice, but because it is what engages me to my core. It is what I know…