Blogging Vancouver: Heading Home

Funny thing ... so melancholy this morning as I saddled up and wandered over to Sophie's Cosmic Cafe for a last massive breakfast. I forgot to order the happy eggs ... free range. Melancholy as Frobisher and I drove by a circuitous route through the luminescent autumnal colors to the airport. Then the business-like part of getting through customs, stripping down for the ludicrous security initiation, and murderously banging out the rest of an old post and all of a new one in an open Starbucks in Vancouver's spectacular airport.

But now that I am on board, the nostalgia dissipates, the memories go back to the shelf, ready-to-hand but not active. I look forward to being home, to getting on with it.

Vancouver, alas, was probably a bad choice as a first trip to blog. I am too attched to the stirrings of my youth spent here, now there as we fly away ... not so much youth, really, as formative young adulthood. So these posts have been excessively sentimental. Still, travel should always shake you up, make you different than when you left. Travel, especially for those of us for whom travel must by necessity be a strong drink sipped only occasionally.

I think that this was only my sixth trip to Vancouver ... perhaps seventh ... in the nearly 27 years since I foresook it for San Francisco. But now I know that eventually I could happily come back if it came to that, that there is a sufficient underlayer of the old Vancouver for me in an old age that I crave but seek to delay as long as possible. What would happen if something suddenly opened up such that I could move back sooner than retirement? That would be a dilemma now, unlike at any time before now. When I first moved to the States, I had a recurring nightmare that I had returned to Canada, and I was trapped and could not get back to San Francisco. I no longer have that dream; I am secure in my new home, and the old one no longers threatens.

I should end this little huzzah by embracing again my home of three decades, lest it think me unworthy of continuing occupation. Here's to San Francisco, the Vancouver of California.