Special thanks to all our con-tributors for sharing in their nostalgia with us.

Special thanks also to our EICs emeritus, Paula Razuri, Emily Pollock, and Amanda Ghazale Aziz, for laying the groundwork for this year’s style and content.

Important influences in the production process of this magazine include pizza, John Legend’s marriage, Hamil-ton: An American Musical, and fuckin’ magnets (how do they work?).

Most of all, thanks to you, the reader, for continuing to sup-port our creative and vibrant community.

4 Lost Neighbourhood Gems

6 Simpler Times

7 Autumn Leaves

8 The Future of the Past is Now

10 Victoria Through the Ages

Trudeaumania: Then and Now

12 Matryoshka

14Nostalgia for the Old Nests15

Spaces I Have Called Home

18 I Recall When I Was Small

22 My Life in TV Intros

24 112 Years of Annesley Hall

26 Land of the Sleeping Bear

28Premature Nostalgia31

Home/Home32Inherited Nostalgia36

Going Back38

It may seem ironic that a team of millen-nials would be behind a magazine centered on the theme of nostalgia—what do you have to remember with only two decades under your belt? Over the last few weeks, The Strand’s contributor base answered that question with beautiful variance and vitality. Twenty-somethings certainly have a lot to remember, and a lot to say about it.

When we put potential magazine themes to a vote, nostalgia was a clear frontrunner. There was an odd, almost reverent quiet around Room 153 in the Goldring Student Centre, where our staff is usually shouting about Shrek or some other lesser art form. You could almost see the gears turning in everyone’s heads, delving deep into memo-ry. As the final written products showed us, nostalgia occupies a very personal space in a person’s memory.

To deconstruct the term in a literal sense, nostalgia is a Greek compound of nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, mean-ing “pain” or “ache.” With or without being informed about the etymology of the word, many of the pitches we received for this magazine were traceable to those roots. In the following pages, you will find pieces centered on the concept of home—child-hood, current, and generational homes inherited from parents and grandparents. Others spoke to the sentimental pain that comes with nostalgia and remembering the past.

One minor worry we had about this concept was whether or not the highly personal im-ages nostalgia calls to mind would transfer well to paper and be relatable to are wide readership. After seeing what our readers have put forward, we’re proud to say that that worry was unfounded. We’ve loved reading about everyone’s formative youths, political musings, historical situations, and the place of nostalgia in society. We hope you all enjoy these pieces, too.

The preemptive nostalgia for this produc-tion period is setting in, and we’re proud to present this final print copy as a token of the good times spent putting it all together.

from the editors

editors-in-chiefAnthony BurtonRhianna Jackson-KelsoHolly McKenzie-Sutter

senior design editorEmily Pollock

layout Amanda Ghazale AzizAnthony BurtonRhianna Jackson-KelsoAinsley MacDougallHolly McKenzie-SutterEmily Pollock

senior copy editorJacob McNair

copy editorsSarah ArmoogamAmanda Ghazale AzizAlexandra JonesTanuj KumarAinsley MacDougallNeil MacIsaacTristan McGrath-WaughBronwyn Nisbet-GrayClaire WilkinsAlison Zhou

photosAnthony BurtonJoshua KimRosa Kumar

illustrationsSarah CrawleyLynn Seolim HongEmily Pollock

contributorsMichael BaptistaJenna BorisevichVictoria ButlerErin CalhounMadeleine De SousaClarrie FeinsteinIsabel GalweyMargaryta GolovchenkoWenting LiVictoria LiaoAinsley MacDougallNeil MacIsaacBronwyn Nisbet-GrayPaula RazuriAlexandra ScandoloLauren Van Klaveren Genevieve Wakutz - HMS

When I discovered that Honest Ed’s would soon close, along with The Central, Victory Café, and the other stores and restaurants on the east side of Markham St, it wasn’t just a feeling of momentary sadness for me; it felt like someone was taking away a chapter of my youth. This sounds overly dramatic, but I believe there is a concrete explanation.

People have very vivid memories of their childhood. These recollections can be slight: the smell of your grandmother’s perfume, the image of your dad read-ing the morning paper, picking out matching outfits with your older sister, watching movies in your par-ents’ bed (which always seemed like a massive, com-forting cloud of coziness to my five-year-old self). When these sweet snippets of memory are taken to-gether, they are a mosaic of sensory images—tangi-ble moments that inform my past and therefore my present.

One of the first developmental stages children under-go is the creation of interpersonal relationships—the desire to form a connection with another person. As we get older we become aware of our physical sur-roundings; the connections we make with the out-side world compose our social environment. Even-tually we develop attachments to specific places, like schools, the streets where we play hockey with friends, the local movie theatre, and the park swings we compete to jump off of. These are the components that form the composite DNA of our childhood.

I grew up in The Annex, which allowed for a diverse upbringing. My clear memories of growing up there have shaped my childhood. Since family lived in the downtown core, I experienced all the advantages of city living. I could walk to Chinatown, Koreatown, and Little Italy, and I was a short streetcar ride away from Queen St West—the coolest parts of Toronto. Every year before school started, I would go to an art store called Midoco to buy school supplies and co-lour-code my pens and notebooks (a strange fixation; luckily it was just a phase). I still recollect going to Queen Video to rent VHS movies (for those of you who don’t know what VHS is, you’re too young for me) to watch on a Friday night with my siblings and parents. I vividly remember waiting in line to buy the next Harry Potter book on the day of its release, back when the Bloor St location of Book City was still open.

