One Down & Five Up

After my Tom Baker experience I was drained and emotional. More than usual. I wished I had said hello and goodbye. I missed the opportunity. In the safety of my truck I manoeuvred through the parkade and into the relative safety of everyone else's automated afternoon. Jackson Browne reached out, "I don't do that much talking these days. These days I think about all the things I forgot to do and all the times I had the chance to". The words hung in the air and I wondered what Annabelle was thinking. I wondered who her parents were and how anybody could ever be better off without her in their life. I steered to the side road next to the Bow River and stepped out onto the dirty grass. I left the truck, ticking hot, in the cold still Calgary air and moved towards the river's edge. I found a bench next to the river bank and I sat there and stared at the Bow River as tears trickled down my cheeks and added to the passing water. I cried. Lightly at first and then heavier as the emotions within me literally seduced my sadness to the surface. There were close to 20 good summers maybe left. More important summers than the 50 fading into my memories. In that moment, memories, fears and dreams were passing by with the gentle current. My emotions flowed like a tributary feeding something bigger, deeper and truer than me. My salty tears were diluting the freshening truth that passed by in the swirling waters, while complex emotions gathered and built in my heart. I realized for the first time, but not the last, that my memories were my only true possessions. My children, my favourite dog, my departed mother and my ailing father were all there playing on the back of my eyelids.

In looking back on the situation, that is when it all began. My journey was ignited on the scruffy trailing edge of October by a young girl I had never met, a hospital waiting room, an emotional few minutes on a river bank and the overarching feeling that my life was stagnating in between the meaning of the past and the shrinking amplitude of my future. There was a friction in between. I was struggling to find traction and balance with my personal and business lives, while my usual insatiable creative juices felt rudderless. Writing felt stifled and stale, while even little things like my ongoing battle with my left hand to form a Bm7 bar chord seemed to agitate my senses. Clearly after a couple years I should have mastered this simple change-up so you can appreciate I am not a good guitar player and I was in a general state of flux. I didn't so much decide a journey was required, as succumb to the irrepressible evidence that it was truly needed at this portion of my life. Moreover, I had already rented a beach house and purchased airline tickets for my four children to meet me in Costa Rica after Xmas, which struck me as being conveniently situated on the way to my ultimate dream of Argentina. In hindsight it was a typically impulsive decision that at times in my life has resulted in less than satisfying conclusions, but nevertheless I rarely change my mind and definitely do not sway from popular perception. Among other gems of eternal wisdom, Rudyard Kipling wrote, "if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too...yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and which is more you'll be a man my son". Wisdom, which is arguably more penetrating when delivered with a thick East London cockney accent by Michael Caine, but nonetheless, irrefutable and iridescent in the confines of my thinking. My journey was not into any heart of darkness that Joseph Conrad might pretend, nor was I running from the continued marriage and divorce related emotional eddy currents that continue to re-surface and burden my heart. I was to realize that this journey was not so much about finding myself or becoming anything, as it was unbecoming everything that isn't me, so I can be who I was meant to be in the first place. Around midnight on December 10th, these thoughts surged through my head somewhere near the US border as my weary eyes squinted through a small defrosted hole in the windshield, following the U-Haul's pencil beams of light searching for the road that ceased to exist under a falling blanket of snow. There was no path for where I was going, which was strangely reassuring.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be - Ralph Waldo Emerson