Montreal: The End

I’ve been back home for almost a month now, but I feel a need to properly end and conclude the Montreal story…

Here’s how it ends-

At the end of four months, I learned what’s most important to me in my life. I learned a little more about myself and even more about Annick.  I fell in love with a new city while at the same time fostering a deeper appreciation for my hometown. I started drinking red wine and brown liquor. I grew to hate kissing on two cheeks and I learned to cook homemade pasta without clumping the noodles together.  I found out the hard way that theme parties don’t truly exist in big, cool cities and that Skype is the best invention since body-wash.

I found out how much I love my friends and how much fun poofy-haired, right-wing politicians can be.  I found a way to merge my loves of photography and clothes in a creative way and I was able to overlook my aversion to organized religion and appreciate and accept moments of spirituality and sanctity inside Montreal`s majestic, historic corner-street cathedrals.

I was able to see that while there can be moments of insight in solitude, for me life is better shared.

But yes,  I found out that I really can be ok by myself. That I wouldn`t pee myself and cry, basically alone in a big city. That I could pay my rent and feed myself and keep my gitch clean without anybody’s help……but then I thought-So what? Who cares? (as Joy Behar would say) How anti-climactic! Where is my Oprah AHA moment?!  Where is the grand revelation??  Where is my prize?!

I felt a little stupid. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who realizes after days of being followed around by three weirdos that she could have gotten home all along just by clicking her heels. There`s a lesson there…Something about how everything you`re looking for is in you all along.

In the end, it comes down to realizing that there is a difference between knowing, understanding and accepting.  And that is my Oprah AHA moment. There were things I knew that I hadn’t accepted or understood. Things I had accepted that I didn’t know or understand.  And things Iunderstood  that -you get the picture. As life goes on we work to align the three I suppose…

Probably the best and most precious consequence of the last four months is my renewed closeness with Annick (Mme.Glover #2) I would not have been able to do it without Mme.Glover and Mme.Glover #3  te remerçie. Mme.Glover est fière de tes nouvelles lèvres colorées. Mme.Glover will never forget our time together cooking and eating and walking at an incredible rate and I will always miss it terribly when I look back.  It’ll be SUCH HELL!

 So now for a Winnipeg summer- the best kind there is.  What`s to be of the fall has yet to be determined. In the meantime, the blog is back in town.