Sunday, 7. September 2008, 04:19:21
vacation, childhood, Baie-Comeau, time
...
I spent much of the day sorting through old image files pulled off the hard drive that became corrupted a few weeks ago.
Mostly just checking to see that I had not missed anything that I might not have backed up elsewhere.
Everything seemed to be in order, I'm glad to say. But it's funny going through old photographs. Things that you did not see before appear and things that seemed to stand out in the past recede. I found this shot of my son standing on the beach at Baie-Comeau, Quebec, in 2005. A picture I had not paid much attention to in the past.
Some of it displeased me, mostly the sharpness and color balance. It was taken with the very cheap and low-grade lens that came with the Canon Digital Rebel XT kit; I knew no better at the time. Also, I barely knew how to operate the camera so I was not taking optimal photographs. Blown highlights, poor use of focus and depth of field - all the usual goofs.
Never mind. It served at the time, and it serves now to remind me of my son when he was quite a bit smaller than he is today and when he was in some ways a different person.
Watching a child grow is like getting to know and then losing somebody over and over again; each stage has its joys but sometimes I can find myself looking back wistfully. Just as I did when I found this photograph.
You can't stop growth and you can't stop life and better it is that way. So, imperfect as this shot is, it is a window into a happy past. Fortunately, the present is just as good.
Thursday, 17. August 2006, 03:32:45
Baie-Comeau, Satie, memory, roots
...
Continuing what has been an unusually deep immersion into classical music over the past few days, I played the Jean-Yves Thibaudet recording of Erik Satie's
Sarabandes tonight and was immediately cast back to the last time I played them.
This was in our aging Toyota Corolla, that by this time had amazed us all by flawlessly traversing the empty and lengthy roads of Quebec province far north of the St. Laurence estuary. Indeed we might have trekked all the way up to Labrador City had the road not changed from smooth asphalt to dust and gravel.
But that was a couple of days past, and now I was killing time waiting to join the ferry boat that would carry us south across the channel. Parked close to the shoreline, drinking a beer, and listening to Satie. I remember thinking how appropriate this most idiosyncratically French music was to this doggedly Frankophile town where I heard far less English than I would in any coastal village in France.
I did not want to go. I realise by now that I have a very easy time of settling into almost anywhere that I travel to, feeling within a day or two that I could live there for months. Perhaps being relatively well-traveled when young, as well as making the major shift of moving from one country across an ocean to another, has given me this facility. The downside is that I always find it hard to leave, and anywhere that captures my heart takes a little piece of it and holds it forever.
A small price to pay, I feel, for being able to embrace so many different places - in many ways, I feel like a world citizen. Consequently, I find myself out of sympathy with overtly and doggedly patriotic people. Ironically, many of the places where I feel most at home evidence precisely this trait in spades.
So am I always destined to be the traveler? Staying, from days to decades, in places yet always a little bit the outsider? Always able to see things from another culture's point of view, and in doing so capsizing the certainties that seem to glue local communities together?
I think so. As with everything in life, a little is lost and a little is gained by doing this. But it suits me.
WIDGETIZE