Why Would You Go Back to Toronto?

For seven months this past year I lived with my family on a lake, on an inlet leading to a lake. We had two acres of land, our rent was dirt cheap and a wood stove was our main source of heat. I tried to capture if but some of the poetry of that profound experience in those “Dispatches” I wrote here on this blog, but in hindsight I see all I left out. I see where I may have been dishonest.

I left out how hard it was. I left out how lonely I sometimes felt. I left out that despite some wonderful new friends we made, neighbours we came to cherish and one not so new set of friends we were so grateful to have out there, we remained largely on an island, or an inlet if we’re being literal, so very far from most of the people that had been part of our daily lives for the last decade plus. This is something I so often long for, nay, need! To get away. To get far away. And yet it always seems I just as badly need to come back from Oz.

The Land of Oz, aka Tokyo at night, 2019

This echoes some of what I experienced living in Osaka, Japan in my twenties (talk about flying to another world lived in full technicolour and wonder!). The profundity of a wildly new and different way of living and jumping in with both feet to immerse myself in it, being so inspired as to often write about it and yet sometimes feeling so incredibly alone. To be so far from my nearest and dearest, from my community. The kind of experience I hope to keep diving into for the rest of my life, it’s just, Dorothy knows: there’s no place like home.

My gregarious extroverted son we sometimes refer to as our puppy. My introverted daughter is the kitty through and through. I am some strange amalgam of the two. A cat in dog’s clothing, maybe? Definitely an extrovert sometimes so desperate for company as I was last winter in Prince Edward County (PEC) teaching remotely from home, that I drove five days a week to Picton, the closest town to where we lived, so I could go in the supermarket or the bookstore and just see people, make small talk. When I found a co-working space I could go to write in on Picton’s main street eleven kilometres from our cottage-like house, I was thrilled. And yet it is that same supposed extrovert who finds having just two social plans on a single weekend day to be exhausting. Any event involving more than four or five people generally leaves me so depleted I come home needing to disappear to my room for an hour or more if I can get it. I don’t fully understand it. But if you care for things astrology related, apparently my being a gemini provides some justification.

Even if my sign (twins) is apparently governed by Mercury, it all leaves me completely befuddled feeling either constantly restless or else overwhelmed and exhausted. The Disney version, if you prefer, would have me either puppy social or going kitty solo.

The house we rented in West Lake, PEC, 2020/21

None of which matters except to say that the extroverted me struggled something fierce living so far from my community. It is that struggle that perversely had me conquer a Dostoyevsky I had not read (“The Idiot”) over that long Covid winter last year and I thrilled at the challenge of it, and the fact I did it. But that never changed how grateful I was to know there was an end date to our stay in that rural spot so far from home.

I lived in Japan twice. When last I lived in Osaka in my late twenties, I had returned to the country after completing my Masters. Returned to Japan though that had not been the plan. After over two years there in my mid-twenties the first time round, I was so grateful for the experience but ready to return the familiarity of home. Going back to Japan a second time was because my Japanese girlfriend from Osaka was still there working on her PhD and I wanted to be together again. On a more pragmatic level, with a Masters degree and little else, I could at least get a decent job teaching at a university somewhere in the Kansai region of west Japan. Something that would have been much harder this side of the ocean.

I figured the second time round would be far easier. I now knew a smidge of Japanese. I would be living with my girlfriend. and I knew the lay of the land. The culture. But it didn’t turn out to be the slightest bit easier. In fact, in some ways my second stint in Japan (also for two and a half years as it turned out) was far harder. While I had my girlfriend, who being Japanese gave me far more access to the culture than I’d ever had before, my job situation kept me at a loose end socially. My first time in Osaka I worked for a massive company of a language school called Nova, derisively known as the Mcdonalds of English schools. I was thusly embarrassed to be working there and gave little credit at the time to how fortunate it was that the school had provided me a community. I made friends with the foreigners working at my branch (all but the odd American from commonwealth countries like mine), had people to go for drinks with, a group of guys I started regularly playing cards with, and by the gift of great fortune, a guy who turned out to be my best friend that I met my very first day in the country and who I spent so many days off travelling the Kansai experiencing all that was new and strange and amazing.

By the time I returned to Japan at twenty-eight all of that was gone like a puff of smoke. All but one of the friends I’d met had left Japan and the jobs I picked up now working part-time at various universities were so piecemeal and disjointed that I never really developed a new community in those jobs and besides as much time as I spent teaching, it felt I sometimes spent almost as much commuting solo over distances of one and sometimes even two hours in a single direction.

My parents, Jerusalem, Israel, 1965

I grew up in a family of five, my father an extrovert in the extreme, my mother the only true introvert in our family and both my parents firmly resolved that we spend much time together, especially around shabbat dinners, but also in all the socializing they did. The wondrous parade of guests that came through our house on Friday nights and for Sunday brunches. This was their and ultimately my version of happiness.

I never pretended to my then girlfriend (now wife) that I would ever make a life in Japan. Even after I fell in love with the country and culture both - the true and deep kind of love that comes with time (I wasn’t the least bit in love my first year btw; I found it incredibly hard to be the white weirdo that got too much unwanted attention) - even still I stand by the statement I made so bold to my partner on a footbridge in Osaka in 2002: I will never live here. Nothing to do with Japan, everything to do with the fact my community was so far away. Though it seemed the writerly ideal, it turned out I could never live in a place where I would ever remain an outsider. (Visiting is another story entirely.)

If I’m honest, on our return from the natural beauty of Prince Edward County to Toronto this past summer we were dreading it, my wife and I. Not because of a particular disdain for Toronto. We’d have felt equally shitty returning to Osaka or Tokyo or yes even New York City, a city we have always loved. But the idea of actively choosing to live so closed-in, with neighbours not a stone’s throw away on either side, and certainly not enough of our own land for our kids to bike on or dock for us to unwind upon at day’s end, why in f*** would we return to city life, and with a pandemic not nearly done to boot?

Cut to ten days later. Ten days after being back in T.O. No exaggeration. It was in reference to something my wife said about the County that I replied, I don’t miss the it the way I thought I would.

Let be be clear, like Japan, my love for PEC now runs deep, for the kindness and openness of so many of its people, for its breweries and bookstore, for the Miss Lily the cafe and the fact Picton has an old repertory theatre, and for the nature that is everywhere surrounding - gosh yes, the majesty of that. But once again I return to the city I grew up in, not necessarily because I love Toronto (though lord knows I try) but my community is here. So are some pretty damn good cafes, and the ravine near us isn’t half bad.

When I told people that whilst working in Japan part-time at universities in Osaka and Kyoto I got paid a full year’s salary with more than four months off for paid(!) vacation everyone I shared that with in Toronto asked me why I would you ever come home again?

The County is undeniably prettier.

New York sexier.

Osaka more vibrant and energetic.

But turns out I’ll forgo the white sand beaches of PEC and the mountain-top temples of Osaka for a little home-cooked lovin. At least that is until the next time I need to get back out on the road.