Getting Older
Maybe this isn't the same for people who have lived in one place their whole lives. I know Deborah has never mentioned it, and I doubt that my other friends on the south side of the river who have lived there since childhood could share in the experience that I have had as a result of living in as many places as I have, certainly those of coming home. Perhaps Andrew could to some extent.
In the past 7 years I have lived in Pitt Meadows (where I grew up), Prince George, Burnaby South, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Nagano, Burnaby North, and New Westminster. When I was a little boy in Pitt Meadows, I used to go taboganing at the biggest, steepest tabogan hill on earth, Bonson Park. This was a giant bowl valley and the whole community would be out there every day in the winter time with thier sleds. We'd hop on and slide for minutes before stopping in the center of the bowl and having to make the trek back up the hill.
I drove by it today checking in on my brother who is alone in the house and attempting to check in on my dog at a friend's. The hills at Bonson Park are no more than 30 feet from top to bottom, and the steepest gradiant is probably about 20-25 degrees. Decent for a park, but nothing particularly spectacular. But when I was a kid it was the best thing there ever was.
I think as children we see the world as we want it to be: reality is used only as a minor source for our perceptions. When you live in such a place your whole life, the change from the sublime to the normal occurs so slowly as we age that it is not noticed, but when you leave and return, your memories are of the perceptions of childhood, of the world as it should have been.
For all that I am a person of not inconsiderable imagination, capable of imagining worlds and writing or painting them, I do not have the ability to live, as a child does, inside of the ideally created world of altered perception. This in itself is tragic, but what is moreso is that my disappointment with the world today is not, as I had thought it to be, a result of comparison between the world now and that of my childhood, but between the world now and the world of my childhood perceptions.
In the past 7 years I have lived in Pitt Meadows (where I grew up), Prince George, Burnaby South, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Nagano, Burnaby North, and New Westminster. When I was a little boy in Pitt Meadows, I used to go taboganing at the biggest, steepest tabogan hill on earth, Bonson Park. This was a giant bowl valley and the whole community would be out there every day in the winter time with thier sleds. We'd hop on and slide for minutes before stopping in the center of the bowl and having to make the trek back up the hill.
I drove by it today checking in on my brother who is alone in the house and attempting to check in on my dog at a friend's. The hills at Bonson Park are no more than 30 feet from top to bottom, and the steepest gradiant is probably about 20-25 degrees. Decent for a park, but nothing particularly spectacular. But when I was a kid it was the best thing there ever was.
I think as children we see the world as we want it to be: reality is used only as a minor source for our perceptions. When you live in such a place your whole life, the change from the sublime to the normal occurs so slowly as we age that it is not noticed, but when you leave and return, your memories are of the perceptions of childhood, of the world as it should have been.
For all that I am a person of not inconsiderable imagination, capable of imagining worlds and writing or painting them, I do not have the ability to live, as a child does, inside of the ideally created world of altered perception. This in itself is tragic, but what is moreso is that my disappointment with the world today is not, as I had thought it to be, a result of comparison between the world now and that of my childhood, but between the world now and the world of my childhood perceptions.