So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish
I was reading Marcy’s excellent Lost in Your Inbox today and happened across a post of hers that gave me pause for thought, and just a little wistful remembering.
The last few years of my life have been relatively stable. I have been in Edinburgh for about three years, and was in London for three and a half before that, but I haven’t always been so sedentary. In the years preceding London, in reverse order, I managed the following: Cambridge – 18 months, Manchester – 6 months, Montreal – three months, Cape Cod – a year, Glasgow – ten months, Cape Cod – four months, Grongingen – ten months, Glasgow – three years, Manchester – one year, Vienna – three years, Singapore – three years. In other words, over the course of about fifteen years I upped sticks and vanished about fifteen times.
It wasn’t quite as crazy as that, but it was quite hectic, and most of the time it involved abandoning pretty much my entire life and all my friends and disappearing off with no more than a couple of suitcases to my name. Because of growing up in international schools where people changed countries, and hence schools, on a regular basis, I have seen so many disrupted friendships dwindle as well-intentioned letter-writing slowly tailed off. Consequently since high school, whenever I move country I tend to just cut the cord and go.
It’s very, very rare that I stay in touch with anyone from my past actually. Once gone, I tend to just look forward and try and make a life wherever it is that I have ended up and reading Marcy’s words I was reminded of just how many people I have ended up just abandoning to the swirling mists of my past – how many good friendships have been aborted, how many shared things have been forgotten, how much human kindness has gone unremembered.
It’s sad, I suppose, but it’s not a bad thing, I don’t think. There’s little point in stringing these things out beyond their natural lifespan. Most friendships are surprisingly context-dependent and there have been quite a few times when I have known them to have an uneccessary cloud cast over them by ill-advised and utlimately fruitless attempts to keep them going once the environment in which they first grew has ceased to exist. Nowadays I tend to just wrap them up in my history as good, complete entities and let them rest there. Some day a song or a coincidence or a conversation will remind me of them and there will be one of those warm, nostalgic moments where you relive that time for a little while, before setting it carefully back in place and returning to the present.
So it is sad I suppose. Or melancholy. But there’s a warm, happy core to the sadness too, so I still think it’s a good thing in most ways. Ironic, too, that I ended up marrying a girl I knew from high school and hadn’t seen for the best part of ten years by the time we met up again.
Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head
Michelle Shocked – Anchorage
Gene – I Can’t Decide If She Really Loves Me
Supergrass – Moving
Tom Waits – Shiver Me Timbers
ironic that she still liked you as well! ;O)
All those different cities… but you haven’t mentioned how many times you changed your name to evade the local authorities..
Well I did spend quite a while travelling on a British passport issued in Vienna and a Canadian passport issued in the Hague, which was quite International Man of Mystery of me for a bit.
And ironic is NOT the word, Euan. Fucking amazing might be more like it.
sorry, i was using the term ironic based on alanis morrisette’s understanding of ironic.
I.e. absolutely none whatsoever. Which I suppose is in itself ironic, which is nice for her. At least she got something right.
Mrs. C&B and I have talked about this quite a bit. She abhors nostalgia and doesn’t really keep in touch with riends from her “past lives,” college, high school, etc. She was born and raised in Central America until she was 10 or so and had to flee civil war, so she came to America very abruptly, without speaking English and without any friends from home. I suspect this has colored her experience ever since. She lives very much in the moment and does not have a very happy past. By contrast, I lived in the same house from birth until I turned 20 (late fucking bloomer), and to this day many of my best friends are lads I first met at home in the 1970s or early 1980s. I still speak often to a friend I made in kindergarten. My wife finds this extremely weird.
I was about to post pretty much what Matthew said about Alan Morris and her creative interpretation of the word ironic, luckily I hit the refresh button first..
I’d forgotten how fucking excellent that Supergrass song was. I suppose everyone knows the story about how, apparently, the song was constructed from two unrelated and somewhat lost choruses that were going nowhere, as the band couldn’t find suitable verses to attach them to. That was until they decided to staple the two unlikely orphans together and created something quite magical (if you ask me).
I can’t think of many other great songs with the construction:
chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-bridge-chorus-fade
Seems to me that you’re a Friends Reunited couple/marriage, Toad, & you should be onto their press office asap for a quick fluff piece on their site & a bulb pop photo op for the local free paper.
Incidentaly, what type of ‘at did Cilla wear?
If she’d tried to turn up she’d have been wearing it right up her arse.
And Friends Reunited is spot on actually. Mrs Toad has perhaps been the one instancewhen all this FR/Facebook nonsense of people desperately trying to stir up long-dead childhood friendships has been even slightly welcome.
Oh and cheers for the Supergrass trivia Dylan. It does sound a bit like that, now you put it that way!
Quite alright, a spot of music trivia here and there never goes amiss!
There is something in the epic sweep of that song that’s very evocative of moving from one place to the next. Followed by the experience of getting stuck in a rut after a while illustrated by the more discordant and repetitive “I’ve got a low, low feeling…” sections.
For a song that we’re told was found after a happy accident, It’s actually quite a stylish bit of composition..
Epic sweep. I’m retiring and leaving you the keys, mate!
It actually doesn’t sound accidental at all though, you’re quite right.
well thank you, kind sir, for the lovely words. interesting that they stirred so much up for you.
i’m rather like c&b, myself. i lived in my childhood home until i went away to college and still have a very close friend that i met in kindergarten. i am a pretty nostalgic person at the core.
i suppose it takes all kinds to make the world go ’round, you know? what if mrs. toad had decided to tuck you away in a memory box, so to speak, and not thought of you again? i shudder to think!
That’s what we’d both done, until we happened across one another again. As she said, she’d never have invited someone she didn’t know at all up to her flat in Edinburgh for the weekend, so the old memories stood us in good stead – instant trust, I suppose.
I realize I’m quite behind the times in replying to this, but I think I just wanted some time to ponder it. While I haven’t moved around nearly as much as you, I’ve done it enough that I’m starting to feel it in a bad way . Or maybe it was just leaving Edinburgh that got me so far down. The problem that’s definitely emerging is making and maintaining relationships here in California with the knowledge that what I want most is to move back to Scotland again soon for lord knows how long. A feeling of futility lingers no matter how hard I try to drive it off and enjoy things. I hate being this goddamn emo.
OK, enough moaning. Enjoy Mr. Waits!