All of these childhood moments have created a safe-ty net of happiness to which I retreat in moments of isolation or stress—entering adulthood is not an easy ride. But most importantly, these memories have ce-mented a strong sense of self. I speak about who I am in relation to my local surroundings, as they are in-tegral to my personal interests. It makes sense, then, that when change happens to the neighbourhood you’ve lived in your entire life, it isn’t just a change, it’s a significant personal transformation. The special associations you have formed are extinguished in a second.

There have been many scholarly sources written about the positive and negative impacts of gentrification on inner-city neighbourhoods. Often it can have mas-sive socioeconomic benefits for certain communities, as it can drive out crime and create successful local

businesses. Gentrification is a double-edged sword, however, as it introduces a privileged upper-middle class mentality into lower income neighbourhoods. The new, expensive businesses create a domino ef-fect: their establishment often causes rent to skyrock-et, forcing lower-income families to migrate to other areas of town. While all of these sources discuss the political, economic, and social impacts of gentrifica-tion, none talk about the negative psychological im-pact that gentrification has on the individual.

When the new plan for Honest Ed’s was unveiled this past March, the public seemed pleased that inno-vative thought and creativity had gone into the new development plan. The layout involved constructing residential buildings no taller than 2.5 storeys, and included retaining 14 of the historical houses on Markham St. There also seemed to be a strong de-sire for the plan to incorporate and promote local business, an admirable goal that is not often seen in downtown development.

While I was glad to see that Toronto urban planning was seriously considering what to do with this public space, I looked at this plan and did not see an Annex that was representative of one I knew. It’s a selfish thought, I know, but it remained prominent. Why not keep the façade and just transform what was inside? Why feel the need to completely demolish the trade-mark exterior?

The plan was to showcase a new Toronto, a gentrified Toronto that no longer reflected or represented the Toronto of my childhood. Living in the downtown core my entire life, I notice the small changes occur-ring across this city, and it makes me wonder what this urban landscape will look like in the next ten or 15 years—unrecognizable, I bet. As more people move to the urban centre, the demand for these changes will only increase. I feel as if my negative response is outdated and unpopular.

A couple of years ago on Dupont St, the now trendy and hip diner-restaurant Rose and Sons used to be a greasy spoon called People’s Diner. My family and I would go on Sunday nights and order an $8 ham-burger and milkshake: every child’s dream dinner. Each table had its own little jukebox that would play rock ‘n’ roll ‘50s and ‘60s classics. Now Rose and Sons is filled with young professionals who gladly buy overpriced food and are served water from man-ufactured antique looking jugs. To me, the image is self-aware and over-produced, with the sole purpose of selling a certain lifestyle that seems to be in high demand these days.

I already sound like a jaded old lady, but places like People’s Diner, Honest Ed’s, and The Central (where I managed to go during high school and occasional-ly get away with buying drinks underage) have in-formed my early developmental years. As I see To-ronto rapidly changing for a shifting demographic, my heart will always remain with that flashing, blaz-ing, in-your-face Honest Ed’s sign. The store invited you to “come in and get lost,” but it will never be lost in my fond memories of an older Toronto—my past Toronto, my childhood Toronto.

Neighbourhood Nostalgia: Recollecting Lost Gems

Clarrie Feinstein/WriterJosh Kim/Photographer

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nostalgia

Erin Calhoun/WriterRosa Kumar/Photographer

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The yellow leaves of the trees standing on my front lawn once decorated my childhood with wonder and innocence. In the third grade, we created a turkey by gluing an autumn palette of dry, fallen leaves to the back of a small pumpkin. Every year, my vegetable turkey sat with my family for Thanksgiving dinner in the center of the table. Then, one year, the autumn leaves left. Boxes piled high around my house, all saying “Rob-ert—Kitchen” or “Robert—Books,” and my dad was around less and less. The leaves continued to fall, and when I asked my mom why they had to leave, she told me it was nature’s way. I liked the warm, blurry colours that painted my front lawn, and was sad to see them gathered in a bag waiting at the end of my driveway.

Winter weather came early, and instead of the familiar turkey sitting on the table, my mom put out a bouquet of white flow-ers that had a tag reading “Happy Thanksgiving to you and your kids, love Dave.” The pumpkin turkey eventually rotted, and I was secretly upset that something I had loved was now gone. I wondered why I was having two Thanksgiving dinners when all I wanted was one, and I was still angry that the leaves had to fall off the tree.

My dad’s new house had white walls and a thin layer of snow covering the decaying leaves on the lawn. Inside smelled new, and I felt small. My dad moved again during the end of sum-mer. I saw yellow and orange leaves decaying on the branches outside of my bedroom window. In this room I became more isolated than ever; it was obscure, and the most uncomfort-able I have ever felt. I felt like the burnt red leaves that fall from their roots and away from the other leaves they grew with.

Eleven years later, I am walking down the same driveway I once saw through rose-coloured glasses, this time holding a suitcase instead of a DIY turkey. I am not wearing glasses, and don’t mind the glare from the sun. I see yellow leaves that were once blooming off of the branches in summer, now ly-ing lifeless on the cold grass as I tread over them. When these leaves lose their grip I remember my six-year-old self, won-dering why her beautiful arrangement of these leaves’ ances-tors was put on the shelf and left to rot away. I now know why the leaves must fall, and why my mom would leave the room to take a phone call. Things run their course and die. My home-coming is lined with tall trees with wilting leaves. This time of year is accessorised with clutches of relief and comfort. Leav-ing a place where anonymity is a characteristic of normality, and returning to a home with four walls and a door that locks is the definition of family.

