You would think that returning to the Philippines, a country about as far away from Canada as one can possibly get, physically and culturally, would be slightly disorienting, if not disarming, but it's been surprisingly smooth. Sedate, even. I've been here for almost a year, after all, exclusively in one city, one house, and so coming back to this town and this time is almost like returning to a corner of one's own head and heart. You know the streets, the weather, the people. The distance is vast from here to there, but feeling that distance, via air travel, is almost impossible. You get on a plane in one place and get off in another. You don't see the ocean below or the altitude above. You sit down, the windows are closed, the movie comes on, and the plane shakes. Repeatedly. It doesn't feel like you're moving -- just shaking. Travelling by train, or car, you can look out the window and see the world go by: people and cars, woods and buildings, all of it rapidly receding past you, replaced by something else, and something else, and something even more. Plane travel reduces everything to static. You move, and shake, and Canada is replaced by the Philippines. (Or, in my case, Ottawa is replaced by Toronto, which is replaced by Vancouver, which is replaced by Seoul, which culminates in Manila.) I know that over there is quite distant from over here, but now that I'm back, time has shifted to its old acknowledged patterns. I've found I can exist almost anywhere.
***********************************************************************************
I'm waiting for the greenlight on a teaching job in Japan. Having returned to the Philippines, oh what do I find in my e-mail inbox but an offer -- or a semi-offer, anyways -- for a teaching gig at a university in Japan. (The company places you at a university somewhere in Japan. This offer is for a school in the Kanto region, which is a broad area but includes where I lived from 1999-2003, so if I'm sent back there, it's either some kind of a cosmic joke or a karmic inevitability.)
They also offered a gig teaching corporate clients and junior-high school students in various sites in various places, but that requires an International Driver's License, and I just renewed my Ontario license back home, and the official one hasn't arrived yet, and besides, I'm not too keen on driving on the other side of the road in Japan. I'm a bad enough driver as it is; visions of Chevy Chase in European Vacation dance through my head...
They told me that it wasn't a formal offer, per se, but that with my high qualifications I had a great chance of being hired, so I said sure, sign me up, count me in, and here it is, Thursday, and I'm still anxiously wondering when they will e-mail confirmation regarding a job that starts next freakin' Friday. Leaving the Philippines is not something I particularly relish, but I do need to make money, and it's impossible to save anything substantial here, and a return to Japan would be a) comfortable, as I've lived there before, and the culture shock of dealing with yet another new culture at this somewhat fragile point in time is not something I think I can handle and b) teaching at the university level in Nippon would be interesting, I think, different than I what I did before in that country. ("Same, but different," as Mr.Miyagi tells Daniel-san in the first Karate Kid, and in a different context, but a noble sentiment nevertheless, don't you think?) I taught university in Cambodia, true, so university teaching is not completely out of my real, but truth be told the words 'university' and 'Cambodia' do not exactly co-exist comfortably with one another.
Nothing to do now but wait.
************************************************************************************
Recovering from jet-lag is mind-numblingly mundane. The symptoms are boring and clear: you wake up fresh at three a.m., and feel sluggish and inert around suppertime. But the sleep you get doesn't refresh you, and you wake up with a slight, unfocused buzz, as if you had been staring at a computer screen for hours on end instead of sleeping and dreaming. (And the dreams themselves are deep and strange and fathomless.) You lay on the pillow and instantly open your eyes, six, seven hours having passed. You don't feel re-energized; you feel, instead, re-plugged. Automated action, I guess you'd call it. A week from now I should be fine, and the precise sensations connected to jet-lag will fade, as all things do, only to reemerge one or two years down the line when the next, long journey makes its mark.
************************************************************************************
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
CANADIAN THOUGHTS
While rushing through Pearson International Airport in Toronto to catch my connecting flight to Vancouver I somehow managed to spot Canadian journalist Peter C. Newman browsing in one of those tiny bookshops that sprout up in odd corners of airports -- and even odder was the fact that I had a tattered copy of his 1968 book The Distemper Of Our Times in my backpack, which I asked him to sign, and to which he said yes. I told him I was trying to catch up on Canadian political history -- not an easy thing to do while living in the Philippines, which makes visiting small-town Canadian used-book shops that specialize in Canadian history, social and military, a necessity on trips back home. "Well," he said, "this shows how things started to go downhill for the Liberal Party." I shook his hand and walked away, feeling strangely enriched, the way one feels after somebody whose work has affected your trains of thought and avenues of interest has suddenly materializes right before your eyes -- a sensation that is rarely felt, true, but one which I've been lucky to experience after meeting writers like Norman Mailer, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster in person, only hours after being immersed in their philosophical scribblings.
