Calgary 2.0
Missives from May and early June
It’s been a month since I have written anything here.
I’m currently in Calgary, in a small studio apartment my husband and I rented until the apartment we signed a lease for is ready in July. I picked him up at the airport last Monday, looking for the tallest man coming through the doors. His bushy beard and tired, bright eyes, and his command that we go get pho straight away made our month apart feel like morning mist, already dissolving. Here we are, in this wee space, together again. A busy ground squirrel colony rules over an empty corner lot, and when the wind is right I can hear their alarm calls. There is a large, fragrant lilac tree that is going nuts outside the little porch we’ve got, and within it lives three magpies, all three with much to say.
Two fledgling magpies scream and screech at all hours of the day, starting when the sun comes up and going until after it has retired. The parent is always nearby, screeching as well.1 Magpies are smart, so although I was tempted to shoo them away, they’d likely just go for my eyeballs. They have already covered the back window of my van in bird shit. They are one of those things that we just have to tolerate - and the Earth has tolerated so much human nonsense, I’ll let the magpies have their due. (The three shrill rat dogs next door do not get these magnanimous feelings wasted on them.)
Being back in Calgary feels right this time, thank goodness. The Bow River is fat and fast with run-off, cold and brown. The Ship & Anchor pub is the same, woody and busy and servers rushing around, the Guinness dark and delicious, the light coming in like we’re in an old, slightly smoky painting. The apartment we will soon move into is in a quiet area near the Elbow River, and it’s got big windows and is near a little park.
The area we are staying in now is Forest Lawn. This is a part of the city where Calgary’s immigrant background (almost a third of the people in this city are not Canadian) is on full display; Ethiopian restaurants jostle for space with Chinese grocery stores and Thai take-aways and strip-mall pubs and Arab beauty shops. Lately I’ve been sharing the bus with lots of school kids, including hijabi girls and Sikh boys and kids of all shades of brown, and it makes me wonder how my own childhood would have been different if my classmates had been such a diverse lot. I grew up with a few First Nations classmates and exactly one Black classmate, which is depressingly standard. For us, diversity was having a Norwegian foreign exchange student who had a facial piercing. Knowing what I know now, having lived and traveled as much as I have, I am envious when I see all these kids sharing cultures and languages and backgrounds even as they don’t realize they’re doing it. Imagine getting to go to a friend’s house here in Forest Lawn - what kind of smells are wafting from these kitchens? How many languages are being spoken on a single block? (On this one, I’ve heard at least four different languages drifting in through our porch door.) How many stories, from all corners of the world, all converging on this one place in Alberta, are there to be told here?
To be back in Canada after a month cavorting around Montana, seeing friends, staying out late, having the deep chats that trickle into parts of my heart secret and necessary, hiking and looking at the stars at night, I am feeling very, very lucky. I went to Butte with Ella, got my first tattoo with her, had some amazing cocktails, sat in a wood-fire warmed bar, was very gently and appreciatively hit on by an Irishman, and woke up in a historic hotel two mornings in a row. In Missoula I walked seven miles almost every day for four days, capturing so many bird songs on my Merlin app, seeing Mary and Tiaira, crying near the Clark Fork, and sleeping like a stone. I hiked to the top of five different ridges with Leann over the course of 24 hours for the privilege of getting a sticker, a free beer, and my photograph on a local brewery’s Instagram (although it was more for the privilege of being around Leann, who is one of my many friends whose massive heart and determined soul guide me in my own ways). Then, I headed North.
I go back to Montana tomorrow morning to photograph a wedding of an absurdly cool couple this Saturday.2 So, time to pack, time to go to dinner at my favorite Indian place that I have missed these long seven months away, time to act and accept change and be open to new things and seize this very brief, green time of the year. (This part of the world gets yellow and crispy by July.)
One depressing thing that I hate is the number of outdoor cats here as well. I’ve already seen collared cats, clearly with warm roofs over their heads when they want them, stalking fledgling birds and the ground squirrels, and I’ve chased them off when I can. Keep the damn cats inside!
The gas prices right now are making me wish I had a tiny little electric vehicle rather than my grandma’s giant loaf-of-bread-shaped van. Alas!