I read the rules before I broke 'em

Another tiring day, another song I like.  I enjoy Joel Plaskett, but there are not too many rap songs that catch my fancy.

I think the difference here is the folk-based Haligonian feel of this number. 

Coffee break

This year, the assigned hurricanes are familiar.  I mean literally.  Lot of them have names that are in my family.  It's a bit disconcerting, seeing the trouble they're causing.

The images of the destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Fiona this weekend were sobering, but an antidote, of a sort, came in viewing the local coverage in Atlantic Canada.

Mind you, Halifax had a relatively mild time of it, as Fiona (wince) made landfall near Cape Breton.  Still the footage showing the conditions of the streets in Halifax reminded me strongly of Hurricane Earl, when I was there in 2010.

In between reports of devastation, the CBC reporters out of the Halifax office were chatting like neighbours at a barbecue.  They kept mentioning coffee.  No electricity, so difficult to make coffee.  The weatherman had been up for over 24 hours; he'd been getting by on five cups of coffee.  A man on the street was stopped for an interview - was he out to look at the downed trees?  No, he was looking for a cup of coffee.  (Chuckle, chuckle)

Even this morning, a journalist writing an essay for the National Post, wrote wistfully and a bit uneasily of the changes he'd seen in hurricanes over the years, while living in the Halifax area.  He described brewing a cup of coffee for someone sheltering at his home.

Clearly, what Halifax needs is coffee.  Cape Breton, Charlottetown, and Port aux Basques need electricity. And infrastructure.  And new houses.

Farewell to Nova Scotia

It was only when our taxi was tooling along the highway from Stansfield Airport in the direction of Dartmouth that it occurred to me that this was, in all likelihood, our last time in Nova Scotia.

I was in the front seat with the taciturn driver, gazing at the trees, still winter-beaten in mid-May. The last time I'd come this way was on a hot day in early September 2010 with my then-eighteen-year-old elder daughter about to embark on her first time living away from home, studying at the University of King's College. At the time, it seemed like the first of many visits, especially when we returned by train to spend Thanksgiving with her a month later. However, the years slipped by and here I was on only my third trip to Halifax, ready to see her receive her degree.

It wasn't a unreservedly joyous week. Elder daughter was still severely jet-lagged, having only flown in from London two days before, where she had had a month's internship with the London bureau of the CBC.  This left her homesick for London, a city she's always dreamed of calling home, and eager to leave Halifax where she has slogged and stressed over term papers, exams, and the diplomatic struggles of editing the university magazine, with little time for the social life that is associated with post-secondary education.

We learned, while sitting with the other families in the surprisingly intimate All Saints Cathedral leafing through their programmes and waiting for the graduands, that elder daughter was receiving a first class honours degree in journalism, one of three awarded in her category.  The Resident Fan Boy and I wept in quiet pride, although our eyes had plenty of time to dry during the four-hours-plus ceremony. Younger daughter made it through this trial, but melted down when we had to wait for a restaurant table after the long trek back to the university to pick up the frame for elder daughter's diploma.  On top of that, when we were finally seated, the family at the next table belonged to a former dorm mate who used to be a close friend but no longer is.

So, with four days left in our stay, I was almost as eager to leave as elder daughter.  The weekend was saved by my awareness of the finality of it all and my resulting determination to grab opportunities.

 The first of these was the Ghost Walk of Historic Halifax.  A ghost walk is painless and quick (if a wee bit creepy) way to learn a city's history.  I've taken such walks in Victoria, Ottawa, and London (the one in England).  This one was run with appropriate melodrama by an actor whose tour emphasized the events that have shaped and scarred Halifax: its ancient days as a British fort, its part in the 1812 war, the sinking of the Titanic (what bodies were recoverable were brought to Halifax to be claimed or buried), and, of course, the Halifax Explosion of 1917 which somehow isn't nearly as famous as the Great Fires of London or Chicago, or the San Francisco Earthquake, although many more people died in Halifax that day.  The tour ends at Alexander Keith's history brewery under his rather unsettling wooden statue.

Yet somehow walking out in a cool spring evening hearing spooky tales made me fond of Halifax again and sad to leave it.  I made a pilgrimage to the tiny Unitarian Church in the south end of the city. I walked through the Public Gardens in the first furls of spring, having previously seen it in the summer (after Hurricane Earl devastated it) and the autumn. And we made a hasty visit to the unexpectedly charming and thorough Museum of Natural History which was a 15-walk from elder daughter's final apartment in Halifax.  An added bonus:  I was able to manage the long walks and the relentless hills of downtown Halifax - a final sign that my knees have made a recovery.