The weird thing is, encountering Peter C.Newman (probably Canada's most famous political commentator, a dubious distinction at best) at Pearson Airport proved a fitting capstone to my time spent at home. In the past few weeks I read my first book by Newman, The Canadian Revolution (which chronicles the changes Canada experienced from the mid eighties to the mid nineties), in addition to inadvertently buying at a second-hand bookstore two copies of the same book by him: one a paperback, one a hardcover; one the Canadian edition, one the American version, albeit with a different title. I also picked up a couple of books on Pierre Trudeau, and a couple on the rise and resurgence of the Conservative Party in Canada.
Asleep yet?
Growing up, no two words carried more potential for sheer, unadulterated, pristine boredom than these: 'Canadian politics.' (Unless it was 'Canadian history'.) It was only by living in Asia for so long that I became interested in world history and culture and commentary, and it's only on my (grossly) infrequent trips back home that I can fill in the gaps (even more grossly huge) that exist in my knowledge of the people and players that bend and shift the politcal currents in my own country, Canada.
Yes, Canada. For years I've been fascinated by the characters and conmen to be found stalking the landscape of modern American politics: Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon and Carter, Reagan and Bush (multiplied). Oddly, even Gerald Ford's story is more compelling than one would at first suspect. (I'll leave, um, Dukakis and Quayle out of the picture...)
But Canada, too, has its own abundant share of oddballs and artistocrats, wackos and wunderkinds of the political realm -- not to mention the towering force of our greatest, most humane P.M., Pierre Trudeau, loved and reviled in equal measure. (And who I accidentally met on Bay Street in Toronto about ten years ago while waiting for movie stars outside of the Sutton Place Hotel -- now that's a hell of an autograph for a Canadian to have...)
It is Trudeau -- prime minister for a towering sixteen years -- who best represents the conundrum of modern Canada. A fierce intellectual whose motto was "reason before passion" but dates Margo Kidder, becomes engaged to Barbra Streisand and marries a twenty-two year old flower child while in his early fifties; a proud Quebecker who disdained his province's desire for independence; a romantic wanderer who wilfully endured years and years of mandatory political drudgery. Born of a French-Canadian father and an Anglo mother, it is Trudeau who somehow embodies the essence of the Canadian spirit -- if such an entity, at our country's young age, could be deemed to exist. (And probably the only leader in the history of the modern world who told a fellow MP during question period to go fuck himself. Asked what he said, Trudeau pleaded innocent: "Fuddle-duddle.")
Boring, bland Canada had for a time a leader as shockingly intelligent, profound and charismatic as any world leader currently on the stage. The worst we can say about the current PM, Stephen Harper, aside from the usual reactionary Conservative policies, is that he's, um, well, let me think. Got it. His haircut is kind of lame.
The fact that I've even writing about Canadian politics, for me, is a sign of maturity. A few years ago I wouldn't have known who the hell Peter C.Newman was, let alone had a copy of his book in my bag, and I sure as hell wouldn't have been rushing for his autograph in an airport. (Hmm. That doesn't sound so mature after all...) Keeping current with Canada's leaders (and wannabes) is a way of planting one mental foot on my native soil. It allows me to vicariously examine where I grew up, and where that place is going (with or without me) from a more nuanced perspective.
And it gives me an excuse to chase down seventy-something writers in aiports, which is always a good way to kill time between flights, truth be told.
The weird thing is, encountering Peter C.Newman (probably Canada's most famous political commentator, a dubious distinction at best) at Pearson Airport proved a fitting capstone to my time spent at home. In the past few weeks I read my first book by Newman, The Canadian Revolution (which chronicles the changes Canada experienced from the mid eighties to the mid nineties), in addition to inadvertently buying at a second-hand bookstore two copies of the same book by him: one a paperback, one a hardcover; one the Canadian edition, one the American version, albeit with a different title. I also picked up a couple of books on Pierre Trudeau, and a couple on the rise and resurgence of the Conservative Party in Canada.
Asleep yet?
Growing up, no two words carried more potential for sheer, unadulterated, pristine boredom than these: 'Canadian politics.' (Unless it was 'Canadian history'.) It was only by living in Asia for so long that I became interested in world history and culture and commentary, and it's only on my (grossly) infrequent trips back home that I can fill in the gaps (even more grossly huge) that exist in my knowledge of the people and players that bend and shift the politcal currents in my own country, Canada.
