A Farewell

For the first twenty-six years of my life, Toronto was physically my home, and even after living in Hong Kong for the past fifteen years I still consider it my “true” home. A not insignificant part of that has been due to the fact that my parents still live in the same house I grew up in, and every time I visit I end up staying in my childhood bedroom, eating in my childhood kitchen, watching TV in my childhood living room, and going for walks in my childhood neighbourhood. Even as I switched careers, went back to school, started a family, and built a new life halfway around the world, the fact of my parents’ continued presence in Toronto acted as an anchor for me – it allowed me the illusion of believing I could always go back to a place that was mine.

What happens to that feeling when the parents decide to move, though? And not just to another place in the city, but clear across the country? For years they kept up their Toronto lives, cultivating community and family even as their children settled into new cities thousands of miles away, but three grandkids in different timezones can be a heck of a motivator to relocate. So this summer, Ashley and I and the kids made the trek back to Toronto to stay in grandma and grandpa’s home one last time, and to do a final tour of the city I never thought I’d leave. And also to help clean up all my childhood junk and mementos (sometimes these were one and the same) I had accumulated over the first two-plus decades of my life.

Over a two-week period (and change) spanning the end of July and the beginning of August, we hung out with cousins at home, visited farms, went berry-picking, spent a day at the zoo, went back to Centre Island, explored the downtown area, and played in countless playgrounds and parks (splash pads being an especially big hit). I also made it a priority to get together with my hometown friends – the ones I grew up with at church, the lifelong friends from my university days, and even some from way back in the day that I hadn’t seen for twenty-plus years. In past visits I’d always miss out on seeing one group of friends or another, and there was always the idea that I could always just see them the next time I’m in town, but that option is likely to become exceedingly rare in going forward.

It was a beautiful summer full of family, friends, and memories.

Uprooting

I still haven’t fully processed the impending reality of not having a home base in Toronto anymore. Certain things I took for granted – having a place to stay, a car to drive around in, breakfast on the table every morning, etc. – now present a significant barrier to even thinking about what a future Toronto trip might look like. Old friends I would count on seeing as part of my trips back home will require much more effort to meet up in person, and other relationships might just fade away with time (I’m already not very good at keeping in touch). So I’m glad I made an effort this time around to see the people I wanted to see, though I wish I had had more time to touch base with others. And it’s not a final goodbye – friends shared upcoming travel plans to Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, with promises of meeting up whenever they were in town. My parents’ future city, Vancouver, is also a popular destination for Toronto travellers, and I’m pretty confident I’ll be running into folks back home taking holidays on the west coast going forward. It’s a new beginning for my parents, and a sort-of new beginning for me, and I’ll just have to be cool with whatever comes next.

And with that, the summer holidays passed us by. The kids were back in school before we knew it, meeting new teachers and new classmates, signing up for new extracurriculars, and just getting back into the groove of a new school term. With the approach of October comes the half-term holidays, however, and after the smashing success of our first boys trip last year, I began putting together another epic adventure for Miles and I – back to Japan, but this time to a city known throughout the land as the ‘kitchen to the nation’.