When the time came to leave Halifax, it was not with a sense of relief, but a feeling of having said goodbye properly.  I can, with a good conscience, breathe a sigh and a wish for her.

Keeping track

When my father departed for Boston with another woman, my mother decided to scrub around her life, make a fresh start, and move to some place warmer. She splurged, booking two "roomettes" on the train from Edmonton, Alberta to Nanaimo, British Columbia. I was eight years old and charmed by the beds which slid out of the wall like drawers. To this day, I can't recall having a better night's sleep, rocked through the Rockies. I was woken only once, as the guard in Jasper paced the platform calling out to those who could hear him to change their watches back one hour. Early in the morning, I lay on my stomach in my drawer-bed head-to-head with my six-year-old sister, gasping as nearly bottomless canyons opened up beneath the train as it sped over trestles. By breakfast time, we watched the sunny Okanagan orchards flash by the dining car. As an introduction to a new life, it was pretty hard to beat.

Recapturing that perfect sleep was one of the goals on my mind when we decided to take Demeter and younger daughter to Halifax by train last year to see elder daughter at her university and spend the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend. Other considerations were Demeter's life long dream to travel completely across Canada by rail (this seemed a reasonable compromise), and the idea of traveling through the Maritimes in autumn.

We started the 26-hour journey with the dayliner jaunt from Ottawa to Montreal, moving in and out of the shadow of rainstorms and reaching Canada's second largest city with its mad inter-weaving of La Metro subway, VIA rail, Amtrak and commuter trains at La Gare Centrale, to say nothing of the shoppers. After nearly forgetting my suitcase on the platform (I was shepherding Demeter and younger daughter while the Resident Fan Boy charged ahead and disappeared down the train corridor), we glided slowly across the dark river surrounded by the blazing lights of the city, and made our way down the south bank of the St Lawrence before veering away south from the Seaway just past Rimouski and crossing into the province of New Brunswick at daybreak just at the innermost tip of Chaleur Bay. From there we headed steadily south, rumbling across the Miramichi River about mid-morning, entering northern Nova Scotia sometime after lunch then making a long circle around the south-west edge of Halifax, arriving in the late afternoon, steps away from the famous Pier 21 where so many new Canadians entered the country, including Demeter many years ago.

When we took Demeter to the Pier 21 Museum the next day, a brand-new Cuban-Canadian tour guide greeted her with an enormous "Welcome ba-a-a-a-ck!" and a gold alumna sticker for her coat. She remembered her fellow boat passengers, Germans en route to Wisconsin and Italians en route to Toronto, being put in holding cages, while she, a British subject, was waved through to the waiting train to Edmonton. (We also learned there had been a young man, a Haligonian, on the boat...)

And we visited with elder daughter at the University of King's College, ate two Thanksgiving dinners (one of them cooked by us in a student residence kitchen), saw the sights, including the ancient (by Canadian standards) Old Burying Ground in the centre of the city where they stopped burying people in 1844. And I wistfully watched elder daughter striding through the streets of a city that will be hers and never mine. And I watched Demeter wonder about the beautiful boy from Halifax and what might have been. And I was grateful to have seized the chance to come this way, even though the train bed, not a magic drawer, but a shallow fold-out shelf, was lumpy and jumpy and I never did much more than doze, or peer out into the darkness at ghostly white cottages, paddock fences, and flashing poles.

We flew back home. Train travel, alas, has long ceased to be the economical option.

A hard rain's gonna fall

It's 10:30 here in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the leading edge of Hurricane Earl has been whirling through for the past hour or so. I see trees and bushes tossing wildly and sheets of rain slicing down the deserted streets, with waves of water sloshing over from the gutters. Good thing Earl was downgraded; he's now a "weak Category One". I wouldn't care to encounter anything stronger. Reports already coming in of fallen trees and power outages. I better get this done...

Half an hour ago, I waved goodbye to elder daughter as she descended to the parking levels of this hotel to drive the short distance to the University of King's College, "Canada's oldest chartered university" (founded 1789, which is ancient by Canadian standards). I slipped into the tiny computer room here and had a quick weep, because once people see someone in here, they decide to come in too.

Being eighteen, elder daughter is eager to get started, and being eighteen, she's still veering between being a child and an adult. This song has been relentlessly playing in my head for the past twenty-four hours:
Oh very young, what will you leave us this time?
You're only dancing on this earth for a short while . . . .
There'll never be a better time to change your mind
And if you want this world to see a better day
Will you carry the words of love with you?

And the goodbye makes the journey harder still.

The computer room has people in it now. If I need a place for another quiet weep, I'll have to find someplace else.