Left and Leaving

I have such a heavy heart these days. If I think about it too much my eyes tear up and I have to find a corner to hide in. And I can't avoid it; I stand on that street to smoke, I walk down it to get to and from. I think about places I could go to eat my lunch, places I could sit and read when my work day is done. I wonder where or if I will meet my friends. A lyric from another Weakerthans song hits me over and over: "A spectre's haunting Albert street." If anyone loves a city like I love Halifax, it is John K. Samson (Winnipeg). And Barrington street, like Albert street, is haunted by the things that it has been. Worst of all, there is nothing I can do.

The block of Barrington street between Prince and Sackville streets is my turf. It is my neighbourhood more than any neighbourhood I have ever paid rent to live in. And of course it is not the buildings but the people within them who create community, and when the buildings are left vacant, there is nothing to foster that community, is there? Brick and wood are assigned the characteristics of the people who inhabit them, and it is such a tragedy to look through tears in paper covering glass, to reveal empty spaces that used to be filled.

I first got to know Barrington street in the fall of 1997, when I worked at United Bookstore. The manager of United Bookstore, Dave, is still one of my favourite people in the city, and we still see one another nearly every day, for brief moments that never cease to brighten my day for our easy familarity; his relentless and fond teasing. We talk about music and books and people we both know. When I first moved here and only knew a handful of people, he invited me to spend holidays with his family. He told me stories about his own history in Halifax, a transplanted Torontonian himself. He still tells people about how he taught me how to change a light bulb. United Bookstore does not only sell books. They also sell junk food and cigarettes and bus tickets, so there were customers we would see every day; friendly faces from the offices upstairs in the Roy Building, who became part of the scenery; part of the community that I was also a part of, of people who spend their days in down-town Halifax.

When I moved back to Halifax in 2001, after my brief return to Toronto, I spent a couple of months waiting for Sean, my then-boyfriend, to join me here. He sent me a series of mix tapes during this period, that each included at least one song from The Weakerthans' recent album, Left and Leaving and at least one song from Sarah Harmer's recent You Were Here. It's remarkably coincidental that both album titles so explicitly refer to space and time. And if it isn't intentional, both records nevertheless feel like concept albums, exploring the respective speakers' personal spaces. I always placed You Were Here alongside of my relationship with Sean, from the basement apartment he inhabited on Woodbine Avenue in Toronto (the apartment that always smelled of bleach, as described in "Basement Apartment") to the eventual knowledge of his infidelity ("Coffee Stain") , and all of the good stuff that came between and after; like it was written for us. And while You Were Here seemed to have a lot to say about my interior life, Left and Leaving spoke to my surroundings and my ideas of "home." These songs were wonderful gifts, through the mail, from the town where I was born, to the town where I chose to live.

It is funny, because I have always had the strangest relationship with Left and Leaving. Sometimes, I swear it is the best album ever written. And on other occasions I am so irritated by its intentional cleverness. All last week, I kept singing those songs to myself.

The Barrington street location of Sam the Record Man closed its doors on February 20, 2007. I worked there for a couple of years. Sean hired me, several months after we broke up, and I maintain that it was the best possible thing for our relationship. It helped me slide into a friendship, our relationship changed necessarily by our new boss-employee relationship, and by seeing each other, all the time, in this brand new context. The store's closure was sudden and shocking, but I could hardly say entirely unexpected. Everyone who worked there knew it was pretty amazing that we all still had jobs. Record stores were on the brink of disappearing. It was a hard blow for everyone who cared about music. The building was a landmark, and everyone who grew up in Halifax seemed to have recollections of purchasing favourite albums there or seeing local bands performing in-stores. For a week my co-workers and I put merchandise in boxes and boxes on trucks and congregated, afterwards, next-door at the Granite Brewery to grieve over pints of Peculiar. If we were not all friends, exactly, we were all familiar, and of course nothing was ever going to be the same again. We would see one another infrequently. We would miss and be missed, and it was so sad, saying good-bye.

There are things about working on Barrington street that seem inconsequential but that are actually enormous. Buying cigarettes from Dave; buying my coffee from one of several people whose first names I know, at Just Us! coffee roasters; the deaf man rumoured to have been a former boxer, who asks for change at the corner of Prince and Barrington, who tells all the women he loves them, and jokingly threatens to fight all of the men. And until its closure one week ago, there was the Granite Brewery/Ginger's, where I not only worked the door in exchange for beer on many nights when there were performances upstairs, but which I also relied on to be a meeting place or at least a place where I could spend my lunch breaks in warm company, with coffee and a book.

