Toronto and The Center-Seeking Force.
I should clarify for any who might be labouring under the HammerPlayer's delusions: I am still well on track with my promise to you, O Flights' faithful & devoted (in fact I gave you a freebie on Sunday). My vow was to post every WEEKDAY for the next 30 days. So far so goot.
Now that I am at it again, I am struck by how my ring of adoration has shrunk. Fickle bunch, you lot. Still, I am obliged to keep my promise and keep putting things up everyday, but it creates a dilemna. If you, as I, want to get this place looking like it used to, you are all going to have to get off your collective aRSSes [clevah clevah if I do say so myself] and weigh in here. This Boeing has started rolling again and Inspiration is clearly on the Flights Deck. I will know I have hit third gear when Mel stops by again, and I rouse Wawfuls from his feigned indifference.
However, my usual in[s]anity aside, it's time for a brief break from our A Year In Review omnibus retrospective. The following post was inspired by an early-showing I received of the post Fuel put up today entitled "Mecca". If you haven't read it, I strongly suggest a visit. Not that I am in any position to tell any of you what to write about, nor am I a huge believer in Memes (I treat them with the same general disrespect I have for Mimes due my long-held policy of Guilt by Free-Association), but I would be curious to know what my friends and fellow bloggahs consider their equivalent touchstone. Understanding this idea had to percolate for months in my head, if it proves too dense to navigate, who am I to complain?
_______________________________________
Pilgrimage has a curvilinear topography. We might look quickly at bodies moving purposely from one location to another and construct a vector in our minds to describe what we see. In doing so we’d miss a grander map which has this motion more truthfully writ as a circumnavigation, a completion.
We go, but to return. That might be the last thing a preconscious soul notes before heading briefly out of the light and down, down into a body. The idea of purposeful return, seems primeval and the more I look around the more I see evidence of this inexorable drive working its invisible levers in my mind. The name of the quintessential pilgrim’s respite, Mecca, is now a well-worn metaphor for any visionquest’s goal. I like that fact since it’s subtle evidence that East and West might have more in common than either is wont to admit.
This idea has been percolating ever since JEV sent me his thoughts on it as it applied to WSOP and the way we stream in to Vegas, the unlikeliest Mecca of all, with dreams of fulfillment (albeit of a more material nature) and actualization. The minute I read his take, it occurred to me I have known the name of my other Mecca. And it’s a pilgrimage I have been making repeatedly for the last seventeen years, with varying degrees of success.
I left Toronto in 1990, without fanfare, and without even understanding I was leaving her; a kind of break-up without tears because I thought of my absence as a business trip rather than a formal separation. For reasons I still can’t explain I opted for the lesser of two scholarships, and turned down the University of Toronto where I could have roomed with my closest friend and enjoyed 4 years of downtown life, in order for a fresh start in London, Ontario. The experience was memorable but not productive. I tend to collect friendships wherever I go but this is the one period of my adult life from which I did not take a lasting relationship. I was without a rudder, or much common sense, for two years and it resulted in choices that would make Toronto a part of my past instead of my future.
London quite logically led to medical school in the Dominican Republic, and I went from returning home once a month to twice a year. In that time, my parents sold their condo on the west end. They did it primarily to finance my brother’s and my MDs, although we didn’t learn of it until we were almost done. As a father of three now, I realize I have no excuse and a very tough road ahead of me if I want to hold myself to their standard. They also sold the house I had grown up in on the eastern tip of the diaspora known as the Greater Toronto Area. That turned out to be the equivalent of a divorce because much of what I had loved about TO was centered around that house, my high school crew and the idea of home in general. Without that nexus, I found my way back even less frequently once I started training in Cleveland.
Ten years and maybe ten or twelve trips to see my folks, rarer still my friends; often with a sense of regret for what was lost when I unintentionally said goodbye to that amazing city. My wife notes I still spend our trips up almost visibly stressed while up there. It’s true too; I hate leaving and it shows the entire time I’m home. Another vanity indulged incorrectly.
In high school I always thought I would end up practicing in downtown TO and living within that cosmopolitan jewel. Later I thought I would yet wend my way back when my US training was done. Now, fully within my own, I realize that dream is not going to happen. My attempts have brought me close, but ultimately not brought me home. And as all adults should learn how to do at some point, I worked a compromise that I can live with.
