After almost exactly one year I find myself once again in front of my father’s old laptop, the same in front of which I typed over 100 pages non-double spaced in the office of the Central Bank of Burkina Faso. The manuscript I produced is dark, and extremely emotional about how much I hated living in Africa, and how badly I wanted to return to Montreal. It makes me think and brings me to several conclusions. Number one, I still hate typing on laptop keyboards. Number two, my father really should get a new computer… I think this one is at least 5 years old. Number three, life has gotten much better since then and I am a better person now, in this instant.

And so I find myself back again in the land of my birth and a significant part of my upbringing. It makes me think of my youth. There is so much similar and so much different. There is a lot of which I detest about the United States, a lot of which I missed. I also get the unique chance to draw certain parallels with Canada, which after just a few short hours here seems completely different. Mind you I’m a downtown Montreal boy now, and here I'm in a hardcore DC suburb. Ironically this place reminds me lots of Brossard, a part of Quebec I’m not very fond of. I look forward to returning to my old neighborhood where I grew up thinking to myself that it is not quite as generic and geometric as Alexandria Virginia. The neighborhood in which I’m currently situated looks to me to have been generated by a computer. Everything is very homogeneous and straight, (even the vegetation). I find this mildly disturbing like the physiological climax in a bad horror movie. But I digress. I am here as a wedding anniversary present from my father to my mother. My mother is very attached to us her children, and so here I am making myself useful. My parents have recently moved into this house which although smaller than that in which we grew up in, is actually cozy despite the copy paste layout of this neighborhood. When we left for Zimbabwe in 1996 most of our belongings were put into storage and have only just recently resurfaced. The place is a mess, remnants of my childhood strewn about the floor. It is a bit macabre from an existentialist perspective. Destiny is an artist.

In a few days I will have some time off to visit with the Field Marshall. I plan on having him take me briefly to my old house and high school so that I can compare and reminisce. I expect the experience to have a minor impact on me, but I am curious to know my reaction. An experiment so to speak. Ideally I’d like to spend some more time here visiting these old emotions, but alas I have not the time nor the flexibility. Perhaps some other time. I’d also like to go back to downtown DC and look at it from my new adult perspective. In my younger days I was quite anti-American, but I think now for reasons which are not valid. I want to re-explore how I feel about this place from a just point of view. After all there is a strong possibility that I will come to live here someday, and I want to make sure I am still interested. And so perhaps I’ll not have time to make all of my judgments but this is fun.

I return to Montreal on Sunday just in time for a game. I look forward to that too.

Travel is illuminating.