There is another entry for the Granite, and surely one for Sam's, because they are too big on their own. But they are also inseparable from my experience of Barrington street. I was introduced to a lot of friends in that bar, and I got to know a lot of other friends more intimately there. It was wonderful to walk into the bar and see staff from United Bookstore, Sam the Record Man, Just Us!, Neptune Theatre, and JWD (where I now work), all enjoying the personal relationships they had with that space, and watching relationships develop with one another. Of course the alcohol helped foster much of the camaraderie, but I haven't had a drink in over seven months, and I still feel like a piece of my heart is being ripped out and trampled on.

I love my job. I work in the coolest used bookstore in the history of ever. But I worry about my security there, about the security of that street and the small businesses that make my neighbourhood what it is. I worry about the paper-covered windows; the buildings that stand vacant for months and years.

And I don't know what to do with myself. I feel aimless. I know I can call people on the phone, but it isn't the same. I miss the organic nature of the community that the Granite Brewery allowed. The best things about this city are vanishing. I miss my friends already, and I feel like my home is slipping away.

Left and Leaving - The Weakerthans

My city's still breathing (but barely it's true)
Through buildings gone missing like teeth.
The sidewalks are watching me think about you,
Sparkled with broken glass.
I'm back with scars to show.
Back with the streets I know
Will never take me anywhere but here.
The stain in the carpet, this drink in my hand,
The strangers whose faces I know.
We meet here for our dress-rehearsal to say " I wanted it this way"
Wait for the year to drown.
Spring forward, fall back down.
I'm trying not to wonder where you are.
All this time lingers, undefined.
Someone choose who's left and who's leaving.
Memory will rust and erode into lists of all that you gave me:
a blanket, some matches, this pain in my chest,
the best parts of Lonely, duct-tape and soldered wires,
new words for old desires,
and every birthday card I threw away.
I wait in 4/4 time.
Count yellow highway lines
That you're relying on to lead you home.

Galbraith Street

Like the speaker in this song, I've lived in many homes on many streets, and said several sad good-byes. But Van Dusen Blvd: None compared to the good-byes I said there.

When I was nine years old, my parents purchased a much bigger house in a much more upscale neighbourhood and residing there, as I did, until I was twenty, Edgevalley drive of course felt like home, but when I think of my childhood, it is to the red brick home on that dead-end street that I immediately return.

225 Van Dusen Blvd. was the middle house on a dead-end street, nestled in between the Tracado's and the Chalk's homes and across the street from the Lundy's. Delta Tracado lived on the corner of another dead-end street, and when I crawled through the hole in the wooden picket fence that divided our properties I was only a few steps away from the mountain deposited by the snowplow, out of which we would make fortresses and ammunition. Behind the pile of snow and the imposing fence was a factory that we only imagined. The factory at the end of Van Dusen, alternately, was easily visible through the wire fence, and it clearly belonged to Canadian Tire. It must have been noisy living where we did, but I never recall the noise of trucks and work as a nuisance; more as the natural soundtrack to the chaos of childhood.

We had a backyard big enough for a small metal swing set and gymnastics routines and the forts that my brother Geoff and my neighbours and I would make out of found cardboard boxes, usually acquired from the forbidden factory property. Geoff and I have enduring memories of the acquisition of said boxes. I remember how Delta and I would taunt him relentlessly. I remember asking him to sneak through a hole in the fence to retrieve a cardboard box I had spotted, only to turn around and tell my mother that he was disobeying her by trespassing onto the factory property. One time, Delta and I hid him in her basement insisting that the cops were looking for him and the property he'd stolen. We made him be quiet and fearful for hours while we laughed at his expense. On one occasion I even made him wait up until the wee hours of the morning to attempt to retrieve the soccer ball he'd kicked over the fence in our backyard during the daylight hours. I told him that it was the only time of day during which the guards were on their breaks.

But often, Geoff and I were on the same team. Such was the case with the ball tree we planted in Sarah Lundy's yard. The tennis ball miraculously sprouted beach balls and soccer balls while she was asleep at night. We were all friends when we skated on the rink the Lundy's would make in their backyard. I remember pushing one another across the ice in big plastic garbage bins.