Yes, Canada. For years I've been fascinated by the characters and conmen to be found stalking the landscape of modern American politics: Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon and Carter, Reagan and Bush (multiplied). Oddly, even Gerald Ford's story is more compelling than one would at first suspect. (I'll leave, um, Dukakis and Quayle out of the picture...)
But Canada, too, has its own abundant share of oddballs and artistocrats, wackos and wunderkinds of the political realm -- not to mention the towering force of our greatest, most humane P.M., Pierre Trudeau, loved and reviled in equal measure. (And who I accidentally met on Bay Street in Toronto about ten years ago while waiting for movie stars outside of the Sutton Place Hotel -- now that's a hell of an autograph for a Canadian to have...)
It is Trudeau -- prime minister for a towering sixteen years -- who best represents the conundrum of modern Canada. A fierce intellectual whose motto was "reason before passion" but dates Margo Kidder, becomes engaged to Barbra Streisand and marries a twenty-two year old flower child while in his early fifties; a proud Quebecker who disdained his province's desire for independence; a romantic wanderer who wilfully endured years and years of mandatory political drudgery. Born of a French-Canadian father and an Anglo mother, it is Trudeau who somehow embodies the essence of the Canadian spirit -- if such an entity, at our country's young age, could be deemed to exist. (And probably the only leader in the history of the modern world who told a fellow MP during question period to go fuck himself. Asked what he said, Trudeau pleaded innocent: "Fuddle-duddle.")
Boring, bland Canada had for a time a leader as shockingly intelligent, profound and charismatic as any world leader currently on the stage. The worst we can say about the current PM, Stephen Harper, aside from the usual reactionary Conservative policies, is that he's, um, well, let me think. Got it. His haircut is kind of lame.
The fact that I've even writing about Canadian politics, for me, is a sign of maturity. A few years ago I wouldn't have known who the hell Peter C.Newman was, let alone had a copy of his book in my bag, and I sure as hell wouldn't have been rushing for his autograph in an airport. (Hmm. That doesn't sound so mature after all...) Keeping current with Canada's leaders (and wannabes) is a way of planting one mental foot on my native soil. It allows me to vicariously examine where I grew up, and where that place is going (with or without me) from a more nuanced perspective.
And it gives me an excuse to chase down seventy-something writers in aiports, which is always a good way to kill time between flights, truth be told.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
RECENT PHOTOS
My parents' vineyard in Oxford Station, Ontario, near Ottawa;
Me and Trish, and me and Steve, her dad, at Mike Craddock's wedding - our families all vacationed together when I was a kid;
Me, niece Annabelle, my Mum, my Dad, my brother, Ted, and my sister-in-law, Elaine, at Mike's wedding;
My grandparents and I at their home in Brockville, Ontario;
The groom and I the morning after the wedding;
Me and my mum;
Me and my niece, Annabelle;
Me and my parents.
More photos to come - stay tuned...
Monday, September 25, 2006
THEY MADE ME UP
Almost everyone was at Mike Craddock's wedding last night. And I mean everyone. Everyone I grew up with, hung out with, vacationed with. Everyone that meant something to me as a kid. The Southcotts were there, and Steve and Lynn Davis (and their two daughters, who we went wilderness camping with, and to the cottage with) and Bobby Vorstanbosh (who lived behind the Craddocks on Catherine Street in Fort Erie, and who had a backyard teeter-totter-type contraption that spun around and almost killed me, repeatedly). I'm serious -- everybody was there. People I haven't seen in ten, fifteen years. My past -- the years from zero to, let's say, fourteen or fifteen -- suddenly, almost inexplicably, collided with my present. Last night, for one night, we were all there, together, in that place, at that wedding. It was epic in its intimacy.
Because my parents grew up in Fort Erie, Ontario - just across the border from Buffalo, New York, and about thirty, forty minutes from my hometown, St.Catharines -- I spent many weekends and summers and holidays hanging out in Fort Erie. Or going to the cottage with people from Fort Erie. If I had been born a rich American, Fort Erie would have been the Los Angeles to the New York that was my St.Catharines. (If that makes any sense.) And the people that I knew, in that town, formed the nucleus of my upbringing. For the first part of my life, they were, in a very real sense, most of my life. They composed it.
