Losing Touch

There's a well noted phenomenon that comes with living between a couple of countries, in my case Canada and the US - it's been described as becoming illiterate in two cultures. While most of my time is still spent in Seattle, I couldn't begin to tell you what's going on in this city as far as the politics, and I have only bold outlines in my head of the big city projects and priorities. Are they still going to replace the viaduct? What's happening with the monorail project? Is that Nichol's guy still the mayor? How long has he been mayor? I don't know.

I do watch the local news in the morning, but it's FOX, so it's not really news, but infotainment. I'm a weather fool, so I typically know what's happeneing there locally, still - I don't really feel like I'm in touch.

Now every evening, my news is Canada Now on CBC, and I guess I'm more in touch with the issues that are going in Canada overall than I am in the US. I watch with a touch of disdain the Gomrey Commission spend more money on an investigation than the Sponsorship scandal that they are investigating, I wonder when the US will open the border to Alberta beef and BC softwood lumber...I wonder why the country doesn't flex it's muscules around water and oil and help the US understand it's place a little better. I don't know why Canada suffers us so much, but they do.

I'm up on a lot going on in Toronto, but there also, I know that I am missing that essential connection that comes from being settled. Like here in Seattle, I know the big picture, but the details are a little fuzzy.

I wonder if Seattle will ever feel like home again once I completely relocate to Canada, and if Toronto will ever feel completely like home, ever. I think once you become a wanderer in your heart, and I've been one for many years now, that there's no place like home, and no place to call home - home like you knew with certainty when you are a child. If I get really internal about it, I'm sure it started way back when - We didn't move a lot, but we moved anough. I remember at least three homes between birth and age 11, and home was always somewhere else. As an adult, I can count nine different places I've called home in Seattle. I loved them all - I cried when I left most of them behind, because it so true - you never can go home again. In this life, we live and we leave. I've lived and left more than many I guess. I envy my brother - he's much more settled than I will ever be. I guess it's just not the path God had in mind for me. It's a good thing I embrace adventure and can find in each place he sets me down, something to call home.

Maybe that's just become magnified over the years as now it seems home will be an entirely other country. Canada is not the US - not by a long shot - and it gets more and more foreign in comparrison to the US in the essential elements of how the culture thinks, acts and what it values, each and every day.

I wonder how much of America I will leave behind when it's time to leave again, hop on that 319 and not consider when I will see this skyline, those Olympic Mountains again?