But I had not until recently uncovered for myself why a proximity to Toronto meant so much. Yes, my family is there, and I was raised to recite Family First as a mantra, but that explanation hasn’t satisfied in its simplicity. A clearer understanding of this unnamed pilgrimage came to me over two nights leaving TO. The first was driving back to Buffalo a few weeks back after my Dad had collapsed on a treadmill and I had rushed to Toronto to see him. Things turned out alright, although ambiguously. I was driving back to Buffalo in the drizzling rain at seven in the evening, when I made an instantaneous decision to leave the northern toll-road that lets you speed at 85mph without traffic, and instead took the 404 down to the 401 into the heart of the city.
I chose to drive through Toronto rather than around her. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but as the skyline unfolded heading east in the mist and half-light I was struck by her silhouette; elegant, lovely, and ultimately unknowable. Gatsby was not far from mind. I then had the scent of unrequited love stiflingly about me as I drove passed the lakeview penthouse apartment of a girl I thought to marry nearly twenty years ago. Garcia-Marquez suggested bitter almonds, but after a decade of placing my hands inside other people, I liken it to drying blood; the breath of a thing once-vital giving up its final association with the living. I forced a smile as I have every other time when facing this architectural reminder of something wanted and denied. It wasn’t that I still pined for the girl, though she has grown inconveniently more beautiful with years and children. I was just trapped momentarily in a superposition of states. Another victim of violent time.
The second drive took me in altogether different direction. I was cruising the Gardiner Expressway, the lakeshore’s ribbon, while I talked on my cell with a friend. I was navigating its narrow lanes when I was struck by a conversation my dad and I had had on this exact strip of road fifteen years ago. He and I would run errands together regularly, using the opportunity of enforced proximity to run the table on topics that were on our minds. We disagreed (mostly amicably, sometimes not) on philosophy, politics, economics, but we enjoyed the act of talking to each other. This particular conversation was so that he could outline how disappointed he was in my performance as an undergrad. I admit I was at an all-time low, feeling like everything I had ever been told about how clever I was had turned out to be hype at its worst. I was looking at two more years of undergrad at insanely high output just to have a shot at a Canadian med school. Or exile to the Caribbean.
His tone was soft as he kept us in the slow lane and outlined a plan he had for me. Although he never explicitly stated it, it was clear this was my last chance to get it right. I was mostly quiet, occasionally murmuring assent, when in fact I was highly conflicted and mostly just wondered how the fuck this had happened to me. In the end, he offered me the choice to continue in undergrad if I wanted, or to try the D.R. But this would be the last year on his dime unless he started seeing signs of the adult I was supposed to be turning into. That’s not an easy thing to hear from your dad if you respect him as much as I do mine. Not easy, but necessary as it turned out. I picked exile, and distinctly recall him looking straight ahead at the road, raising an eyebrow to a quiet smile and murmuring, “let’s see…”
As I drove the Gardiner, lost in that moment where my father laid out what has proved the biggest decision in my life to date, I worked something out. So much of my time in Toronto was spent on those highways getting to know my dad that they have become synonymous with our relationship. There is almost nowhere I can go in the GTA where I can’t think of an errand I ran with him decades back. I learned his whole riches-to-rags-to-riches immigrant’s tale on those drives. And in that process unconsciously inducted the city itself into my family.
Somewhere between these two images is a truth to explain my orbits around a magnetic center. Toronto as what might have been. Toronto as a connection to a mortal man I cannot imagine myself without. In truth, the image of a life as a successful downtown TO doctor has never gone away. It sits a renegade seed in the unaccommodating tundra of a pragmatic mind. Despite all the good that has come my way since; including a wife I met in that Caribbean med school, I am at times unable to resist regretting that early failure and the exile it created.
Pilgrimage is all I have left.
Now is this too much to speak of something as mundane as regret? It’s always been my intent to view myself as the hero of my story; I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t. Robertson Davies was once criticized for portraying all women as Beatrice. He laughed this off with the keen observation that all women are Beatrice. To think otherwise is to deny yourself her light every day of your life.
The unarticulated corollary to this axiom would be each of us is Dante. Yet another pilgrim working his way back home.
MTF.