And then, they were gone. Or I was gone. I'm not sure what happened. High school took hold, then university, then Japan, and Cambodia, and the Philippines. Life sped up. One minute we were camping together, chilling together, laughing together; the next minute their solid presence had been reduced to mere vapors, second and third-hand information passed along by mothers and relatives. ("What's ______ up to right now? What about _______?") You know the deal.
It's rare in life that you get the chance to land smack-dab back in the middle of your past (updated), but last night was one of those nights. Abroad for so long, you tend to lose touch with who you were, who you knew. Last night meshed. Everybody I met had known me since I was five years old. You squint at them and see the years in their faces, and they look at you and wonder where the time goes. You catch up in two-minute spurts of dialogue in between the groom's speech and the band's first number. But the words themselves, not to mention the years between, almost don't matter. You are there, together. The music is playing. Everyone is animated. Almost shining. And time itself becomes a circle that links you back to who you were and perhaps still are.
Near the end of the night I helped an old family friend walk back to his cabin -- me holding him by the left side, his wife clutching him by the right side. (Let's just say he was feeling rather wobbly after a drink or two.) I hadn't seen him in eight, nine years. He had known me as a kid. (When I was eight I had asked him how old he was, and he told me that he was twenty-eight, an impossibly old age.) He was now chatting amiably and heartfully in the way that people who are drunk often do.
"Scotty," he said, "it's amazing how our families have all kept that bond. We don't see each other for years and years, but we come together, and..."
I knew what he meant. Precisely, exactly, definitively. We stumbled along in the dark. He rambled on. I listened intently. The air was cool. The moon was bright and silver and impossible to reach.
It is amazing, the more I think about it. When you have grown up with a group of kids, and have endured your childhood with them, and seen each other slowly, almost imperceptibly shift from child to teen, and the adults in your orbit have gently guided and shifted you along the way, in the way that family and friends so tolerantly do, it creates something. Perhaps 'bond' is too tiny a word. A link, perhaps, is a better way to put it. You become linked.
I realize, too, how rare this. How many people grow up surrounded by such good, loving people? If my parents had not maintained their links to their childhood friends, none of this would have been possible. And if their friends and their friends' friends had not been such fundamentally good, decent people, none of this would have been worthwhile.
But I'm lucky.
A night like last night probably won't happen again for another five, ten years. Or maybe never. But that's okay. Time moves on. We gathered together again, were condensed again, and now we expand outward. That's life. You can't hold on to the past, no, but you can sometimes allow it take a peep at who you are now, in the company of those you shared it with.
Before I went to sleep, exhausted, the slightly-distant sounds of the wedding band and the late-night revelers mixing together in discordant glee, I realized something: Everybody had called me 'Scotty'. Almost nobody calls me Scotty. Scotty is what you call a kid. (Or an intimate.) The thing is, everybody at the wedding had known me as a kid -- before I was a runner, or a writer, or a teacher, or a wanderer across the arc of Asia. Scotty is who I am, at my core. They all know that, instinctively, because they were there from the beginning, before I was me.
They made me up.
Because my parents grew up in Fort Erie, Ontario - just across the border from Buffalo, New York, and about thirty, forty minutes from my hometown, St.Catharines -- I spent many weekends and summers and holidays hanging out in Fort Erie. Or going to the cottage with people from Fort Erie. If I had been born a rich American, Fort Erie would have been the Los Angeles to the New York that was my St.Catharines. (If that makes any sense.) And the people that I knew, in that town, formed the nucleus of my upbringing. For the first part of my life, they were, in a very real sense, most of my life. They composed it.
And then, they were gone. Or I was gone. I'm not sure what happened. High school took hold, then university, then Japan, and Cambodia, and the Philippines. Life sped up. One minute we were camping together, chilling together, laughing together; the next minute their solid presence had been reduced to mere vapors, second and third-hand information passed along by mothers and relatives. ("What's ______ up to right now? What about _______?") You know the deal.
It's rare in life that you get the chance to land smack-dab back in the middle of your past (updated), but last night was one of those nights. Abroad for so long, you tend to lose touch with who you were, who you knew. Last night meshed. Everybody I met had known me since I was five years old. You squint at them and see the years in their faces, and they look at you and wonder where the time goes. You catch up in two-minute spurts of dialogue in between the groom's speech and the band's first number. But the words themselves, not to mention the years between, almost don't matter. You are there, together. The music is playing. Everyone is animated. Almost shining. And time itself becomes a circle that links you back to who you were and perhaps still are.
