Why Kemptville?

I was living in Emeryville, California in September, 2001. Emeryville is a small suburb nestled in between Oakland and Berkeley with easy access to San Francisco, where I worked with Nicole at Millennium Restaurant. September was a busy month for me already. Our restaurant had been invited to participate in a large flashy gala event in New York City and my boss, the chef, had flown out with the pastry chef and catering manager to attend, leaving me in charge. Nicole’s grandfather was, coincidentally, turning 100 years old in Boston that week as well, and she too, had flown off to attend that event which meant that I was in charge and alone both at work and at the house.



Nicole and I had been enjoying our urban lifestyle, to some degree; our salaries were good and our apartment was cozy. We weren’t, however, at home. My family and her family both lived thousands of miles away from us and neither was in much of a financial position to visit often. This meant that what little vacation time we could muster was often spent appeasing one family or the other. We loved the work, but not always the hours and we loved the people, but eventually, to get along with people, relationships have to evolve, which is difficult in a workplace with a glass ceiling. The series of events that had taken us each to the west coast and together had been adventures of a lifetime for both of us, but the road west dead ends at Highway 1 and we were both about ready to start looking for another route.



On the 10th of September, I spoke to Nicole briefly; she’d had a great time with her family, I was sad to have missed it, there was some mix-up with her flight, but she’d figured something else out. She was taking a cab and the train back to the house from the airport so I didn’t bother to write down her new flight number.



On the morning of September 11th a phone call woke me, Paul from work said, ‘go turn on the TV, I don’t think we’re opening the restaurant today.’



By now plenty has been written about that morning by lots of people who write better than I do. And for all the ink and column inches it has greedily drunk, it is, at the end, just one more simple example of a day where someone woke up to find the world had turned up different, darker and worse than the one they’d put to bed the night before. For me, for 45 minutes, I wished more than anything else in the world that I’d written down a fucking flight number. Every minute was a million horror movies played out in repeated images on every channel and in my head.



Her plane was grounded in Wichita. She called, she was fine. I was changed. It took a few days to get her back to San Francisco, to Emeryville, but I knew before my heart stopped racing that morning that I was ready to move home. The problem was I didn’t yet know what home meant.



I had another clear thought that morning. I was sad. I was sad because I knew that whoever had done this, however clever they felt for pulling it off, and no matter how loud the voices of logic and sanity shouted, the war hawks were going to fly. If the plan had been to make the world, or even some small corner of it, a better place for anybody, by whatever twisted logic, I knew that it was for nothing because the only possible result of that monumental act of stupidity was that the war hawks were going to fly.



I am fascinated by conspiracy theories, but skeptical. For any conspiracy of grand magnitude to work, the conspirators would have to be incredibly smart. I, personally, don’t think George W. Bush is very smart. He is smart enough, obviously; he has managed to land an excellent job, but I don’t think his ability to reason is fully developed. His thinking is short sighted and he makes snap judgments, he is inflexible and apparently, from his actions, incapable of empathy. I don’t think he orchestrated September 11. I don’t think anyone in Washington did. I think the official script is pretty close to the truth. Incompetence is probably the most accurate charge that can be leveled against him or his people, and one that certainly is consistent with every other action (outside of political maneuvering) that we’ve seen them take before or since. This is not an excuse.



What is not in question is that as of that morning, my and lots of other people’s safe, bland world stopped feeling so safe and so bland. Nicole and I quickly agreed that we needed to get our priorities in order and high on that list was moving closer to family. Getting away from a city. Finding a home.



We didn’t move right away. We were ready in our hearts, but life wasn’t ready for us. We loved and still love our restaurant in San Francisco. We had met there, married there and come of age in our profession there. We are still in touch with the owners and some of our co-workers and still follow their careers with fascination and pleasure. We also felt that our change of life needed to include doing things we had put off; like a honeymoon trip to Europe and a road-trip across this continent. And at the end of that trip we knew we had a devil’s choice. Would we live near her family or mine?



