My hometown

The drive from Ottawa was surpringly fast; it didn't take long to thread our way through the outbound traffic and the time was passed by my relentless picking of J-P's tireless brain. Thank goodness for good company and good conversation. Merci infiniement et a bientot, J-P. I also keep forgetting that Ottawa is closer to Montreal than, say, Quebec City, which I've visited far more frequently. Thus I arrived just as Mom & Dad were sitting down to dinner -- vegetarian chili, no less. A very pleasant welcome home indeed.

As I write it's a bright, clear Sunday morning in Montreal. The sun has a noticeably autumnal quality to it; it's hard to descibe, but it's the kind of light that if I had just awoken from a Rumplestiltskin-like slumber with no other way of knowing what time it was, at least I could make an educated guess that it was fall. Never mind that the trees are already several shades of red, orange and yellow, and the temperature is a good few degrees cooler already than it was just a few days earlier. Change is definitely in the air, in more ways than one.

Speaking of which, I'm having a hard time deciding if I really believe the old adage that once you've left you can never really go home again. On the one hand, getting together with old friends like Henry, John and Ralf -- as we did last night, dining out in Chinatown just like the old days -- provides a deep sense of continuity, of seamlessness. Oh, sure, the topics of conversation are periodically more mature (mortgages, kids, the 40th anniversary of Star Trek Classic, etc.), and there are the obvious physical manifestations (receding hairlines, eyeglasses, reduced ability to remember all episodes of Star Trek Classic in alphabetical order). But other than those, as I was just saying to Lynne, it's like I never left. We can pick up the pieces after months or sometimes years of not seeing each other or even communicating bar the occasional e-mail, as if nothing's different. Even if we have changed and grown as individuals (Star Trek obsessions notwithstanding), our relationships remain fundamentally unchanged. Local and provincial politics are as goofy as ever. Amen.

On the other hand, some things do underscore a sense of estrangement. The city itself is more built up each time I come, and there is always some new feature to see. (A big story these days is the recent removal of the concrete monstrosity that was the Pine/Parc interchange, near where I used to live in the Plateau Mont-Royal area, and neither of which I was, alas, able to see on this trip). The real estate prices here -- despite being a far cry from Vancouver's hyperinflated bubble -- are increasingly falling more into line with the rest of the world. And so it goes.

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Holy cow, it's nearing noon now and I've got to get ready to go out for brunch with my nephew Erik, whose personal growth (and not merely of the physical kind either) continues to astound. He's definitely one of my favourite people on the planet, and very much his own man. More on him later. I'm also going to be out visiting with a few other friends this afternoon, and I'd hoped to write a bit more on the topic of Montreal. We'll see. According to Air Canada's web site, travellers to Heathrow should allow 3 hours (!!!) to do the business with check-in, security and such, which means leaving even earlier than I'd anticipated. (I had wanted to write my thoughts about the [expletive deleted] 9/11 anniversary hoopla but that'll have to wait 'til later as well.) The next leg of my journey, the one that takes me to London, is about to begin.