Westward Ho! by Noemi Lopinto

This is my last IMHO entry from Montreal. In three weeks, I will be moving to Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. Ron Tetz, publisher of the Meadow Lake Progress, was crazy enough to hire me as an editor for the paper. I will be flying up there in late December to edit stories about whatever the hell happens in on a weekly basis in a community of six thousand people. When I try to imagine it, I see happy white people saluting each other on the streets, unlocked doors at night, the beauty and wonder of the country. Then I run out of happy images, and veer towards the deeply morbid: bodies left in the boreal forest, never to be discovered in the dense foliage; Boy scouts forced to perform mysterious rituals in the woods; Men in secret orders, hanging out in clubhouse basements--performing mysterious rituals. Women in denial about the whole thing.

The stress of the move hasn't effected me much--unless you count sudden, explosive crying jags, memory loss and a raging appetite for chocolate. I also have this constant twitch in my left eye. I think Saskatchewan is an ignored have-province, left unscathed by federal budget cuts. So while the twitch is annoying, it's probably the best place in Canada to be when the brain tumour is diagnosed. And there are so few people living there, I won't have to wait in line for surgery. And I will have a salary, so I can pay for my own CAT scans!

Speaking of cats, I need to dump one of my two cats. But all my animals have fleas. Last week, as a precursor to abandonment (and an incentive to adoption) I shampooed all my animals in the dead of night while the children were asleep. I started with the dog. Her pathetic whimpers attracted Milty, the black cat, to the bathroom door. I took the opportunity to snatch him up. Milty's soap-muffled yowls attracted Mao, the orange cat. I snatched him up and dumped him in the sink. A struggle ensued. His infuriated meows, combined with the wet duet trapped in the tub, woke the kid. Who insisted on coming in the locked bathroom to see what was happening. At which point all members of the choir fled, and I had to chase three wet, enraged animals through the house. It was all a waste of time though, because now they are all scratching and biting their butts again. And at any rate, I am too overwhelmed with guilt to give Milty away--even though I hate him. I am hoping the plane ride kills him off. I still reek of Ecto-Soothe.

My daughter Sadie is a teeny, tiny, seething mass of conflicted emotions. On the surface, she's excited to move. I accentuate the positive (saving tales of carnivorous lotteries and rope lynchings for later) like the landscape, new friends and a new house, horsie rides and skating on the river. So she's excited, but also very angry with me. The other day we were in the bath together and she had an empty shampoo bottle in her hand. She kept filling it with water and throwing it at me. At first it was a game, but then it entered that zone, the one somewhere between fun and war, which usually ends with someone getting hurt. She was incredibly persistent. No matter what I said, she had to throw the bottle at me again and again. And she had a weird smile on her face, which began in fun and slowly became distorted by an unknown source of raw anger. I ended up getting out of the bath in a huff, and she wept and said she hated me. Luckily, I had a Mom of the Year moment, and I just rocked her and held her until she had cried it out.

All my relationships have intensified, their chemistry brighter, more intense and obvious than before. Some friendships are bearing up--others aren't. My female friends seem to have the most complex responses to the news. For the most part, there is joy for me and encouragement, but there is also a sense of personal investment in my destiny that has surprised me. For some, the fact that I am leaving echoes some deep personal pain, of having been left by someone--a mother, sister or father.

Since accepting the position, I have been wandering around Montreal in a rainbow haze of emotions, ranging from excited to nauseous. I keep trying to think of creative geniuses who lived in small towns. Mostly, I come up with creative geniuses who ran screaming from small towns, moved to the city and wrote book after book about how stifling life was at home. (Margaret Laurence, are you there?) My own darkest imaginings come straight from my experience of adolescence in Toronto in the eighties, where I discovered rich white people are mean, creatively nasty buggers. You can laugh, but that was the last time I lived somewhere other than this city.

I have concluded that what forms the basis of my attachment to Montreal is habit. Sometimes I have moments of philanthropy where I decide there is something special about this place and this time. But then I realise that all over the world, people are having similar moments. Right now, someone is walking down the streets of Reikjavic, and the volcanoes are meeting the setting sun just so, and Vidjnok is walking next to her in that slouching way he has when he is pre-occupied with a math problem, and she feels almost on the brink of understanding something about the meaning of life... and then the moment passes. Or in Yemen, some guy is sitting by sea listening to the raucus cry of (God knows what--American Scud Missiles? Crows?Alligators? Whatever they listen to in Yemen) and feeling the same. It's all theatre, folks.

So what it amounts to is a love of the familiar. I love this place because it makes me feel at home. When you don't believe in God, a home is a good thing to have. But the city sidewalks will not mourn me, even if my feet have warmed them many times over. There is no reason to love brick walls and sign posts, stretches of asphalt like any other. The world is not a safe place, so we love what makes us feel safe until we pass on, either to the next realm... or to Saskatchewan.

I'll write ya,

N

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