Delta's house always smelled exotic. Her parents had accents and the Portuguese food they cooked made her house smell different from my own. And they had plastic covering their furniture! I don't know how that fit into their perceived foreignness, but it certainly was different from my own home.

My father would take Geoff and I for walks, across Islington avenue, to the very end of Van Dusen Blvd. and to Mimico Creek. Often, he called these "quests," and he created characters we would encounter along the way. Or we would walk in the other direction, through the industrial landscape, often collecting bits of discarded plastic that we called "sparklies."

Cats were a big part of living there. Xerxes was my companion for my entire life up until that point, and he even made it to Edgevalley Drive with the rest of the family. But there was also Sparky, the stray cat who disappeared as mysteriously as he'd appeared. For years Geoff and I wrote letters to Sparky and threw them out onto the lawn, hoping he'd receive them and return to our home. Instead, several new strays would appear in Sparky's place. My mom had a particularly soft spot for the cat with one green eye and one blue eye, whom we alternately called both "Whitey" and "Dirt Pit."

The garage at the end of our gravel driveway was painted two very uncomplimentary shades of green. (When I walked by the house a couple of years ago I was shocked to see that the garage still retained that colour scheme!) Delta and I plugged my portable cassette player into the outlet there and we made up gymnastics routines to Madonna's Like A Virgin and performed these for my parents. I never mastered the back flip. I can still feel the pain of landing flat on my back on the hard ground.

I remember walking to Islington school across busy streets, holding my brother's hand, past the subway station and the Ship Centre, up the metal stairs to Cordova Ave. I felt an immeasurable sense of pride and responsibility. We walked past the insurance building that my father had made me fearful of by insisting that if I went on their property they would paint me green. (I'm sure you've forgotten, Dad, but I never did!) Past Kenway Park, where once a year the employees of the Bell telephone building would have a family party that the neighbourhood kids got to attend.

There are so many other things. There were so many other kids.

My brother Ted was too young to have any real memories of Van Dusen, but I'm so glad that Geoff can still recall some of them. That is the best thing about siblings - having someone with whom you can share that perspective. Nobody else will ever know me like that.

Galbraith Street - Ron Sexsmith

I woke up on Galbraith Street
Where the houses stood like twins
Oh and even though the door's been closed
I can find a way to get back in

For in daydreams my mind returns
Like a ghost upon the hill
As I knock upon old doors again
And find my friends all live there still

So many good times to speak of in a life
But none compared to the good times I had there

The world looks so much brighter when
You believe in every word
Now I'm holding on to all those years
Like a tear before it falls unheard

So many goodbyes to speak of in a life
But none compared to the goodbyes I said there

The sun went down on Galbraith Street
I saw it from my childhood bed
As the red and gold brick houses stood
Underneath a crimson sky that bled

Carey

It's the summer of 1999. Joni Mitchell's Blue is playing on the tiny record player that sits atop of Karen's refrigerator in her apartment on Summer street. She and her two roommates have turned their living room into a third bedroom to save money, to all live together, so the tiny kitchen is where they congregate; where they entertain friends when they come over. And the kitchen is tiny, and usually cluttered with dirty dishes that they are usually warring about.

The weather is perfect. Just outside the kitchen door, we smoke cigarettes on the fire escape with Karen's neighbours and friends and we look down and across at the graveyard while Kitty's meows compete with Joni Mitchell's voice and the sunlight to try and figure first in this memory of this perfect summer day.

Everybody Karen was friends with was a student then. Everybody except me. But I would finish work at two in the afternoon and have free time like students and I was student-age, so I reaped some of the benefits of living within this young city, this enormous student ghetto, without actually having to write essays or study for exams or owe the government tens of thousands of dollars.

I was friends, then, with a ridiculous number of people who suffered from mental illness and/or substance abuse in very pronounced ways that were very new to me and also, I must sheepishly admit, very exciting. I was also friends with a lot of hippies. Like, serious hippies. The kinds who live off the land in places called things like Gandhi Farm. (Honest. To. God.)

Karen and her friends, maybe because they were in school and had that focus, were a lot more stable than most of the other people I was hanging around with then. And believe me, they weren't that stable. Karen would have gotten along wonderfully with most of my friends from Toronto, but I know she thought that Butterfly and Kenova and Skylark were all pretty weird, and I don't think she quite trusted any of them.

