playing catch-up

I had a diary when I was seven. I think my record in terms of writing in it regularly was probably not as good as my frequency as a blogger.

Lots to think about lately. A good friend mine and of my wife, a former classmate of ours back in Montreal, has left the NCR, moved to lovely Whitehorse. We wish her well, I already miss her, and I'll probably come back to this later.

I'm (obviously) from a much younger generation of English-speaking Montrealers that didn't witness first-hand the mass exodus that occurred in the late 1970s. The dispersal of my generation has been more gradual, more quiet, more anonymous. And I admit that I've lost much of the passion that I felt even 10 years ago for my links to the Montreal English-speaking community, such as they were. But today for some reason I feel that loss.

It's been five years since I left Montreal. Five years since I've been living in a milieu that is in certain settings entirely francophone, and in other settings almost entirely anglophone, with only some token bilingualism thrown in here and there. It's definitely not the same. The immersion of the two solitudes here is fleeting, more a matter of convenience or necessity than of principle. Being an English Montrealer meant something that being an English Ouatouais-an (?!?) doesn't. And for every little personal connection to Montreal that is lost to me, I feel a little less myself. I'm becoming someone else, and I don't know who that is yet.