Now that I am at it again, I am struck by how my ring of adoration has shrunk. Fickle bunch, you lot. Still, I am obliged to keep my promise and keep putting things up everyday, but it creates a dilemna. If you, as I, want to get this place looking like it used to, you are all going to have to get off your collective aRSSes [clevah clevah if I do say so myself] and weigh in here. This Boeing has started rolling again and Inspiration is clearly on the Flights Deck. I will know I have hit third gear when Mel stops by again, and I rouse Wawfuls from his feigned indifference.
However, my usual in[s]anity aside, it's time for a brief break from our A Year In Review omnibus retrospective. The following post was inspired by an early-showing I received of the post Fuel put up today entitled "Mecca". If you haven't read it, I strongly suggest a visit. Not that I am in any position to tell any of you what to write about, nor am I a huge believer in Memes (I treat them with the same general disrespect I have for Mimes due my long-held policy of Guilt by Free-Association), but I would be curious to know what my friends and fellow bloggahs consider their equivalent touchstone. Understanding this idea had to percolate for months in my head, if it proves too dense to navigate, who am I to complain?
_______________________________________
Pilgrimage has a curvilinear topography. We might look quickly at bodies moving purposely from one location to another and construct a vector in our minds to describe what we see. In doing so we’d miss a grander map which has this motion more truthfully writ as a circumnavigation, a completion.
We go, but to return. That might be the last thing a preconscious soul notes before heading briefly out of the light and down, down into a body. The idea of purposeful return, seems primeval and the more I look around the more I see evidence of this inexorable drive working its invisible levers in my mind. The name of the quintessential pilgrim’s respite, Mecca, is now a well-worn metaphor for any visionquest’s goal. I like that fact since it’s subtle evidence that East and West might have more in common than either is wont to admit.
This idea has been percolating ever since JEV sent me his thoughts on it as it applied to WSOP and the way we stream in to Vegas, the unlikeliest Mecca of all, with dreams of fulfillment (albeit of a more material nature) and actualization. The minute I read his take, it occurred to me I have known the name of my other Mecca. And it’s a pilgrimage I have been making repeatedly for the last seventeen years, with varying degrees of success.
I left Toronto in 1990, without fanfare, and without even understanding I was leaving her; a kind of break-up without tears because I thought of my absence as a business trip rather than a formal separation. For reasons I still can’t explain I opted for the lesser of two scholarships, and turned down the University of Toronto where I could have roomed with my closest friend and enjoyed 4 years of downtown life, in order for a fresh start in London, Ontario. The experience was memorable but not productive. I tend to collect friendships wherever I go but this is the one period of my adult life from which I did not take a lasting relationship. I was without a rudder, or much common sense, for two years and it resulted in choices that would make Toronto a part of my past instead of my future.
London quite logically led to medical school in the Dominican Republic, and I went from returning home once a month to twice a year. In that time, my parents sold their condo on the west end. They did it primarily to finance my brother’s and my MDs, although we didn’t learn of it until we were almost done. As a father of three now, I realize I have no excuse and a very tough road ahead of me if I want to hold myself to their standard. They also sold the house I had grown up in on the eastern tip of the diaspora known as the Greater Toronto Area. That turned out to be the equivalent of a divorce because much of what I had loved about TO was centered around that house, my high school crew and the idea of home in general. Without that nexus, I found my way back even less frequently once I started training in Cleveland.
Ten years and maybe ten or twelve trips to see my folks, rarer still my friends; often with a sense of regret for what was lost when I unintentionally said goodbye to that amazing city. My wife notes I still spend our trips up almost visibly stressed while up there. It’s true too; I hate leaving and it shows the entire time I’m home. Another vanity indulged incorrectly.
In high school I always thought I would end up practicing in downtown TO and living within that cosmopolitan jewel. Later I thought I would yet wend my way back when my US training was done. Now, fully within my own, I realize that dream is not going to happen. My attempts have brought me close, but ultimately not brought me home. And as all adults should learn how to do at some point, I worked a compromise that I can live with.
But I had not until recently uncovered for myself why a proximity to Toronto meant so much. Yes, my family is there, and I was raised to recite Family First as a mantra, but that explanation hasn’t satisfied in its simplicity. A clearer understanding of this unnamed pilgrimage came to me over two nights leaving TO. The first was driving back to Buffalo a few weeks back after my Dad had collapsed on a treadmill and I had rushed to Toronto to see him. Things turned out alright, although ambiguously. I was driving back to Buffalo in the drizzling rain at seven in the evening, when I made an instantaneous decision to leave the northern toll-road that lets you speed at 85mph without traffic, and instead took the 404 down to the 401 into the heart of the city.