Karen stole my boyfriend from me, is how we met. Some months later she approached me at a party we were both at and invited me out for a "coffee" at the Grad House. I went because I was totally curious, and knowing Karen now, I am sure her own curiosity is what initiated her request. We drank beer instead, and the rest is history. A very significant chunk of my history with Halifax and its people can be traced back to that meeting.

I really liked Karen - immediately, intuitively - from the first time I met her through our common ex, in the slightly glorified rooming house they were both staying in above Bob & Lori's Food Emporium. But it took me a long time to really trust her.

She was such a King's student. (For non-Haligonians: King's College is a university in Halifax that's affiliated with Dalhousie. Its Foundation Year program is one of those Great Books things, and all first year students skim very quickly through many of the texts considered canonical in the western world. A lot of King's students come from private schools, and a lot of them come from Ontario. They seem to like to talk really loudly about how smart they are. A lot of them dress like hippies and have the kind of naive sense of social justice that is borne out of having lived a very privileged and entitled life. To be fair, they are also, usually, eighteen years old.) Karen would throw around a lot of big names in a way that struck me as being kind of obnoxious and intentionally intimidating. It also made me feel incredibly insecure.

But Karen was no hippie. And she was no entitled private school kid. And she was not easy. I know she struggled with a lot of personal issues. And she did some pretty unconventional and interesting things, like taking a semester off to go live in Yellowknife, NWT. Stuff like that surprised me about Karen. We spent one Valentine's Day at a strip bar (The Lighthouse, RIP). In fact, for a month or two we hung out there once a week, 'cause we thought it was a pretty funny thing for us to be doing, until it just got depressing.

Karen was also a gossip, and maybe that made me hesitant to trust her. She was fascinated with other people's lives and wanted to know everything.

But all of these concerns, every last one, are ones that I have about myself.

I think that, a lot of the time, I felt kind of together and responsible around my really messed up friends, and I think I sometimes felt like kind of an aimless fuck-up around Karen.

Mostly, though, Karen was remarkably easy to be around. We liked the same albums and books. We laughed at the same things. The same kind of curiosity about people that made her talk made her remarkably easy to talk to. Her education and intellectual curiosity inspired me to further my own education. So many hours over beer or coffee, conversation into the wee hours of the morning, and it's hard to imagine how we fill these hours in other places with other people we didn't used to know then, but so it goes.

The building Karen lived in on Summer street was torn down several years ago. They left the facade up, but it just makes the building look so shallow; it's depressing. I know the building was creaky and old and expensive or impossible to repair but who wants to live in a building without character, or quirks, or history? Not me.

A couple of months ago Karen came back to Halifax for a visit, from her home in Japan, and she brought her new husband and these weird Ramen noodle-flavoured caramels. We didn't have much time together, because there is never enough of that - time - but what we had was perfect. I could count on my fingers the number of people I trust completely as friends, as constants, and Karen is certainly among them. It was like those years in between didn't matter, or were inconsequential, to the fact of this unlikely, unavoidable friendship.

Carey - Joni Mitchell

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn't sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey
But it's really not my home
My fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy french cologne

Oh Carey get out your cane
And I'll put on some silver
Oh you're a mean old daddy, but I like you fine

Come on down to the mermaid cafe and I will buy you a bottle of wine
And we'll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down
Let's have a round for these freaks and these soldiers
A round for these friends of mine
Let's have another round for the bright red devil
Who keeps me in this tourist town

Come on, Carey, get out your cane
I'll put on some silver
Oh you're a mean old daddy, but I like you

Maybe I'll go to Amsterdam
Or maybe I'll go to Rome
And rent me a grand piano and put some flowers round my room
But lets not talk about fare-thee-welis now
The night is a starry dome.
And they're playin that scratchy rock and roll
Beneath the matalla moon

Come on, Carey, get out your cane
And I'll put on some silver
You're a mean old daddy, but I like you

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldnt sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here
But, it's really not my home
Maybe it's been too long a time
Since I was scramblin down in the street
Now they got me used to that clean white linen
And that fancy french cologne

Oh Carey, get out your cane
I'll put on my finest silver
We'll go to the mermaid cafe
Have fun tonight
I said, oh, youre a mean old daddy, but you're out of sight

Bad As They Seem

The absolute worst month of my life was spent living in a tiny trailer in Barrie, Ontario. I had just graduated from high school and September and university and freedom were so close I could practically touch them. But practically was not actually, and this scheme concocted by myself and my friend Kathleen looked like it just might work.

