You can never go home again...or can you?

My birthday is coming up this week and for me at least, that sort of thing tends to set the old nostalgia engine to rumbling. It also means lots of people are doing nice things for me. It started a week ago last Monday with a trip to Prince Edward County; my sister-in-law Denise surprised her husband Steve, my wife Nicole, and me with an elaborate plan involving fine hotel rooms at Huff Estates winery, reservations at restaurants in Picton and Kingston and pages of printed internet pages recommending culinary and booze related stops at an organic farm, a cider maker, several wineries, a brewpub, a cheesemaker, an ice cream shop, a beach and even Reader’s Digest’s pick for the ‘Best Hot Dog in Canada.’ Our whirlwind tour brought back numerous fond memories of trips Nicole and I took in California and Austin to each of their neighboring wine regions (I’ll let you guess which one was better). Visiting a winery’s tasting room is the best way to discover a wine’s secrets. You will always find the wine displayed in its very best condition, temperature, aeration and proper glass; the staff do nothing but answer questions about the wine and are therefore always capable of offering at least some basic information to help a buyer make informed choices. They also tend to know the culinary and cultural landscape of the area, as locals, and can help to guide the experience outside the winery as well.



When we first moved to this area, Nicole and I took a day trip from Toronto to the Niagara region and were just a little disappointed. The wines were not terrible, we just found them unadventurous and safe. I’m sure a few more trips might yield a different opinion, but after California and Europe, Canadian wines just seemed, well, like they needed more time to come into their own. Prince Edward County, on the other hand, was a pleasure from the first stop to the last. Perhaps the insanity necessary to build a wine region in an area that requires burying the entire crop to save it from the harsh winter also attracts winemakers with a bit more of a maverick attitude. Oh, the safe names like Cabernet and Chardonnay were still evident, of course, but they were often dismissed by the wineries themselves, as well they should be, as most of them were produced from grapes sourced from Niagara. They instead seemed more interested in showing off the newer grape varietals and blends, or the older varietals that were more appropriate for our cooler climate. The wines were not perfect, which is why I liked them. I once heard the French biodynamic wine guru Nicolas Joly speak in San Francisco; he said that he loved to taste bad wine; then, after a beat, he said, it’s the only way you can tell it was made by a human and not a machine. In my experience, some of the best and worst wines I have tasted have been made by the same person. I like Prince Edward County wines and am thrilled to find such a gem so close to my new home.



My parents arrived on Friday of last week with a trunk full of my old vinyl records. It was the missing puzzle piece for me in many ways. I started collecting records when I was about 15 and have amassed a modest but personally important collection over the years. When I moved away from Texas in the 90s, I left the bulky collection in my parents’ care (it wouldn’t fit in my rucksack), but on arrival in California, realized that I had not lost the bug. Collecting records is a very satisfying hobby; it is an excuse to visit second hand shops, garage sales and flea markets, it involves the skills probably evolved in our DNA for hunting, it has the reward of music upon the find, the lost art of the record sleeve, and unless one is a different kind of collector than I, it is a cheap hobby. I never even go to the collector’s shops where discerning snobs have placed inflated values on some album I will definitely find next year after Grandma cleans out Junior’s old room and will sell me the whole box for, I don’t know, 50 cents? Over time I built what I called, The California Collection. And my parents held The Texas Collection. In my mind, I dreamed of a day where the two collections were joined together, and as of last Friday, that wish has come true. I have often said that when these two collections were together I would know that I was home.



I was raised in Bryan, Texas; my family on both sides were Bryanites for at least three generations; I know that wouldn’t seem like much to a European or an Asian whose family has held their patch of ground for hundreds or thousands of years, but to me, it was home, it’s what home felt like, it was the streetmap of my nostalgia, the precise location of my ennui, my longing; for me homesickness was bryansickness, and it still seems like a mystical place, shrouded in the very mists of blah, blah, blah. Ughhh. The fact is, Bryan was a smaller town, it had some neat stuff, but it wasn’t a place I felt very strong about at the time. In fact, as a pre-teenager, I remember fighting tooth and nail to convince my family to move to East Texas when an opportunity came to buy my great Aunt’s house and property. High School was a bitter pill for me and felt more like a survival game than a learning institution. When my chance came, I was gone. I love my parents dearly, but the life of a Bryanite was not for me. I have and will visit the old home for many a year to come, but it is not for me. Not to mention that businesses have closed and opened, old friends have left, new people have arrived, and it’s not the same place it once was.



Many people have written on the theme that we can never go home again, most famously Thomas Wolfe in the book by that (approximate) title, in which he proceeded to piss off so many people with his frank tell-all approach that he actually made the title true by writing it. I don’t claim to understand the mechanics of nostalgia, but I am not immune to it. I feel longing and sometimes its name is Bryan, sometimes Austin, sometimes San Francisco, sometimes it is for my great Aunt’s homestead and farm, a place I never even lived but sometimes wonder about. It was in a small town, a village smaller than Kemptville, and I would have had a very different life. I wanted to move there so badly because it was near my father’s family farm, a (now) collectively owned 150 year old house we call ‘The Old Place’. When I close my eyes I can feel the smooth wood of the porch rail and the magical wind we called the Enloe breeze. I can smell the pine forest and I can imagine milking cows and hauling hay in that blistering hot Texas sun. I can imagine the sound of the old fiddle from the closet, strung and shiny and new giving us a mournful tune in the hands of some great-great aunt or cousin of mine before cars drove down the old red dirt road. I am nostalgic for something I’ve never even lived through. And isn’t that what nostalgia is? A ghost?



I am writing this in a 130 year old building in a country and village which neither I, nor my ancestors had any part in building. I am looking at my complete record collection. And I am home.