"Strange and beautiful are the stars tonight."
A farewell dinner in Pictou. 2025 is going to be a busy year.
January 5, 2025. Writing from the Alt Hotel at the Halifax Stanfield International Airport, Goffs, Nova Scotia
I’m flying alone out of Halifax tomorrow on a 5 a.m. flight.
My wife, Hayley, is staying behind in Nova Scotia. She grew up here and she’s moving home for a new job as a professor. I’ll follow sometime this summer.
There’s a lot of good things waiting for me back in Minnesota: friends and family, a lifetime and more of history, the home I bought and we made together, our sure-to-be-excited dog, and the best job I’ve ever had.
Last night, we went out for supper at a local place with Hayley’s mom. The conversation ranged from whether to build or buy a house to the state of academia to politics to psychology to people. Less than a hundred feet away, the North Atlantic crashed against the rocks that frame Pictou Harbour. I still don’t know if it was a sad farewell or a celebration of the future.
Both, I guess.
We were seated up front, right next to the stage where a man played guitar and sang.
The waitress had pulled an unexpected double shift and was hellbent on punching out by 6:30 so she could pick up her mother after church.
An extended family at a nearby table clapped as two-year-old cousins, the youngest among them, danced together to the music. The singer noticed the young dancers and sang them a song that wasn’t on the setlist, one that he sings for his own daughter before bedtime.
Friends of Hayley’s mom sat a few tables away.The last time my mother-in-law had seen the man was a couple years ago at Tim Horton’s, when she’d asked him out of the blue if he’d serve as one of her pallbearers when the time was right, many years from now. Caught off guard, I’m sure, he agreed. What else could you say? After we settled up, my mother-in-law went over to visit and share wishes for a happy new year.
For them. For all of us.
Hayley and I finished our drinks at the table while the guitarist started singing one of her favorites by the Canadian band Blue Rodeo. I didn’t know the song, but listening to the music and looking around the room and thinking about leaving and looking forward to coming back to this good place, I got choked up.
“You think I’m making this all up. But I’m not. It’s true. Most of it. And no, it’s not heaven on earth. It’s boring as hell in its own way… So why do I tell you, anyway? It's just this: that there are places we all come from—deep-rooty-common places—that make us who we are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again—and can go home again.”
— Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
There are problems with anyplace, I suppose. But right now, Pictou, Nova Scotia seems pretty alright to me.
It’ll be a busy spring, full of life-work and work-work and figuring out next steps. But it’s all for the promise of summer, and the good things that are yet to come.