Near the end of the night I helped an old family friend walk back to his cabin -- me holding him by the left side, his wife clutching him by the right side. (Let's just say he was feeling rather wobbly after a drink or two.) I hadn't seen him in eight, nine years. He had known me as a kid. (When I was eight I had asked him how old he was, and he told me that he was twenty-eight, an impossibly old age.) He was now chatting amiably and heartfully in the way that people who are drunk often do.
"Scotty," he said, "it's amazing how our families have all kept that bond. We don't see each other for years and years, but we come together, and..."
I knew what he meant. Precisely, exactly, definitively. We stumbled along in the dark. He rambled on. I listened intently. The air was cool. The moon was bright and silver and impossible to reach.
It is amazing, the more I think about it. When you have grown up with a group of kids, and have endured your childhood with them, and seen each other slowly, almost imperceptibly shift from child to teen, and the adults in your orbit have gently guided and shifted you along the way, in the way that family and friends so tolerantly do, it creates something. Perhaps 'bond' is too tiny a word. A link, perhaps, is a better way to put it. You become linked.
I realize, too, how rare this. How many people grow up surrounded by such good, loving people? If my parents had not maintained their links to their childhood friends, none of this would have been possible. And if their friends and their friends' friends had not been such fundamentally good, decent people, none of this would have been worthwhile.
But I'm lucky.
A night like last night probably won't happen again for another five, ten years. Or maybe never. But that's okay. Time moves on. We gathered together again, were condensed again, and now we expand outward. That's life. You can't hold on to the past, no, but you can sometimes allow it take a peep at who you are now, in the company of those you shared it with.
Before I went to sleep, exhausted, the slightly-distant sounds of the wedding band and the late-night revelers mixing together in discordant glee, I realized something: Everybody had called me 'Scotty'. Almost nobody calls me Scotty. Scotty is what you call a kid. (Or an intimate.) The thing is, everybody at the wedding had known me as a kid -- before I was a runner, or a writer, or a teacher, or a wanderer across the arc of Asia. Scotty is who I am, at my core. They all know that, instinctively, because they were there from the beginning, before I was me.
They made me up.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
EVEN GODS CAN FALL
Coming back to Canada last week, on the airplane, via THE GLOBE AND MAIL (Canada's National Newspaper), I read about the handful of Canadians killed by fire (both friendly and decidedly unfriendly) in Afghanistan, and, scanning the photos of the deceased, I realized that I knew one of them.
Or knew of him, anyways. Had shared the same track, at least, way back when.
I sat there in disbelief for a few moments. Could it be the same guy I knew as a teenager, the towering sprinter a few years older than us we had so admiringly dubbed 'Zeus', in awe of his size, speed and general invincibility? I didn't want to believe it -- but how many black Canadians named Mark Graham were there? It had to be him, damnit.
I soon learned that it was, in fact, the Mark Graham that had once ruled the Ontario high school track circuit. And I suddenly felt older. More mortal.
As teenagers, us distance runners at the Ontario championships would sometimes stop to watch the sprinters strut their stuff. Distance running and sprinting share as much in common as ballet and target shooting. The track events that we participated in -- the 800 metres, the 1500 metres, the 3000 metres -- emphasized endurance over speed. (Yes, the 800 metres is fast, but it's nothing like a sprint.) Those who ran in the 100, 200 and even the 400 were a breed apart. They moved. They soared. They flat-out fucking flew.
Mark Graham was big. And fast. Almost titanic. I remember lounging on the grass lining the oval track, my own events gratefully completed, my mouth sucking back water, waiting for the sprinters to do what they were built to do.
The sun shone. The sky was blue. Mark Graham took to the track and buzzed on by like a Japanese bullet train. The whoosh of his speed -- I still remember it. Us distance runners looked at each other and shook our heads and wondered what it would be like to fly that fast. Only minutes earlier, we had run that same track, but it was his now, his to mold and dissect with his strength and his power.
And now he's dead.
Killed by American friendly-fire in Afghanistan, so far from the world he grew up in. At one point in time we were both high school students sharing the same track meet, competing in diverging events, only the sun and the sweat and the joy of our bodies linking us together.
I felt very old, reading that newspaper on that plane. Reading about the death of someone my teenage self had known as 'Zeus'. Trying to imagine what you could say to the teenage Mark Graham, that invincible sprinter: "One day you will be killed in a land called Afghanistan, serving your country, helping to rebuild a sick and stricken land." Would he have believed it? Would anyone?
Then, days later, a deranged lunatic shoots up a Montreal college, killing one, wounding dozens. Only two hours away from where I type these words.