I get a sense of nostalgia when I see these beautiful, dying leaves scattered on my front lawn. I remember the days when I was naïve, and took pleasure in watching the leaves wilt off the tree, watching time pass by.

Autumn Leaves

This past September, I learned of a couple in Washington state who live their lives as though it were the late Victorian era.

The wife, Sarah A. Chrisman, published an article on Vox titled, “I love the Victorian era. So I decided to live in it.” In the article, she outlines the material aspects of their daily lives—they use an icebox instead of a re-frigerator, for example, and both wear period-appropriate clothing, and Chrisman explains how and why they came to live this way. Both Sarah and her husband study history and work as consultants and speakers on late Victorian life. They claim that by living their lives with antiques from the time, they gain special insight into the lives of late Victorian people as a form of primary source study. They love the era, admire its perceived aesthetic and ideals, and simply like living this way. Chrisman ends the piece by recalling some of the negative reactions they’ve received from other people, ranging from relatively mild (her husband’s “hand-knit wool swim trunks raise more than a few eyebrows”) to the decidedly more serious (including a threatening letter repeating the word “kill”).

Trying to recreate the past in one’s present is not a recent phenomenon. The modern historical re-enactment movement emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a renewed interest beginning in the 1990s. Generally, the term “historical re-enactment” refers to the re-enactment of a particular historic event or activity as it was performed during a peri-od of time, often with participants portraying real historical personages. American Civil War re-enactments are a good example. “Living history” is the portrayal of the broader everyday life of a given period, with partic-ipants generally representing “types,” rather than specific historical fig-ures. The interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg, and the television show The 1900 House and its numerous spinoffs are examples of this.

The Vox Victorians and Historical Re-enactment

The Futureofthe Pastis Now:

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“Historically-themed events,” a term I’ve coined (I think—if anyone thinks otherwise, do get in touch), refers to events that have little con-cern for historical accuracy and are rather trying to recreate an approx-imate “look” or “feel” of a time period, occasionally with some fantasy elements thrown in. This category includes events like Renaissance fairs and “era” parties (think Mad Men-themed parties or Spadina House’s Gatsby Garden Party). There is a great deal of overlap between these three categories—one could make the argument that either historical re-enactment or living history is the parent category of the other two. The Chrismans, for instance, base their whole-life approach to the re-enactment of a particular historical period, similar to living history. By contrast, a bicycling demonstration on an antique penny-farthing would fall under historical re-enactment. To keep from getting bogged down in terminology, I’m using the term “historical re-enactment” and its various iterations throughout to refer to any form of re-enacting some aspect of the past.

Chrisman’s Vox article incited a slew of responses in the form of arti-cles and blog posts both defending and critiquing the couple’s lifestyle. The critics focused on their failure to live wholly as though it was the late Victorian period—many mention the fact that she must have used a computer to publish the article, as well as the existence of This Victo-rian Life, their website and blog. Others commented on the Chrismans’ choice to ignore the more negative aspects of life in the period, with ill-ness and disease, racism, and sexism being the most commonly men-tioned. Most of the defences come from historical re-enactors who wish to support the validity of the practice of re-enactment as a genuinely useful research or educational tool; they express sympathy and solidar-ity against what they feel has been a barrage of harsh, unconstructive criticism. The more thoughtful responses on both sides of the argument, while mentioning most of the above points, focus on the ultimate im-possibility of re-creating a genuine experience of living as though it were some point in the past. It would be next to impossible to perfectly rep-licate the material surroundings, but more importantly, while material culture is increasingly being recognized as a valid and important source for historical research, history is more than just material objects—the history of any given society must include that society itself. The Chris-mans, try as they may, do not live in late 19th-century society. They are living their lives as early 21st-century people in early 21st-century soci-ety who choose to live in a house kitted out as closely as possible to the late 19th-century standard.

I’ve spent a great deal of time combing through the Chrisman’s on-line presence, which, I must say, is considerably more extensive than my own. My opinions on them are similar to my opinions on historical re-enactment as a whole: deeply ambivalent and unsettled, but likely to drive me crazy if I spend too long trying to commit them to paper. (I have gone crazy.) I don’t want to go through their lives critiquing what I think they’re doing wrong; those lists have already been compiled (I will mention that they eschew consulting secondary historical sources, rely-ing entirely on primary sources for their research, with which I strongly disagree). More broadly, the most significant problem that I see with historical re-enactment, and with the Chrisman’s research and public presentation of their lives as nearly-authentically Victorian, is that it presents either an overly positive or overly negative view of the period. Both of these have consequences for how participants and viewers de-velop a sense of history and how they incorporate their knowledge of history into their view of contemporary life.

There is an overwhelming tendency for re-enactment events and groups, both at the hobbyist and professional levels, to focus on “happy histo-ries” or the history of elites. Rarely are the histories of marginalized or oppressed peoples re-enacted in a professional museum or educational setting, and even less so as a leisure activity. I understand that when un-dertaken as a hobby, people will focus on the aspects of history that are fun, and the histories of marginalized or oppressed peoples generally ar-en’t fun or readily re-enactable. However, historical re-enactment does contribute significantly to a society’s collective historical memory. We

re-enact what we deem important. Leaving huge swathes of society and aspects of culture out because they are unpleasant and uncomfortable to remember may not strictly be rewriting history, but it’s certainly heavily editing it. This issue gets even trickier when historical re-enactment is either practiced by participants or interpreted by viewers as a form of “small c” social conservatism, praising the values and morals of the past.

