The Stand In Birthday Girl

I got a birthday call last week despite the fact that my birthday isn't until August. It wasn't unexpected though and I knew that it was Daria as soon as I heard the phone ring. I was half on my way to bed but I picked up the phone because Daria is a special lady and her annual call means a great deal to me and I know that it means just as much to her. Daria was my mother's best and longest friendship. They met shortly after WWII as displaced youngsters in the strangeness and cold of Northern Ontario. My mother came from England and Daria from the Ukraine, they probably felt equally lost and foreign and maybe for that reason became best of friends. Years later my mother said that Daria looked like a little Russian doll with her long golden braids and her pink cheeks. Daria said that she found a protector in my mother who would stand up to teachers with a heavy rod and classmates who were ready to poke fun at her cabbage sandwiches.

Daria and my mom remained good friends. They moved away from each other. Marriage, children, travel and life in general separated them over the next fifty years but years ago, when I took mom out for dinner to celebrate her fifty fifth birthday Daria surprised her by meeting us at the restaurant. I remember that night very well. I remember drinking cognac with them, back at my apartment and listening to them talk about Billie Holiday and Chet Baker and Mary Quant and watching them evaporate all the years spent apart. It was lovely to watch. I don't think that I fully appreciated the kind of friendship that did not require maintenance to survive and prosper.

When my mother died, Daria was, apart from relatives, the only person I called.

So every year on my mother's birthday I know that I will get a call from Daria and her voice makes me feel that we are, for a short time, joined by the real birthday girl.

A Cold Place Called Home

Sudbury is a cold, cold place. And if you think you have some knowledge of cold then visit Sudbury in January and live the experience: the pain of frozen cilia stabbing your nostrils until you wince in astonished distress. I spent a few days in Northern Ontario last week -- for work -- not pleasure. I grew up in Sudbury but I'm not a Northerner. It's one of those funny places that chooses to reserve and bestow the distinction of citizenship only upon those born there and I wasn't. My first memories in life are of miles of blindingly blue snow, mixed with sunshine and squinting faces. Snow, sunshine, cold, lots of coats and sweaters, mittens and the excessive swaddling blankets of an eskimo baby or a saviour. I grew up in Sudbury but I can't say that it is home. I wasn't born there and about 30 seconds after graduating from high school I gleefully succumbed to the magnetic pull of the big city south, everything was south -- Toronto.
More than half of my life has been spent away from the North. Still over the past twenty years, on no less than three occasions, I have returned to live in Sudbury. Jobs, lack of jobs, family, friends, shelter have all factored into decisions to return to a place that once was the only home I knew. I grew up I moved away. I moved back. I moved away. I moved back to my family's house. I remember being twelve years old and pressing my nose against the screen window in my Holly Hobbie bedroom, listening to Blondie and trying to be patient as I waited for my real life to begin. A real life that would, I imagined, include cool friends, a crazy cool apartment, the perfect clothes, the perfect everything, all to drop into my lap by the time I was old -- 25! Ofcourse the perfect life and the perfect home would be in Toronto and I would never, ever return to Sudbury. The land of ice and smokestacks would one day be a distant memory.
When you are twelve years old the world is black and white. Even when I was twenty five years old I saw the world through a pretty simplified two tone lens. I finally left Sudbury three years ago selling the little bungalow that my grandparents had built, the house I grew up in, the house that was left to me. Home isn't a cool apartment -- it's the place, wherever it is and in whatever city, with the people and animals and memories and hopes that make you feel lucky and loved. My family is gone. Friends from childhood have long since moved or I have just lost touch.I'm old enough now to see that Sudbury wasn't such a bad place to grow up, just very, very cold.