Our road-trip brought us, among other places, to Texas, to Austin and Bryan to visit my family. Nicole and I both loved Austin; I had lived there for a number of years and she had been there twice to visit a childhood friend who had moved there for work. We loved the town and still consider it a second home. The trip also brought us to Kemptville, to visit Nicole’s sister who has lived here for many years. We went for dinner at a groovy restaurant in town, Amanda’s Slip. It was the first time since I’d found Millennium in San Francisco where I read the menu and said “I understand exactly what this chef is trying to do. “ I also told Nicole that night, “This is the kind of place we should open.”



We came for dinner and I stayed for the summer helping in the kitchen while Nicole earned us some spending money for Europe at her old job in Ottawa. When we came back from Europe we were broke. The first stop had to be in Austin where we were both able to work. It was a move brought on by necessity, not a decision, and our belongings remained in storage for the year we were there.



After much soul searching we knew we couldn’t choose between the two families. We loved both options too much to decide. It wasn’t what you’d think either, we both loved our native homes, but Nicole wanted Austin’s sun and my niece and nephew’s hugs and smiles as much or more than me at times, and I was as likely as not to be daydreaming about the little restaurant in Kemptville and universal health care.



But we did know that we were tired and increasingly afraid of the darkening clouds over America. My clear thought on September 11th had turned into an ugly reality, the war hawks were flying. And my opinion? The Afghanistan war would have happened with anyone in the world in the oval office, but the Iraq war was and is to all practical observation a political action designed to promote America’s business interests, and manufactured in whole by an imperial minded executive. Sadly, the whole damned thing was bought and paid for by a blank check of political capital co-written by a handful of extremists in Washington D.C. and Afghanistan and handed over to the world in New York City six years ago.



A lot of Americans agree with every word I’m saying. And a lot that don’t agree out loud know in their hearts that I’m right. Everyone who was living in the U.S. on September 11th was emotionally affected, it upset the apple cart and we’ve all got to deal with the fact that we’re never going to go back to the safe world we thought that we had before.



But America is not governed by consensus. It is governed by a government made up of slick political operators chosen by a majority of voters. I knew I didn’t want to continue living a country entranced by a fear-based culture being cultivated in Washington, and frankly, thanks to our unique circumstance, and given the timing, we actually did have a choice. We knew we couldn’t decide ourselves, so we finally decided to let the American voting public decide. It was simple, four more years of Bush and we would move to Canada. Anyone else and we would stay. I can’t say I’m happy Bush was re-elected. I can’t say the outcome increased my faith in America’s political system or gave me much hope for an end to the series of mistakes and the tendency towards incompetence that became so apparent 6 years ago. But I can without a doubt say we made the right decision.



Sometimes, in life we need a jolt to remind us of what is important. September 11th was our generation’s jolt. The question is, and what determines our value as human beings is, what do we do with it? For some, that means taking all that anger and fear and spraying it back out on the world from the barrel of a gun. And to some, to folks like us, it means getting our priorities in order. It means moving home to be with family, finding the kind of work that is fulfilling. It means committing to doing little things to make the big world a better place. Being thankful and gracious for the life we have, for the luck of magic that our lives have given us, and trying to spread that love around in the faint hope and desperate belief that if we could all react this way, we wouldn’t have to live in the kind of world where our kids have to fight and die as our surrogates in a live ammo schoolyard pissing contest.



We were in Canada for a nearly a year when we found out the little restaurant in Kemptville was for sale, and with help from some family and some friends we pitched in and bought it, and it felt so right that we’ve never looked back. Our lives have changed a great deal from that September. We see family now, every few days instead of every few months. I am thankful every day for little graces; my music, my food, my family and friends. I try my hardest to live well, love well and give back some of that love to the world. And I wake up every day thankful that the girl beside me wasn’t on one of the other flights that left that September morning. So, why Kemptville? Because, Kemptville is home.