Presenting an overly negative view of the past, however, is just as re-ductive. This view comes through in some historical re-enactments (for example, in The 1900 House, the desire for modern shampoo and a hot bath provides a good deal of the drama for several episodes), as well as in many of the broader criticisms of historical re-enactment as a hobby or a less directed nostalgia for a historical past. In expressing a distaste for re-enacting history because it was dirty, disease-ridden, poverty-strick-en, racist, sexist, classist etc., is tacitly, perhaps inadvertently, setting the present not only in opposition to the past, but completely separate from the past and its problems. This suggests that such problems do not exist in modern life, when, of course, they do.

* * *

My own experience with historical re-enactment is small and limited to the amateur, “historically-themed event” end of the spectrum. The first event I attended was a “Jane Austen” ball when I was 16. A new friend I’d met in my high school cooking class had been to a couple before, and having bonded over our hard opinions on the relative rankings of the dozens of Austen adaptations committed to film, she invited me to the first ball of the season. I looked forward to it with more ferocity than I’d looked forward to anything before. I should say that although I was fa-miliar with Jane Austen’s novels and did enjoy them in their own right, I didn’t know much of the actual history of the era, and I knew almost nothing beyond the socio-cultural world of English gentry in the period. I was certainly much more interested in the pretty Regency dresses and pretending that I was a pert young heroine than I was willing to admit.

The ball was held in the evening, in the back room of a local church out-fitted with fairy lights. The live, costumed band consisted of a violinist, a flautist, and keyboardist. Pineapple and punch (served in Styrofoam cups) was offered at the break. About 25 people attended, most of whom were female and adults rather than teenagers. It quickly became appar-ent to me that dancing was the focus of the event, the organizer being a dance teacher who had studied dance history. As far as I could tell, the music and dance steps were highly accurate, but any strenuous at-tention to historical accuracy ended there. Costumes were hit or miss—my own, a sleeveless floral sundress circa 1995, handed down from my mother and tied at the waist with a contrasting sateen housecoat sash, being a hard miss. I danced with a great deal of middle-aged women and one carefully dressed older man who, I’m pretty sure, referred to himself as Sir Roger. It was not at all like the past, but I loved it. I had an abso-lutely fantastic time. I got to dance to music I recognized from Austen adaptations while wearing a long dress in a warmly lit old building. I was with other people that were into the same weird niche thing that I was into. By some miracle, there was even a boy my own age with whom I’d managed to wrangle a dance, and who kissed me graciously on the hand and the cheek. I really didn’t get out much back then, so this was a thrill I could hardly handle. The whole experience was so nice, so comforting, and had so little to do with history.

Madeleine De Sousa/Writer & Photographer

Victoria Through the AgesGenevieve Wakutz

Victoria University Archives (Toronto)

nostalgia

“Entrance from St. Mary Street,” 1926

“Men’s Residences,” no date given

“Eating at Burwash Hall,” 1940s

“Entrance from St. Mary Street,” 2015

“Lower Burwash,” 2015

“Burwash Hall,” 2015

“Front of Victoria College,” 1926 “Old Vic,” 2015

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“Exterior of EJ Pratt,” 1962

“Main Entrance, Victoria College,” 1926 “Old Vic,” 2015

“Pratt,” 2015

Isabel Galwey/Writer & Artist

nostalgia

For me, nostalgia is an important way to gain perspective. It allows me to reflect and remember that problems which seemed stressful or difficult in the past were sur-mountable. This, in turn, gives me a more optimistic view of the future. Sometimes, when I’m finding my university work partic-ularly stressful, I think back to myself at 14 years old, freaking out about a school craft project. Things worked out then, and they’ll probably work out again now.

Like many self-conscious young adults, I rarely view the past through a rose-tinted lens or a pinhole camera. Looking back on myself at the ages of 17, 15, 13… well, fre-quently my reaction is to cringe with em-barrassment. But sometimes I realize that there are things about my past selves of which I can be proud. Even the most mun-dane things—the day-to-day routine of high school, for example. It’s very easy to shrug and say, “That was in the past; things are different now.” But to ignore previous parts of our lives is wasteful—and, in the long run, unhelpful. We can learn from past mistakes, and chances are that we haven’t changed as much as we’d sometimes like to think.

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matryoshka

So open up the matryoshka doll of your past. Take time to turn over every individual layer of who you are, critiquing it and admiring it from every angle. Sometimes, a bit of nos-talgia can be the best way to move forward into the future. Remember, you’re current-ly building the doll’s next layer. Make it a beautiful one.

This autumn I got back in touch with an old friend. We used to write one another letters festooned with small drawings, snippets of work, songs we liked—before I went to uni-versity, I dug out one of those letters, and was overcome with waves of nostalgia. I wrote out a messy, rambling letter and post-ed it off, hoping that the address was still right. At the end of my first week, I found a beautiful, fat, handwritten letter waiting for me at my college. I’d been feeling happy, of course—but also drained and more than slightly anxious about the term to come. Reading the words of my friend, my mood lifted. It helped to remind me of the world outside my mile-a-minute lectures and dreaming spires. It reminded me that uni-versity might be a fresh start, but that there was a safety net waiting beneath me if every-thing went horribly wrong.

