It's been surreal to see Petawawa on the front page of the major papers seemingly every other day, thanks to the Afghanistan "mission."
There was a while there, in my twenties, when I had almost convinced myself the place did not exist, except as a kind of hallucination that was slowly subsiding in my subconsciousness.
In a couple of years, I will have lived away from there for longer than I lived there, so I've been more and more nostalgic about the place. When I actually go back, which I do at least for a day or two every summer, I remember why I left. Even the things I liked about the place are being destroyed in desperate and stupid attempt to turn the place into a small-scale suburb, a town without a centre.
And yet, every time I get within half an hour of the place, I get the urge to spend a week there, just exploring. Following bike trails, checking on the bungalows where my friends used to live, digging up mouldy caches of porn.
3 comments:
I've had similar urges about (of all places!) Don Mills, where I grew up. You can go there, but you can't go back. It's a longing for lost youth, at least that is what it is for me. Or rather, it _was_. Now in my forties, those feelings have largely subsided. I think it is something a lot of people go through in their thirties, if they have been significantly disconnected from the locus of their childhood.
For writers, it can be the fuel of that time machine called the personal essay.
p.s. Why is Petawawee in the news?
Petawawa is like a benign, municipal tumour* growing from the hip of CFB Petawawa, which has been in the news for fairly obvious reasons. The latest was some soldiers' wives winning five million in a lottery.
Lord, save me from the poignant, bittersweet memoir-essay about a lost childhood, aka 'Nabokov on a budget.'
I do get sore tempted some days, it's true.
* I say that affectionately.
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