There's the temptation to wonder: What's going on here? Is the world hopeless? How can young and decent men and women die such violent, terrible deaths?
I thought of Cambodia, where I lived for over two years, and the madness of its genocide. I thought of Japan, where I lived for four years, and the unrivalled animosity of its solidiers during WWII. The Japanese and the Cambodians are the nicest people you will ever, ever meet -- and yet they, too, have known violence. Have embraced violence. (As have the Germans. And the Rwandans. And that Canadian gunman, weapon in hand, eager to kill. Just because.)
The only comfort, for me, is the realization that each day, covertly, the world over, acts of kindness and grace also find their way into the light. People being civil to one another. People helping one another. People doing good because it is good to do good.
To see violence as an aberration, an anomaly, endemic to certain countries or particular races -- that, for me, is a skewed viewpoint. Violence is a part of our nature, a part of humanity, an offshoot of evolution, perhaps, inevitable and unavoidable. How to contain it, how to divert it, how to not give in to our own lesser natures -- these are the questions that must be considered. We will never eradicate violence; we can only seek to prevent it as best as we can, and attempt to unleash our own, nobler angels as much as possible.
Still.
The students at Dawson College began their day of terror the same way we begin all our days. They woke up, pissed, downed some cereal, argued with their parents. ("Whatever, Ma.") Mark Graham woke up, showered, strapped on some guns, made some jokes. Then was killed. Makes no sense. And never will.
Zeus, dead and gone. I remember watching him streak. I remember the sunshine of those days. I remember our youth. We were all so strong and fast and aiming for the finish line, knowing it was close, not realizing how fragile those days were, how arbitrary that line was. Everything we needed was there. Everything was available. We had our shoes and our numbers. The track was ours. There would always be another day, another race, another chance, next year, perhaps, to watch Zeus demolish the competition. Another opportunity to revel in our possibilities.
Or knew of him, anyways. Had shared the same track, at least, way back when.
I sat there in disbelief for a few moments. Could it be the same guy I knew as a teenager, the towering sprinter a few years older than us we had so admiringly dubbed 'Zeus', in awe of his size, speed and general invincibility? I didn't want to believe it -- but how many black Canadians named Mark Graham were there? It had to be him, damnit.
I soon learned that it was, in fact, the Mark Graham that had once ruled the Ontario high school track circuit. And I suddenly felt older. More mortal.
As teenagers, us distance runners at the Ontario championships would sometimes stop to watch the sprinters strut their stuff. Distance running and sprinting share as much in common as ballet and target shooting. The track events that we participated in -- the 800 metres, the 1500 metres, the 3000 metres -- emphasized endurance over speed. (Yes, the 800 metres is fast, but it's nothing like a sprint.) Those who ran in the 100, 200 and even the 400 were a breed apart. They moved. They soared. They flat-out fucking flew.
Mark Graham was big. And fast. Almost titanic. I remember lounging on the grass lining the oval track, my own events gratefully completed, my mouth sucking back water, waiting for the sprinters to do what they were built to do.
The sun shone. The sky was blue. Mark Graham took to the track and buzzed on by like a Japanese bullet train. The whoosh of his speed -- I still remember it. Us distance runners looked at each other and shook our heads and wondered what it would be like to fly that fast. Only minutes earlier, we had run that same track, but it was his now, his to mold and dissect with his strength and his power.
And now he's dead.
Killed by American friendly-fire in Afghanistan, so far from the world he grew up in. At one point in time we were both high school students sharing the same track meet, competing in diverging events, only the sun and the sweat and the joy of our bodies linking us together.
I felt very old, reading that newspaper on that plane. Reading about the death of someone my teenage self had known as 'Zeus'. Trying to imagine what you could say to the teenage Mark Graham, that invincible sprinter: "One day you will be killed in a land called Afghanistan, serving your country, helping to rebuild a sick and stricken land." Would he have believed it? Would anyone?
Then, days later, a deranged lunatic shoots up a Montreal college, killing one, wounding dozens. Only two hours away from where I type these words.
There's the temptation to wonder: What's going on here? Is the world hopeless? How can young and decent men and women die such violent, terrible deaths?
I thought of Cambodia, where I lived for over two years, and the madness of its genocide. I thought of Japan, where I lived for four years, and the unrivalled animosity of its solidiers during WWII. The Japanese and the Cambodians are the nicest people you will ever, ever meet -- and yet they, too, have known violence. Have embraced violence. (As have the Germans. And the Rwandans. And that Canadian gunman, weapon in hand, eager to kill. Just because.)