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Still. There’s no point in viewing all your pre-vious life stages as some kind of matryosh-ka doll of self-loathing. Strive to improve, definitely, but also remember that you are a work in progress, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If we think of ourselves as diverse beings with iterations spread across time and space, then nostalgia becomes an important tool for communicating with our past selves. I am the Isabel eating a pista-chio ice cream sandwich in Florence four summers ago, the Isabel who cried watching Big Hero 6 in Leeds this February, the Isabel who wanted nothing more than to be a dog trainer at age seven. Often we are so busy concentrating on getting through today that we forget that our pasts have valuable les-sons that are easily overlooked—people and places and experiences which have shaped who we are now, distant as they may seem.

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I remember the first time I met a young person who was really en-thused with Canadian politics. I was on a field trip to Ottawa with my Grade 8 class with our tour guide, who was a young, enthusiastic university student. She had an irresistible ability to make you get excited about anything. To say she was a huge fan of Pierre Elliot Trudeau would be an understatement. We visited museums and she proudly pointed out photos of him. She said he was “ballin’” (this was a choice slang word at the time), and that he—hands down, without a doubt—was the best prime minister Canada has ever had. She was completely enamoured with a romantic, idealized image of him. The way she talked about him made him seem as though he was more myth than man.

At the time, I didn’t understand why he was so special, but from what I could see, he seemed like a good guy. Trudeau senior was popular with the youth of his time, so it makes sense that his charis-ma has carried over to create fans in the millennial generation. My father once loosely compared Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s rock star status to John F. Kennedy’s Hollywood star level of allure. Pierre Trudeau was arguably the closest Canada ever came to boasting an interna-tionally charismatic leader.

The Trudeaus were popular, especially with young people, because they were grounded. Pierre and Margaret hung out with musicians like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and made silly faces at the camer-as. Justin displays a similar accessibility—he has been filmed per-forming his party trick of falling down a set of stairs and is often seen hamming it up in public just as his father used to. It makes sense that we are having a resurgence of Trudeaumania now that Justin Trudeau has been elected to the same position his father once held.

The comparisons between Pierre and Justin have been going on since Justin first stepped into the political arena and will surely

continue indefinitely. It’s even more tempting to point out Justin’s inadequacies compared to Pierre, or to belittle Justin due to his lack of “experience,” or to mock him on the basis of physical features (as Harper attempted to do with his “nice hair, though” comments). But Justin wanted young people to vote. In interviews, he admitted that as much as he would appreciate support for the Liberal Party, he was happy just to see more youth becoming politically conscious and engaged.

It seems that Justin is sincere when he says he cares about young people in Canada and the need to accurately represent those living in our country—in fact, he’s pledging to do more for young people than his father did. After selecting the most diverse cabinet in Canada’s history and taking on the unprecedented responsibilities of Minister of Youth and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, he also hosted a Google Chat hangout answering questions from children from five different Canadian elementary and middle schools.

Like Pierre, Justin Trudeau is for the people. Pierre is remembered for his sharp wit and his readiness to put you in your place, which he did with a certain air of arrogance and a dash of elitism. Jus-tin is also making headlines for his snappy one-liners (“Because it’s 2015”), but there is a subtle difference in how he delivers his words. Justin is firm, but there is never any pretense or snobbery beneath his voice, which is something I can sometimes sense when I watch old videos of Pierre speaking to journalists and interviewers. Justin does not act or speak as though he is intellectually above others, which Pierre was often guilty of doing. Justin is warm. He invites us in. Hopefully, as Justin Trudeau’s term as prime minister con-tinues, he does not lose these qualities that have already made him so admired.

Lauren Van Klaveren/CopyEmily Pollock/Art

Round Two of TrudeaumaniaThis Just-in:-

nostalgia

“What happened to the golden peacocks?” I asked.

“Your cousins and I threw them out. I can’t believe they were still kicking around… Those ugly things were from the seventies. I re-member those being at our house on Strange Street when we first came to Canada,” my aunt said. She shrugged her shoulders and gave me an odd look.

“Oh.” I felt sick and horrified.

“What’s wrong?”

“I would have wanted to keep them. I really liked them… Wait, what did you guys do with all the weird figurines from the windowsills? And what about those spider-pebble things from the upstairs kitch-en? And what about…” I stopped, because I realized my questions were pointless. I could tell from the look of concern on my aunt’s face: most of these things were gone now. I imagined them breaking and making crunching sounds in a garbage truck.

“We didn’t know you wanted that old junk… Sorry, we threw it out… but hey, not all of it is gone! She stopped us from throwing some stuff out. I even caught her sneaking some stuff from the throwaway piles! But look how the house looks now—doesn’t it look better? More normal?”

Objectively speaking, my aunt was right. The small renovations and “updates” my uncle had made to my grandparent’s house, guided by my aunt and cousin’s fashionable choices and sparked by a need to add hand-railings and other accommodations to help my grand-mother retain her limited mobility, did make the house look “better” and more “normal.” However, these changes were, for me, very un-settling and violent—I wasn’t sure if “better” and “normal” translat-ed to something positive. Where my aunt and cousin saw garbage and ugliness, I saw (and still see) history—the personal history of my grandparents, who clung to their past and their culture while also struggling, throughout the 1970s and 80s, to make a future and raise a family in a strange land called Canada. Their house’s gaudy interiors being dismantled and their objects thrown away was, for me, like a decisive thunderclap—a choice to dump out history.

