Marking Time · 28 August 2002
This is true. A year ago today I left what had become a life of perpetual flux, wherein time and the familiar seemed ever more contorted to fit available space; in which everything was a jumble, topsy-turvy, all muddled up.
This is also true. I left behind the place I’d been for 35 years to cross an ocean, everything I owned flung into two bags, to live with a woman with whom I’d fallen in love. Her body and mind overtook me. Her language chops left me in the dust. She lived in France with two wonderful, weird, whip-smart children she’d been raising on her own, in a drafty old house full of books, next to a sea of vineyards. And now so do I. Lucky dope.
To mark the occasion, and since some people had been asking to see it, here’s a copy of the article by Craig Taylor, published this past February in the Vancouver Sun, in which further details of the leadup to the move and its aftermath are gathered.
(Craig, in an unrelated but nonetheless good-on-you-Craig turn of affairs, is the sole content provider at Mcswy’s for the duration of this week:
To celebrate the upcoming release of the Fall 2002 edition of Anonymous Juice magazine, the McSweeney’s website is currently presenting a week of new Tiny Plays About London, England.)
I digress. It’s been a year; I’m still in love and happier than ever before. Every day I marvel that children, in the main, think with astonishing clarity and operate without agenda. I play with the dog. There is still flux, but less. I dress like a yokel and walk about this village, where there is one resident to whom, at every opportunity and entirely without playfulness, I give the finger. But that’s another story.
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