Thoughts on a far-flung life

A circle. A path. A journey. A river. A carousel. A scramble. A vale of tears. A mortal coil. There are all kinds of images our minds conjure up when we’re talking about “Life,” most of them clichéd, and some of them decidedly on the gloomy side.

If we had a contest, you readers could probably think of plenty more. Why, they might even skip off the tongue. Life is a sprinkle-dusted doughnut. It’s a shack of woe, a lagoon of … well, it’s rarely a shack or a lagoon. We like to think of life as headed somewhere, even if it rarely gets there on time -- sort-of like Lower Mainland ferries.

The phrases “vale of tears” and “mortal coil” are sad, in part, because the image is of stagnancy or of being bound or trapped. With the more prevalent circle-path-carousel motif, we are always on the move, even if it’s on a wooden horse with obnoxious music jangling in our ears.

Nowadays it seems to me that we’re less on some sort of determined trek than we are travelling on a constantly shifting grid made up of those crazy people-moving conveyor belts from science fiction. The route may be snarled and difficult to read, but it’s teeming with connections, some automatic, some seized, and some dropped -- and, maybe later, taken up again. People move in and out of our spheres unpredictably, as we flow in and out of theirs.

Life is not, in sum, a bullet train run by the Swiss. It necessitates movement. I have no statistics to back this up, but it seems to me that we are farther flung than ever before. In how many families do all the members stay in the same city for generations any more? Maybe they still do that in other countries, but Canada is a land first settled by nomadic First Nations and then taken over by immigrants bent on leaving their homelands far behind. Roving is in our blood memory.

I thought about this situation recently as I heard about friends whose children are considering leaving their hometowns for university, sifting through options – U Vic, U of C or Concordia? After they graduate, what are the odds they’ll return to their old neighbourhoods for much beyond Christmas dinner? I realize that there are full-grown adults who live with their parents for years, but that’s still not in the natural order of things. That university degree is like a sailboat that lets kids push away from family shores.

Some friends from Calgary showed up in town this week to have a mini-break in Vancouver with their own adult son, his wife and their grandchild. Of these friends’ three adult kids, one studied in London and settled in Boston after stints in Chicago and Paolo Alto, another studied in California and settled in Calgary, and a third trekked through Africa and lived in Whitehorse before buying a house in Edmonton (well, everybody makes mistakes).

No wonder people turn to Facebook to keep in touch. It’s free, it requires minimal effort, and you can subject your family to your most inane or significant updates. And they, of all people, might actually be interested. Recently, I’ve learned about the pregnancies, house purchases and vacations of cousins from whom I would otherwise never hear, and am keeping up with the current obsessions of my pop-culture-nutty nieces as they move from being Potterheads to Twihards to Gleeks. These online updates aren’t the most satisfying exchanges – they’re brief and superficial – but they beat being utterly out of the loop.

That has to be why Facebook has more than 400 million adherents worldwide. Even technophobes like me eventually get it -- nobody writes snail-mail letters any more, much less calls relatives long distance. While most of my Facebook “friends” are business acquaintances and really, we needn’t explore that relationship any further, a handful of them are my distant blood relatives, and that still means something. I actually do care about their triumphant in-vitro pregnancies, even if I’ve only spent a few hours in their presence in the past 30 years.

Weird, that. Many of us grew up with grandparents, aunts, an uncle and several cousins in town, and the cousins produced more cousins (they were funny that way). In Ottawa, my family was never at a loss for people to invite for our Sunday roast. It helped that we were the only ones doing Sunday roast, so they were all fairly grateful.

While my brother and sister stayed within driving range of our Ottawa hometown, I flew off to Calgary, drawn there by my future husband, Stanley and encouraged by interesting work. When my parents retired to Sechelt, they drew us further west. Now that they’re gone, it seems that it would be a good career move to head east, stopping at Toronto, but then I remember those terrible, humid Ontario summers and all hankerings cease.

So I’m really the far-flung one, and on visits to the Ontario relatives I recognize what I gave up – that warm, comfortable intimacy that’s so hard to achieve as an adult. You get to a point in life where you’re past finding that comfort zone with new people – the one in which you and your family or friends can simply expect to get together as often as you can, you all make the effort, and drop-ins are welcome.

That’s what my parents had when I was a kid. We do have the great benefit of Stanley’s family here, full of warm and welcoming aunts and uncles and cousins, but the relatives I grew up with myself live thousands of miles away. I know it’s my own fault for being a vagrant, but I sorely miss it. It’s not the same, exchanging Woody Allen wisecracks with acquaintances on Facebook, as it is welcoming drop-in rellies to stay for pot luck.

But then, who’s to say that this is our final address, or that old friends or family members won’t once again heave into closer view? After all, my young cousin just bought his first apartment here, and he’s made it clear that he loves dinner invitations. That’s the reassuring thing about life being a sprinkle-dusted doughnut -- you can always focus on the sprinkles and not the hole.

 

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