Culture invaded

Starting out in Ottawa--not my first time away from home, but the first time truly living far away from where I was born with no chance of going home without considerable expense in terms of my career and anyway I couldn't support such a plan with my pocket book--I wrote home to my undergraduate honours thesis supervisor that I was homesick in the worst way.  He replied by telling me to read Thomas Wolfe, not the author of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, but a book with the inconsolate title You Can't Go Home Again.  This was the beginning of book ending things I couldn't understand with cranial looking stops made of petrified wood.

I think I got the basic concept--and tried to think how I brought home with me in my heart when I moved and could return to its real comforts anytime, but somehow the dressed stone of Canada's neo-gothic capital were nothing like the Rockies, and culture invaded, the way nature had for Auden in Oxford.

When Barry Cooper's medicine was too hard to swallow, I turned to his pupil, Tom Darby, who told me to try Look Homeward Angel, also by Wolfe.  I was to trade Barry's ironic detachment or double vision for Darby's thinly veiled bravado, which sounded like Hemingway.  Listen to Wolfe, Darby bade me.  He wrote standing up, writing on top of his fridge.  Pusillanimous Hemingway said the only engagement that matters to a writer is the engagement of his rear end with the chair he is sitting in when he's working and that of his fingers with the keys of the typewriter, remembering also that you can't fight 15 rounds on your ass.  That's what I was told.  And so I carried the emblematic image of a carved stone angel atop some forgotten grave and tried desperately to hold on to the home I carried inside me.

Thank goodness for Boushey's and snow peas and an early away from home Christmas dinner of baked salmon made by a partisan and a supporter of Joe Clark's.  High River was close to home after all, and occasionally there was a lesson rolled into my typewriter after I went home for the night signed Joe.

And so I fetched newspapers from the Chateau Laurier and chocolate cookies from the East Block cafeteria--the raw materials for his breakfast benediction--for Mr. Clark, and learned not to pass bureaucratic excuses on to constituents and fight like a gunslinger, without even the proper training for it.