If You Can't Find It, Grind It

Whenever I visit the Great White North, as I did this past week for American Thanksgiving, I am astonished how easily I shift gears back into my old life. The smiles are familiar, and the jokes are the same. Conversations begin exactly where they ended in the last email. Reunions aren't tearful because it seems as though we didn't really leave in the first place.

It was a really wonderful weekend. I revisited all sorts of former stomping grounds - my job, my hair stylist, my church, my book club...so many of the things that made me love my life. We hung out with family and got to go to Steve Bell, which was faaaah-bu-lous.

(An aside: where else besides Southern Manitoba can you go to a concert where the performer asks the audience to sing along and they do - in four parts, no less - because they've been singing that song in church for ten years. Happiness, thy name is an advent concert at the Centennial Concert Hall.)

Of course, there are little things that remind me that I don't live there anymore. I get excited every time I see a Friendly Manitoba license plate because they're rare in my neck of the woods (although that gets pretty old after awhile). I miss my exit onto St. Mary's because all of that construction on the Perimeter gets a bit confusing. I die a little inside each time I see the ever-encroaching limits of Waverly West.

And is it just me, or has the graffiti in Winnipeg - Crestcentwood-ish, Osborne Village-ish - been ratcheted up to the next level? We took a swing by the old neighbourhood and felt a bit like we were in the abandoned railcar section at the CN yard.

Nevertheless, when I'm there, everything seems to fit properly - the world in me and I in it.

It's when I get back in the car and head for what-is-now-known-as-Home that everything gets out of whack. The clutch stops working and the gears grind as I try to make the transition smooth but ultimately jolt jerkily forward with each shift.

But hey, all you have to do is get into fifth and pray that you don't hit any of the lights, right?