Wellington Oracle

Photo byncbeets

I was walking through Parc Lafontaine one late spring evening when I first decided that, by some magnificent stroke of luck, I had moved to a kind of paradise. All about me people were sprawled on blankets eating picnic dinners and drinking tumblers-full of wine. Somewhere down the path a guy was beating drums. A man carried a child on his shoulders. The evening light caught the water spraying from the fountain in the heart of pond. Walkers paused on a footbridge to take in the scene. Small groups gathered under trees played and sang. A tightrope walker had tied a long rubbery rope between two trees; standing atop it, he gripped it with his toes, spread his arms and swayed. Deeper into the park games of Frisbee, bocce ball, volleyball and soccer were underway. This was the kind of park that I had come to think existed only in storybooks. Yet here it was, not a 10-minute walk from my new apartment, a giant backyard for thousands of people, heavily and variously and happily used.

That was last May, shortly after I moved from Ottawa to Montreal. Even as I wrestle with the Montreal winter—lethal sidewalk plows and all—my definition of this place as paradise still holds. Rent is cheap. I buy my Boréale Rousse at the corner store. I travel mostly on foot, by bicycle, by Metro, or some combination thereof, all of which is both easier and more visually stimulating than getting around Ottawa. One of my main thoroughfares is the narrow street Marie-Anne, which has gained a mild fame due to having been home to Leonard Cohen, and which, to my mind, epitomizes the aesthetic feast that characterizes so many streets here: winding staircases, bright murals, overgrown back lanes and liberal sprinklings of ironworks and stained glass. And wherever I’m going, I’m hard pressed to walk more than three blocks without coming upon a welcoming and affordable corner café, inside which you’ll hear French, English and possibly two or three other languages being spoken—and where the clientele will collectively embody a dozen styles, from couch potato to shabby-artsy-chic to high elegance. As I sit down to write this, I’ve returned from a homemade Lebanese lunch with a few new friends in a little flat not far from Mount Royal. Good food and company—and time to share—on a Wednesday afternoon. Paradise.

But my move here involved trade-offs, as I knew it would. So far—and for the foreseeable future—I remain a happy visitor partaking of this Québeçois bounty. Back in Ottawa, where I lived for 10 years, runs the rich vein of Wellington-Somerset, thick with history: my own, and that of the neighbourhood itself, which worked its way into my skin, my very bloodstream. I was there when the ground was broken for the new GCTC, and, years before that, for the Royal Oak next door. I was there when you could still run out to buy a bottle of wine around the corner—and before Lt. Pooley’s musty, cozy old location East of Parkdale burnt down. I’ve jogged circles through Tunney’s Pasture, wiled away hours poking through bins at the St. Vincent de Paul, and wandered the neighbourhood streets and lanes surreptitiously photographing people’s clotheslines. I remember life before Bridgehead and the condos it holds up, and before the scent of scones baking in the Thyme & Again kitchen flavoured a stroll down the strip. In this place I learned a mean roundhouse kick, as well as the names of native flora. (The black-eyed susan will forever be Hintonburg, for me.) I knit a sweater. Made friends. Weathered new kinds of loss.

Ottawans love to talk about getting out of Ottawa. Well, OK, yes, I got out. But not really, not yet, and perhaps not ever. Think Helen’s shawarmas. The noontime bells at St. François d’Assisi. Think: the insuperable wainscoting at the Carleton Tavern. Who leaves such things behind?

I was back in Hintonburg on a Sunday afternoon in February, hosting a reading from the latest issue of Arc Poetry Magazine, which I edit. We held the event, as we often have, in the back room at Collected Works. It was in that room, back in 1998, that, under the tutelage of the now-late local poet Diana Brebner, I began to seriously write poetry. (Diana lived in an apartment building just south of Wellington on Parkdale. From her 7th-floor window, she watched the demolition of the old Grace Hospital.) Standing there 11 years later, listening to one of my colleagues read Diana’s poem “Porthole,” I was struck by the following lines:

brilliance. What a grand moment, to look

up then, to know that in any place we

can be everything does depend on red

wheelbarrows, white chickens, the rain.

The mud and rain will always be with us and

windows of imperfect glass, squaring the

world to our particular vision, about to be

broken through.

“The mud and rain will always be with us.” For this, and for that teeming neighbourhood nestled in the capital that will always in some way constitute home, I am grateful.