Worse still, I knew that if my grandmother’s health had been what it was four or five years ago, none of this would have been allowed. The house would have maintained its classic, bizarre, long-preserved 1970s Portuguese immigrant kitsch aesthetic: eye-smarting wallpa-pers, mismatched furniture from various eras, fake plastic flowers, hand-made crocheted table coverings, velvet pictures, Portuguese Roman Catholic icons, and other knick-knacks. But now, with my grandmother’s immobility and declining health, things could been thrown out. This big white-brick house with its two apartments (one a fancy, barely-used showroom of the best of her gaudy tastes,

the other, in the basement, for living) and the aesthetic that put it completely at odds with its Canadian neighbours could be sterilized of the fermented fireworks of its long-held character. I felt guilty. I knew if I had been here, in Kitchener, and not “far away” at univer-sity in Toronto, I would have intervened and saved things by taking my grandmother’s side.

My grandmother was upset, too. She was not happy that her things had been thrown out, but she also did not care as much as she used to. Five years ago, if anyone so much as moved a gaudy porcelain fig-urine or changed the placement of a vase of fake flowers, she would have never let said person hear the end of it. However, that is not the case today. “The cleanup is beginning even before I have died,” was what my grandmother said to me in Portuguese (neither she nor my grandfather have learned English despite living in Canada for 40 years) with a strong air of ambivalence when I talked to her after speaking to my aunt. I was angry with my aunt and cousins. I felt my grandmother was right. Who were they to clean these things up and throw them out? No one had died yet.

But, now, the more I think about it, I realize my aunt and cousins were absolutely right in doing what they did. This needed to be done sooner or later; nothing is forever and evolution must run its course. I couldn’t and cannot keep all these things, nor do I want to. 40-plus years of memory-heavy possessions accumulated by people from Salazar-dictatorship-era Portugal is a lot of stuff, most of it not rel-evant or useful to a 20-year-old just beginning their life. I merely felt nostalgic for the atmosphere of my childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s as a third-generation Portuguese-Canadian, where the presence of these things, this house, these memories, and my grand-parents was not under threat of extinction.

The loss of things like my grandmother’s beloved 1970s golden pea-cock statues (which always represented my grandparents’ house in my mind) was an upsetting indication to me of the now-palpable possibility that these things can and will disappear. I could not help but think, Now that the golden peacocks are gone, what’s next? What will happen to all the barrels for my grandfather’s homemade wine in the garage? Will those be thrown out too? Will anyone still make wine in the garage or basement anymore? And, on a larger level, if this house, its owners, and their things can disappear, what about the other Portuguese elements in their neighbourhood? The Portuguese clubs and its festivals? The Portuguese church? The Por-tuguese stores? What will be trashed and what will survive?

***

When I moved to Toronto three years ago, I found myself fascinat-ed by and constantly drawn to the city’s downtown West End just to walk around and look at it. I did not know Toronto at all, but I found this area of the city familiar and comforting. This is because

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Nostalgia for the Old Nests“O menino e o passarinho vão para onde lhe fazem o ninho.”

“Boys and birds go to where they make a nest.”

-old Portuguese proverb

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it is filled with the kinds of houses I have known all of my life—that is, the kind of houses the first-generation Portuguese immigrants in Canada (among which both sets of my grandparents number) made for themselves and their families across major cities in Southwest-ern Ontario. From Windsor to Kitchener to Cambridge to Hamilton to Toronto (especially the West End), you can find these houses in the Portuguese neighbourhoods and enclaves. This brand of house is an Upper Canada Victorian or early 20th-century house that, in the 1970s, underwent a renovation that we Portuguese—as well as Italians and Greeks—are famous for in North American pop culture (think Toula’s parents’ house in My Big Fat Greek Wedding).

But here is the specifically Portuguese-Canadian Southwestern On-tario version: on the outside, the house’s original brick has been covered with a thin, veiny, decorative brown 1970s brick. The orig-inal wood porch has been replaced with a cement pad with a base-ment-extending room beneath it; in the Toronto version of these houses, this is where the homemade wine is often kept. The house’s wooden railings and columns have been replaced with dramatic

curly metal ones. The original windows, which sometimes feature stained-glass on upper portions, have been replaced with bigger (of-ten homemade) windows that are composed of a large single piece of glass on the top half with a small sliding set of window panes below. The house interior has been divided into more or less one apartment per floor of the house, a feature that was often meant to accommodate multiple families in the early pioneering days. The floors are decorated with tiles, or azulejos, in swirling patterns of orange, green, brown, yellow, and red—the positive and hopeful co-lours of the late 1960s and 1970s when Portuguese people came en masse to Canada. These tiles are greatly favoured by us Mediter-ranean types for their ease of cleaning. Importantly, some sort of Portuguese Roman Catholic icon is added to the facade of the house. These icons most frequently incarnate themselves as azulejos hang-ing by the front door, or small cement chapel-like alcoves in front of the porch. In addition to these things, these houses also have vari-ances: sometimes they have stucco, sometimes they have completely paved yards, sometimes they have overhanging trellises with grape vines, and sometimes they have garden figurines of lions and eagles.