I chose to drive through Toronto rather than around her. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but as the skyline unfolded heading east in the mist and half-light I was struck by her silhouette; elegant, lovely, and ultimately unknowable. Gatsby was not far from mind. I then had the scent of unrequited love stiflingly about me as I drove passed the lakeview penthouse apartment of a girl I thought to marry nearly twenty years ago. Garcia-Marquez suggested bitter almonds, but after a decade of placing my hands inside other people, I liken it to drying blood; the breath of a thing once-vital giving up its final association with the living. I forced a smile as I have every other time when facing this architectural reminder of something wanted and denied. It wasn’t that I still pined for the girl, though she has grown inconveniently more beautiful with years and children. I was just trapped momentarily in a superposition of states. Another victim of violent time.
The second drive took me in altogether different direction. I was cruising the Gardiner Expressway, the lakeshore’s ribbon, while I talked on my cell with a friend. I was navigating its narrow lanes when I was struck by a conversation my dad and I had had on this exact strip of road fifteen years ago. He and I would run errands together regularly, using the opportunity of enforced proximity to run the table on topics that were on our minds. We disagreed (mostly amicably, sometimes not) on philosophy, politics, economics, but we enjoyed the act of talking to each other. This particular conversation was so that he could outline how disappointed he was in my performance as an undergrad. I admit I was at an all-time low, feeling like everything I had ever been told about how clever I was had turned out to be hype at its worst. I was looking at two more years of undergrad at insanely high output just to have a shot at a Canadian med school. Or exile to the Caribbean.
His tone was soft as he kept us in the slow lane and outlined a plan he had for me. Although he never explicitly stated it, it was clear this was my last chance to get it right. I was mostly quiet, occasionally murmuring assent, when in fact I was highly conflicted and mostly just wondered how the fuck this had happened to me. In the end, he offered me the choice to continue in undergrad if I wanted, or to try the D.R. But this would be the last year on his dime unless he started seeing signs of the adult I was supposed to be turning into. That’s not an easy thing to hear from your dad if you respect him as much as I do mine. Not easy, but necessary as it turned out. I picked exile, and distinctly recall him looking straight ahead at the road, raising an eyebrow to a quiet smile and murmuring, “let’s see…”
As I drove the Gardiner, lost in that moment where my father laid out what has proved the biggest decision in my life to date, I worked something out. So much of my time in Toronto was spent on those highways getting to know my dad that they have become synonymous with our relationship. There is almost nowhere I can go in the GTA where I can’t think of an errand I ran with him decades back. I learned his whole riches-to-rags-to-riches immigrant’s tale on those drives. And in that process unconsciously inducted the city itself into my family.
Somewhere between these two images is a truth to explain my orbits around a magnetic center. Toronto as what might have been. Toronto as a connection to a mortal man I cannot imagine myself without. In truth, the image of a life as a successful downtown TO doctor has never gone away. It sits a renegade seed in the unaccommodating tundra of a pragmatic mind. Despite all the good that has come my way since; including a wife I met in that Caribbean med school, I am at times unable to resist regretting that early failure and the exile it created.
Pilgrimage is all I have left.
Now is this too much to speak of something as mundane as regret? It’s always been my intent to view myself as the hero of my story; I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t. Robertson Davies was once criticized for portraying all women as Beatrice. He laughed this off with the keen observation that all women are Beatrice. To think otherwise is to deny yourself her light every day of your life.
The unarticulated corollary to this axiom would be each of us is Dante. Yet another pilgrim working his way back home.
MTF.
posted by Iakaris aka I.A.K. at 10:39 PM
5 Comments:
Bravo.
Hope you're referring to Dante Alighieri, rather than that ghey movie, "Dante's Peak".
Nice post
Yours truly,
The Taint Hound
Fantastic post. Slowly but surely, I'm gonna go back and read your previous posts. Glad I found your site. Better late than never as they say.
I can barely read this crap.. If a bunch of monkeys shit on a dictionary and threw it on the wall that would be an Ick post eventually. Good to see you around otherwise though.
of course waffles doesnt know how to read, its not in binary. Thanks for the stroll through flight of Iak's past post it was definitely interesting, and can relate to some of it very easily (especially carribean exile). See you in a week.
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