Kathleen's family had a cottage in Barrie. It's a weird place to have a cottage. My understanding is that when the cottage was built, it was still very much on the outskirts of Barrie, and that any neighbours were far afield and fellow cottagers. But by the time I was introduced to Kathleen's cottage, it looked like a fairly rustic but basically ordinary house on an ordinary suburban street. It was just a couple of blocks away from the lake, but it was equally close to the Loblaws. We didn't spend much time in the cottage, though, except to make use of its indoor plumbing. The cottage was used not only by Kathleen's immediate family but by aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents as well, so our residence thereabouts was conditional on not actually staying in the cottage. We lived in the trailer out back.

I had always thought it would be cool to live in a trailer. I really don't anymore. The trailer Kathleen and I shared was especially tiny; one of those little metal boxes where the one bed folds down to become the kitchen table, and the other bed turns into the sofa. The tiny refrigerator worked, and we kept out food there, but when we wanted to make meals we had to transport the ingredients into the cottage itself. The toilet didn't work, either. Nor did the sink. The trailer was really only practical for sleeping in.

My mom later confessed that she never would have allowed me to move to Barrie if she'd actually thought we'd be able to find jobs there. But we had; both of us were hired to work at Taco Bell, where we suffered all the degradation that accompanies working in a fast food restaurant. We additionally suffered a sexist manager who didn't let girls work the deep fryer; instead both Kathleen and I were on the front line - taking orders and cleaning the plastic tables.

I honestly don't remember much anymore about the month we spent in Barrie. Little incidents are recalled like snapshots. That time we had a "party" and invited some people we worked with over to drink beer and listen to music. A dozen of my cds were stolen that night. There was the oasis-like evening Kathleen and I spent singing Christmas carols in the public bathroom down by the lake.

Kathleen claimed to have food poisoning, and she took a week off work. I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now, but I don't know much about Kathleen, and I really didn't then, either. A few years ago a friend of mine made a comment - completely unrelated - about someone else whose closest friends all seemed to live far away. "Well of course she thinks they're her best friends," this person observed, "It's so easy to be friends with someone you never see." I'd never thought about that before, but it immediately made me think of Kathleen. Her two best friends were childhood friends. Neither of them knew much about the actual events of her life. One of them, Kathleen confessed, would have been horrified to know about some of the things she had done. One of these friends lived in Barrie, but the two of them didn't see each other at all that month. Of course it hurt her heart. And there were other things going on with Kathleen, as well. She was miserable, uncommunicative, probably clinically depressed.

But I wasn't old enough or experienced enough to know how to deal with Kathleen's allusions or depression or secrecy, and she wasn't comfortable enough to be honest with me. That little tin box just felt like resentment and the ghost of a friendship.

The way we left things makes a good story, but there was nothing good about the experience we kind of shared. And I got off comparatively easy. If Kathleen is anything like who she was when she was eighteen I'm sure she's haunted still by things I've never known.

We had a stupid fight. I have no idea what it was about, but having had enough of Kathleen's bitterness and coldness and negativity I finally told her to "Fuck off," to which she responded, "Don't ever tell me to fuck off in my trailer." I was bawling my eyes out as I telephoned my mom at two o'clock in the morning and asked her to come pick us up. We kind of made up as we sat there waiting for the sight of my mom's headlights. Or at least we reached an understanding about how some things are just insurmountable. I really loved Kathleen, but we weren't ever really friends.

All month long, I listened to Hayden's little indie cassette in my yellow Sony sports walkman; taking the bus to work, walking to and from the grocery store. I obviously can't blame the dirgey tone of that album for my misery, but it sure didn't help. And yet, it was perfect. I just wanted to wallow, and Hayden did it for me, that's for sure.

