Away in Nova Scotia

We're back now, after spending the last ten days in one of my favorite places. My wife grew up in Cape Breton, and for two idyllic years—1996 and 1997— we lived in a flat on the first floor of an old house within walking distance of practically everything worth walking to in Halifax. In those days I drove a 1986 Toyota pickup that I may have started three times a month. In those days I lived like my idea of king on thirty thousand dollars a year; I learned to scuba dive, bicycled the Cabot Trail, wrote for six hours every day, read all of Dostoevsky one winter and all of Tolstoy the next. Donna, in those days, waited tables, and would come home shortly before midnight and I'd have a fire going and we'd watch old reruns of "Law & Order" (Michael Moriarty lived in town in those days, got kicked out of so many bars that he had to move), and then she'd go to bed and I'd stay up until 3:00, reading, sleep, wake up around 10:00, have coffee, eat, write, work out, walk the dog, head down to the pub where I had my own stein waiting, have some dinner, listen to some music ...

We tend remember things better than they were, but those were good, well above average days. After living in the midwest all my life, I didn't find the winters to be that cold (and I had a toasty warm LL Bean parka for the cold, blustery days). The summers were short, but beautiful—memorable and rich in the way of things that end up being short. I liked the foghorns in the harbor late at night, the wind blowing so long as I was inside by the fire ... the rain, the green, the water, all of it ... it didn't matter, I grew up in Iowa, weather doesn't make or break my day.

There are a lot of reasons I could come up with for why we don't live in Nova Scotia. Family is an argument for and against it, to what degree depends on the day, and my mood. Most notably, it would be harder, and a lot more expensive, to go back with what we have now than it was to come here with what we had then. Moreover, we live, by improbable fortune, in a community in Colorado—Louisville, not full of itself yet but getting there one has to think—that is not only one of the best places in the country to raise a family but, increasingly, a cool, cat's meow kind of place to hang out as well (with many years still before it becomes the thing it never wanted to become). The school system is great, and so are our doctors, our dentists, our insurance agent, the people we buy coffee from, our karate school; we live in a great neighborhood that we joke (though not by much) has a waiting list to get into, have great neighbors, a great house that's too big for us now that we're down to four, and that I wish I could hire a maid to help clean, a handyman to fix, a butler to keep organized, but still ... a great place, by any reasonable measure.

And yet year after year, visit upon visit, I continue to miss Halifax and the Maritime Mode ...

Probably (I tell myself) because life hasn't been anywhere near that free of strain since. There's no living like a king on thirty thousand a year anymore. No reading until three in the morning. No scuba diving off the shore in cold, bracing water, followed by pints and cigars at Tom's Little Havana (where one can't smoke anymore, not there, not anywhere). I look back and think I could have gone forever writing on thirty thousand a year, but not when the need was ninety, not for as long as we had to with everything that happened. A smart guy, I keep thinking, would have known that, and accepted it, a lot sooner, and found something more financially sensible to do with his life rather than stubbornly persisting with a novel in nearly impossible conditions, in a civilization that has largely given up on novels, where the fashion is more to push oneself to the limit physically than to, say, read a challenging book (or even one like mine) in one's spare time—that is, if one has spare time, if one is that divorced from the fashion of the times (here in America at least) and still has that thing we used to call spare time.

But one may as well cry over spilt milk ... over his lost hair and the new ones growing out his nose and ears, over that May/September romance with the girl who really wasn't that special by conventional measures but that for some reason you've never been able to get out of your mind.

Halifax ...

Would it be quite a lot different now? Would a smart guy conclude that we're better off leaving our memories of that sweet life long ago alone, and focus rather on being thankful for the many fortunes we have right before us? Probably. Almost certainly. I suspect so ... and yet I suspect I'll always wonder, and continue to miss those late night fires, the cigars, lugging that diving gear over the rocks and into the cold salty water, the foghorns off the harbor as I closed my eyes and fell asleep.