Michael Baptista/Writer & Artist

However, the most important thing about these houses is not their appearance, although in my opinion their appearances make for fascinating anthropological study. The most important thing is this: these houses are the frozen-in-time products of an era and a people. In Southwestern Ontario and, more largely speaking, in Canada, they are the Portuguese community’s first homes—the houses we made for ourselves when we got off planes and boats in the 1960s and 1970s and began to live seriously here. These houses were the first nests we made for ourselves—safe envelopes of a known culture in an unknown land. It was from the porches of these houses that the first generation left for their first jobs, from which the second generation went to school not knowing any English, and where the third generation played under the watchful eyes of the retired first. These houses are our first and original nests in Canada—places of transition containing bits of the old world garbled with the new. These houses are our cultural creation. They are our proud, fierce-ly clean, well maintained, and solid proof that as families, and as a community, we made it.

The changes these houses are experiencing are also proof that Por-tuguese community is continuing to make it. Whether they are being emptied of their contents for younger generations of the family to move into, or whether they are being sold for a sum many, many times more than what they were bought for and remodelled as the second and third generations of the community leave their nest-ing-ground neighbourhoods for places like Mississauga, Milton, or Oakville, these houses are signalling something. They are signalling a community’s final steps into full and complete integration into Ca-nadian society, the passage of time, and the disappearance of the first generation’s Portuguese-Canadian world in which one could live one’s whole life without ever learning to speak English.

And, this is not a bad thing. It would be strange and sad if the Por-tuguese community in Canada did not change after having been in Canada for almost 60 years. Cultural stagnation and ghettoization is never a good thing, and that was not what the Portuguese neigh-bourhoods were when they emerged, either—they were places of transition. It is a good thing that the second, third, fourth, and fifth generations are changing and adapting Portuguese-Canadian cul-ture to suit their needs. Some are bilingual and can still speak Por-tuguese, some can only speak Pinglish (our mix of English and Por-

tuguese), and some can speak only English. Some will take on their parents’ or grandparents’ Portuguese businesses based in Kensing-ton Market, on College Street and Dundas Street in Toronto, and in the downtowns of other Southwestern cities. Some will relocate them and reinvent them. Some of these businesses, as many have, will simply close down. Some people will continue going to and be-ing members of Portuguese clubs and associations, and others will not. Some Portuguese clubs and associations may die off, and others will not. Some second- and third-generation Portuguese-Canadians will work hard to preserve a cultural connection to Portugal, and others will not. For some, this connection will be in Portugal’s mag-nificent folklore and literary tradition, its Catholicism, its history, its traditional musical forms, its cuisine, or its obsession with soccer. People will pick and choose what they wish, and this is neither good nor bad. Merely, it is the future—our future.

However, despite the importance of looking towards and being aware of the future, some Portuguese-Canadians will (here I speak most genuinely for myself) retain nostalgia for the past. We are, af-ter all, people of saudades: an almost untranslatable and uniquely Portuguese word and cultural phenomena which describes a longing for and missing of what has been. For me, my nostalgia and my sau-dades will always manifest themselves for these Portuguese-Cana-dian houses that I have been going on about in this article. Despite knowing that they will and must disappear, I cannot help but feel sick and horrified every time they do. How can I not? Their disap-pearance means the death of my beloved grandparents and the old-er generations of my family—both related by blood or long-main-tained intergenerational friendships with other, older members of the community. It means the death of my childhood spent in those houses and the communities they existed in—neither of which was idyllic, but they are happily mine and (because of that) a part of me. Thus, when these things die, so does the lens from which I first saw Canada and the wider world and learned about what it means to be human and alive. This is something I mourn and hold onto—some-thing I have nostalgia and saudades for.

My aunt threw out the golden peacocks, but I managed to save some of my grandmother’s knickknacks, one of which is a spittoon from one of the tobacco farms near Delhi, Ontario where an early wave of Portuguese immigrants worked as pickers in the 1950s. I also have the gloriously gaudy first kitchen table my grandparents bought in Canada, which I must add is now considered very cool and hipster and would cost a lot of money to buy in a fancy vintage furniture store. Most of my family and even my grandparents think me very strange for caring about and keeping these things, but I don’t care. Wherever I go in the world, wherever I live in the world, I will always be dragging them, and my memories of my grandparents, around with me. They make me happy and give me bouts of nostalgia, and remind me of the Portuguese houses—those old nests—that I come from. This bird, this third-generation son of the Portuguese-Canadi-an community in Southwestern Ontario, is willing to move forward into the future, but I do so bringing shards of the past with me. I re-fuse to forget my family’s history and the history of my community; they form the oldest pieces of my nest in a century and a city they are not native to. I am made of that history which is (as all histories are) filled with some good things and some bad things, but because it is my history I am proud of it, and because of that, I will always fly home.

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The Future

“I recall when I was small...”

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Neil MacIsaac/WriterSarah Crawley/Artist

Just about everyone has that story about the first time they heard a certain album or song, how magical and perfect and transcendent it all was. I’ve always found the music that people can’t remember not hearing—that was simply always there—to be just as interesting. Three albums that were played so much in my pre-consciousness years that they are a part of my psyche come to mind: the Jesus Christ Superstar movie soundtrack, a cassette tape designed to teach children their times-tables through a song called Multiplication Unplugge, and Steely Dan’s Greatest Hits. It goes without saying that this early expo-sure to mathematics, the New Testament, and 1970s California jazz-rock has given me a tremendous advantage in everyday life.