The only comfort, for me, is the realization that each day, covertly, the world over, acts of kindness and grace also find their way into the light. People being civil to one another. People helping one another. People doing good because it is good to do good.
To see violence as an aberration, an anomaly, endemic to certain countries or particular races -- that, for me, is a skewed viewpoint. Violence is a part of our nature, a part of humanity, an offshoot of evolution, perhaps, inevitable and unavoidable. How to contain it, how to divert it, how to not give in to our own lesser natures -- these are the questions that must be considered. We will never eradicate violence; we can only seek to prevent it as best as we can, and attempt to unleash our own, nobler angels as much as possible.
Still.
The students at Dawson College began their day of terror the same way we begin all our days. They woke up, pissed, downed some cereal, argued with their parents. ("Whatever, Ma.") Mark Graham woke up, showered, strapped on some guns, made some jokes. Then was killed. Makes no sense. And never will.
Zeus, dead and gone. I remember watching him streak. I remember the sunshine of those days. I remember our youth. We were all so strong and fast and aiming for the finish line, knowing it was close, not realizing how fragile those days were, how arbitrary that line was. Everything we needed was there. Everything was available. We had our shoes and our numbers. The track was ours. There would always be another day, another race, another chance, next year, perhaps, to watch Zeus demolish the competition. Another opportunity to revel in our possibilities.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
INTERSECTIONS
While running through a cool and crisp Canadian morning I encountered a misty field, a shroud of white, almost smoky dew that hovered atop the ground as if hesitant to descend, afraid to disperse. The sky was blue and the grass was green and here, in the almost empty Ontario outdoors, the silence of the morning broken only by the sound of my own footsteps falling on highway pavement, I could feel, if only for a moment, at home, yet reminded also of away, of another place, a distant place. For in the Philippines, in Baguio, the clouds touch the mountains; here, in Ontario, the mist touches the grass. Between two solitudes -- east and west -- I almost hovered.
When you've lived abroad and stayed abroad for any extended period of time, coming back home, if only for a week or two (or, in my case, three) is almost inevitably a shock to the system, a tiny volt of lightning to the heart and the brain. Not enough to fry, no, but certainly strong enough to jolt. For everything is different and everything is the same. Abroad, away, memories of home are simultaneously vague and vivid; it's all there, in your head, just stored and stuffed into boxes both bursting and empty. You open the drawers every now and then to reacquaint yourself with who you are and where you're from, but it's only when you arrive, again, in the land of your birth that you see who you are and where you've been. (And maybe where you're going.)
People on TV look a little older. Strange new fonts adorn the local papers. Malls and movie theatres have come up and come down. And in between these cosmetic trivialities lies the you that was here before, and the you that is here now. Thomas Wolfe famously said that you can't go home again, but I wonder if that's necessarily true. I think if you come home expecting to find the country you left, and the you that you left, then, yes -- you are pursuing a sense of place that has long ago packed up and headed off to Hawaii. But if you come back hoping to unravel another sort of mystery, an enigma of the soul, an intersection between that which raised you and that which remains, then perhaps, just perhaps, you can find a place in this new and familiar land.
People have moved on, yes; time has marched forward, definitely. But so have you, and to return is not to revert, or regress; to return is to discover. To seek. To consciously endeavor to unearth aspects of the self and the nation that may, just possibly, align themselves once more, in strange yet compelling contortions.
Before leaving Canada I had no interest in its history, its politics, its outlook and prospects. My immersion in Asia led to an interest in world affairs, world history, and so it's perhaps no surprise that I find myself eager to learn more about my country's past and its present, its political parties and nefarious politicians. Soon I will be back in the Philippines, but my home-hearted interests will linger.
As will the mist. I'm sure that tomorrow, as I run, the mist will return. I will stare at its translucent state; I will wonder when, and how, it will shift to sleet, then snow. I will be reminded of the place I left less than a week ago, and the clouds that cross the mountains. I will stare at the fields and wait for the sun to finish its rise. I will be happy to hover between two worlds for at least another day.
When you've lived abroad and stayed abroad for any extended period of time, coming back home, if only for a week or two (or, in my case, three) is almost inevitably a shock to the system, a tiny volt of lightning to the heart and the brain. Not enough to fry, no, but certainly strong enough to jolt. For everything is different and everything is the same. Abroad, away, memories of home are simultaneously vague and vivid; it's all there, in your head, just stored and stuffed into boxes both bursting and empty. You open the drawers every now and then to reacquaint yourself with who you are and where you're from, but it's only when you arrive, again, in the land of your birth that you see who you are and where you've been. (And maybe where you're going.)