Bad as they Seem - Hayden

Girl of my dreams...
Things are as bad as they seem
She is only sixteen
That's why she's only a dream
Woman of my dreams...
Lives right down my street
Has a daughter who's sixteen
That's why she's only a dream

What do I do this for?
Got to get out some more
Go down to the grocery store
Meet someone I'll adore
Someone who'll make me laugh
Someone to be my better half
Keep me warm under the sack
Share with me my midnight snack

Job of my dreams...
Things are as bad as they seem
Working where I did at fourteen
Making less pay it seems

Chorus

House of my dreams...
Things are as bad as they seem
My parents' house I'll stay for free
Until I'm at least fourty-three

Merry Christmas (I Love You)

The best Christmas album to come out in this millennium is, I think, Hawksley Workman's "Almost A Full Moon." In this, he celebrates family and friends and the holiday season. This song in particular speaks to the warmth and love that exists despite the unexpected and tragic events that happen in the world.

I'm not going home for Christmas this year. "Home" in this instance meaning where my mom lives. I won't be waiting up with my brothers until midnight or one in the morning to sneak downstairs to open stockings that "Santa" has just recently filled for us with Archie comics, clementines and Kinder surprise eggs. I won't be going to Burlington to see Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Barb and Uncle Peter and Sam and Alex, and to not eat turkey and cranberry sauce but scarf down mashed potatoes and stovetop stuffing. I won't be hearing Grandpa's recitation of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" or singing carols with my mom and whomever else can be convinced, around the piano.

My brother Geoff will likely not be there to wait up for stockings either. He's just moved into a new apartment with his new wife Patricia. And my brother Ted won't arrive in Toronto until 11:30 am Christmas Day. There was no Chester family dinner at the Old Mill restaurant this year. And Sean lives in PEI this season, so my Christmas mix making was even independent of him.

But on Christmas Eve I will be seeing my brother Ted and his fiance Hayley at my Dad's house in Porter's Lake, where he lives with his wife Susan. Christmas always manages to feel Christmasey, wherever I am. I feel blessed.

I meant to write all kinds of blog entries about Christmas songs this month, but shopping and work and house cleaning has left me with little free time, and, I suppose, I just haven't felt the exactly right kind of inspiration for writing as much as I'd like.

Friends and family near and far: I wish you all Happy Holidays. I wish we could all be together. You're dear to me and in my thoughts and my heart.

Merry Christmas (I Love You) - Hawksley Workman

If god takes you he leaves
a huge footprint of love
and kindness behind
which is where you once stood

And I know you're afraid
to get on the plane
after what happened that day
and selfishly I want you here in my way

But animals come
and animals go
and love is just a laundry line
we hang on until

we're dried out by the sun
and when you think your turn is done
you end up getting dirty
and it's all again begun

Now words i think are just
a noisy dirty wind
makes the trouble we get in
so why do we speak

Now we made another war,
that's what men are good for
men with stupid insecurities
and not a lot more

And satisfied they try
its written about again
but who the hell reads history?
apparently not men

'Cause nothing's guaranteed
except the politics of need
did the Romans see the ship go down
or were they asleep?

I shouldn't expect to live
and I shouldn't expect to die
but I wouldnt mind being beside you, dear
on that laundry line to dry

And for my grandma and my brother
my father and my mother
and you my sweetest lover
to you all I will say

Merry Christmas I love you
and god is above you
Merry Christmas I love you
and god is above you

Merry Christmas I love you

Fairytale of New York

Fairytale of New York is my A#1 absolute favourite Christmas song in the history of ever. No two ways about it. This is a very informed claim, having enthusiastically sifted through thousands of versions of hundreds of Christmas songs, because I am weird like that. And because, thankfully, Sean is weird like that, and introduced me to the whole Christmas music phenomenon.

He did not, however, introduce me to this song.

I get kind of pissed off by people who make the claim that this hardly counts as a Christmas song because said people feel they can listen to it all year round. It's a very derogatory comment to make about Christmas music. But truth be told, my formative and best memories of "Fairytale of New York" are of Toronto summer nights spent dancing sloppily, drunkenly, and with Justin, to this song at the James Joyce Pub, strummed by that guy who would play all of our requests. For us, he played The Beatles, David Bowie, Stan Rogers, and the Pogues. Now, I mind the Toronto summer heat, but then I never did, and for reveling in it there was no better companion than my dear friend and very first drinking buddy.

Justin and I had a very easy relationship that was sometimes made complicated by our youth, our sensitivities, our genders, and our unabashed enthusiasms that occasionally got tricky with our tendencies to go hard rather than going home. I remember a particularly sobering and difficult conversation at Hob Nob Donuts following one such evening. I remember it like I was approaching the end of something that I needed to have in my life. I remember feeling like I knew that we could never go back to the way things were; the way things were when our friendship was uncomplicated by things that should have been left out of him and I. It was okay, though. We were okay. We repeated some of the same mistakes I suppose; but no, they weren't really mistakes - just growing pains I guess. And I think we learned through one another a lot of what we really wanted.

I also think about Justin when I think about Christmas, though the soundtrack to our Christmases together would have been far less inspiring than the soundtracks to our summers. We began a few consecutive Christmases at Country Style Donuts at Dundas and Islington, it being the only place open so late on Christmas Eve night, and I'm sure that whatever godawful music they were playing there was entirely appropriate to a suburban donut store franchise. These evenings would follow our tradition of tobogganing at Centennial Hill with our brothers.

Justin's mom sold her house on Saskatoon rd. several years ago. He has no family left in Etobicoke. My mom lives on Kipling Avenue, now, in an area that's fairly close to the home I grew up in on Edgevalley Drive, but in a house that is not quite my home.

I don't get to see Justin much anymore. It's been a couple of years since his last visit to Halifax, and now when I go "home" he's not one of the people I get to see. He has his own house with his wife and a dog (!) in the Ottawa Valley. I've never even seen it. We hardly ever talk on the phone, and the rare emails we send are fairly concise. Justin has always been sparing with his words. He is, through and through, a man of action.

The closest friends I had in high school were Justin, Katherine, and Tim, and they remain, despite distance and generally pretty shoddy upkeep, three of my closest friends in the world, to my mind at least. They are all very good with words, but Justin has never ever needed to reassure me. Not even that one time I thought he did. He is one of the few people in the world, like family, whom I know will always love me; and he does love me, in his understated and very loyal Justin way, just for being me.

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

Heart of Gold

I assume that anyone who ever reads this blog is also a friend of mine and therefore probably knows that I'm no Neil Young fan. I recognize this as being kind of quirky. I sometimes go so far as to identify my indifference towards Neil Young as a character flaw. Because, like, everyone whose musical taste I respect is into Neil Young. It's not just his voice that irked me, though his voice was definitely a part of it. No, it was his actual songs. I thought they were boring; that they didn't - to steal Sean's preferred description - "swing." Admittedly, I never delved too deep, but I've also been exposed to more than just the hits. I'd listened to "On the Beach" and "Tonight's the Night" and "Harvest" in their entirety, in someones vain attempt to convert me. And I didn't hate Neil Young's music. I wouldn't get up and leave like I would with The Doors or Soundgarden or Joan frickin' Baez. I just felt pretty meh about the guy. I did like the songs "The Needle and the Damage Done" and "Thrasher," though. That's as much as I would give.

I nevertheless spent $75 to see Neil Young play at the Halifax Metro Centre last night. I went for the opening band, Wilco, really, but I did indeed stay for Neil Young, and a lot of his set was pretty boring, but a lot of it was pretty magical, too. I don't really want to write a concert review here; I just want to talk about my reception of "Heart of Gold."

I bet I've heard "Heart of Gold" like five hundred times. On car stereos, in shopping malls, at friend's houses, in pubs, at open mic. nights. It's one of the first songs I ever learned how to play on the guitar. But last night, watching Neil Young play this song on stage, it was like I had never heard it before. I was blown away. I was reminded of hearing Johnny Cash's version, on the last of the American Recordings, of Ian and Sylvia Tyson's "Four Strong Winds." I couldn't shut up about what an amazing song that was. Like it was something new. For some reason, "Heart of Gold" finally hit me last night, in its simple message and phrasing, in the way Neil Young sang over the chords he played on his acoustic guitar. I even got his voice. What an earnest, simple, beautiful song. I love it.

Heart of Gold - Neil Young

I want to live,I want to give

I've been a miner for a heart of gold.

It's these expressions I never give

That keep me searching for a heart of gold

And I'm getting old.

Keeps me searching for a heart of gold

And I'm getting old.

I've been to Hollywood, I've been to Redwood,

I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold

I've been in my mind, its such a fine line

That keeps me searching for a heart of gold

And I'm getting old.

Keeps me searching for a heart of gold

And Im getting old.

Keep me searching for a heart of gold

You keep me searching for a heart of gold

And Im getting old.

I've been a miner for a heart of gold.