People on TV look a little older. Strange new fonts adorn the local papers. Malls and movie theatres have come up and come down. And in between these cosmetic trivialities lies the you that was here before, and the you that is here now. Thomas Wolfe famously said that you can't go home again, but I wonder if that's necessarily true. I think if you come home expecting to find the country you left, and the you that you left, then, yes -- you are pursuing a sense of place that has long ago packed up and headed off to Hawaii. But if you come back hoping to unravel another sort of mystery, an enigma of the soul, an intersection between that which raised you and that which remains, then perhaps, just perhaps, you can find a place in this new and familiar land.
People have moved on, yes; time has marched forward, definitely. But so have you, and to return is not to revert, or regress; to return is to discover. To seek. To consciously endeavor to unearth aspects of the self and the nation that may, just possibly, align themselves once more, in strange yet compelling contortions.
Before leaving Canada I had no interest in its history, its politics, its outlook and prospects. My immersion in Asia led to an interest in world affairs, world history, and so it's perhaps no surprise that I find myself eager to learn more about my country's past and its present, its political parties and nefarious politicians. Soon I will be back in the Philippines, but my home-hearted interests will linger.
As will the mist. I'm sure that tomorrow, as I run, the mist will return. I will stare at its translucent state; I will wonder when, and how, it will shift to sleet, then snow. I will be reminded of the place I left less than a week ago, and the clouds that cross the mountains. I will stare at the fields and wait for the sun to finish its rise. I will be happy to hover between two worlds for at least another day.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
WELCOME TO THE WORLD, ANNABELLE...
After high-tailing it back to Canada for a hastily planned three-week holiday (and enduring a slightly exhausting travel schedule that found me taking a five hour long night bus to Manila, a plane to Seoul, a fourteen hour wait at the airport, a twelve hour flight to Toronto, a one hour flight to Ottawa, followed by a five hour car ride back to Toronto a day later), I was rewarded earlier this afternoon at around one p.m. when I was introduced to my brand new niece at the North York hospital in Toronto, a five minute walk from where my parents spent a year or two in their early twenties and a short car ride away from where I spent my own four years at York University, and the baby is named, eloquently enough, Annabelle Christina Spencer, born approximately an hour or two earlier via ceasaran section after quite a lengthy build-up.
The wait was worth it.
She is small and tiny and looks just like babies are supposed to look. (Only prettier.). Her behavior impressed me, I have to say. If it were me, and I had been floating, chilling, hanging out in that wonderful warm womb for a good nine months and change, and then I suddenly found myself thrusted into this colder, brighter, scarier universe where all of these creatures of various shapes and sizes suddenly fondled me with monstrous hands and shiny white teeth, I'd be freaking out. But the kid actually seemed to enjoy it.
Half Chinese (but all Spencer --and no, I'm not sure what that means, either), I predict young Annabelle will be quite the stunner. She's already considerably cute at, what, eight, nine hours old. Just think what the future has in store for her.
So, much, much, much congratulations and good cheer are extended to the new father (my older brother, Ted), the new mother (his wife, Elaine), her younger brother, Jason (my new fellow uncle), the proud grandparents, the proud great-grandparents, as well as the friends and family that are all equally ecstatic.
Quite a day, and quite a cool welcome back to Canada.
I wonder what tomorrow has in store...
The wait was worth it.
She is small and tiny and looks just like babies are supposed to look. (Only prettier.). Her behavior impressed me, I have to say. If it were me, and I had been floating, chilling, hanging out in that wonderful warm womb for a good nine months and change, and then I suddenly found myself thrusted into this colder, brighter, scarier universe where all of these creatures of various shapes and sizes suddenly fondled me with monstrous hands and shiny white teeth, I'd be freaking out. But the kid actually seemed to enjoy it.
Half Chinese (but all Spencer --and no, I'm not sure what that means, either), I predict young Annabelle will be quite the stunner. She's already considerably cute at, what, eight, nine hours old. Just think what the future has in store for her.
So, much, much, much congratulations and good cheer are extended to the new father (my older brother, Ted), the new mother (his wife, Elaine), her younger brother, Jason (my new fellow uncle), the proud grandparents, the proud great-grandparents, as well as the friends and family that are all equally ecstatic.
Quite a day, and quite a cool welcome back to Canada.
I wonder what tomorrow has in store...
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