These imprints were courtesy of my parents, and it speaks to a mixed approach that they had when it comes to what culture they saw as fit for their children. Stickin’ Around and Garfield were looked down on for their mutual fondness of the phrase “shut up” (long after we heard it every day at school), but Fawlty Towers and Saturday Night Live reruns, complete with various racial slurs, were fair game much earlier than expected. I didn’t know that “slut” was a bad word for years, because every year my Dad would play “Fairytale of New York” just after Disney’s Twelve Days of Christmas, and I had yet to hear it used outside of that song until I was a teenager. Representative of their more positive efforts were the rich supply of compilation albums on rotation in whatever Chevy van we had at the time.

There were the aforementioned greatest hits of Steely Dan, The Pogues, Springsteen, Queen, The Clash, and others. Each confused me into believing something false about the band: Springsteen only got good in 1975 (an idea that my Dad was later happy to correct); Queen was a consistently good band (no other band benefits more from cherry-picking hits); but it was The Clash I was most misinformed about. First, the com-pilation in question was The Essential Clash, so I assumed that was their name, and people only called them The Clash for short. Second, the cover art of the band convinced me that the tough-looking blonde—Paul Simonon—was the snarling and screaming lead singer, Joe Strummer, not the visibly un-comfortable guy hiding behind him. Lastly, since this was a Father’s Day gift and we were a Catholic family, it had eight-year-old me believing that “White Riot” was acceptable music to play on the drive to church.

Looking back, I realize my generation was the beginning of the end for the “Greatest Hits” compilation. One of my earliest memories is looking at the cover of U2’s Best of 1980-1990 in a store and seeing a boy on the cover who sort of looked like me. For a while, I recalled wanting it and my dad acquiescing, but in reality I’d unknowingly been guided there by him and he had every intent on buying it. I fell for it hard, as it was my first exposure to rock, but by the time the follow-up for the next decade arrived in 2002, even I realized it was a case of dimin-ishing returns.

Pre-internet, pre-vinyl-resurgence, and pre-iTunes, there was a need for collecting these tracks together on CD. You could have lost records and not been able to recover them, you could have heard a song long ago on the radio and just caught the artist’s name. Moreover, CDs provided a way to reconnect with the past without some of the past’s problems, not to mention an ideal conversation piece about what was truly the Best Of any given band. But soon these were overtaken by the Inter-net and the increasingly myriad ways one could connect to it and its infinite library. Just as it came of age, it showed its age. Walkmans were bulky next to MP3 players, CD collections were clutter once you imported the tracks to your iTunes, and to those who clung to vinyl, the trend of remastering specific albums saw the compilations’ audio quality outmatched. The murky audience for Best Ofs only stressed their coming reck-oning—were they for nostalgic fans or for introducing new lis-teners? In turn, should they include deep cuts and rarities or stick to the hits? Was the chronology of releases worth preserv-ing? How involved were the artists themselves?

As engaging as this debate may be to cosmopolitan and well-to-do audiophiles, not much of this was on my young mind. I lived far away from the places where music was made, concerts were staged, even where songs were sung about. There, people might have been able to argue such merits and drawbacks, but as a weird kid in Cape Breton who didn’t care much for Top 40, country, or the CBC (Vinyl Café excluded), I’d take what I could get. And as the youngest of four children, it was even less about what I wanted and more about what those older than me felt I was worth.

***

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My dad had one day brought OK Computer home; he didn’t buy much new music that wasn’t from Elvis Costello or Bruce Springsteen after that. My mom hated it and Donald, my oldest brother, loved it. He also loved the Barenaked Ladies, and find-ing and downloading the new track “Thanks That Was Fun” from their 2001 Greatest Hits was his first brush with piracy. While he was a precocious navigator of the early web, he suf-fered from a guilt-born habit of deleting any pirating software used on the family PC before our parents got home from work, which prevented him from discovering how to download full albums for a while. In those first years, he took in BNL, Radio-head, and Our Lady Peace bit by bit.

Using a variety of now-defunct services like ShareApe, Mor-pheus, and KaZaA, Donald was soon able to cobble together Amnesiac and other albums, eventually figuring out how to burn these onto CDs along with a few mixes of his own design. These mix tapes are best left unfound, but suffice to say there was Treble Charger. I understood basically none of his process until writing this article and asking him about it; I had sim-ply accepted that by virtue of being five years older than me he could do stuff I couldn’t, as if long division and pulling mu-sic out of the ether were comparable skills. Despite the short lifespans of such methods in the 2000s, he always seemed able to adapt to the times while his tastes transitioned from North American alternative to British rock from the ‘60s onward.

My oldest sister, Maureen, went through a flurry of phases, al-ternately pushing Feist, The Smiths, and M.I.A., or anything she enjoyed from CBC Radio 2. As helpful as she was in expand-ing my horizons, it always seemed to come with some sense of hipness or sophistication that I could never aspire to. There was also a lingering influence of a series of CDs my mom would play for us called Women & Songs, which compiled a bunch of femininity and feelings and whisperiness that I couldn’t get my

head around. As soon as I could understand it, I subscribed to the shitty adolescent boy ideology of “real music.” This junior high mentality has less to do with songs being about what was real, or even with production—given my loose grasp of how most of my favourite albums were made—and was more about being made by white males who were either old, broken up, or dead. Basically, no band still touring was worth listening to, unless Donald still thought they were cool, in which case they were. When you instinctively believe the past has no rival, it becomes very easy to think you’ve won arguments.

As time went on, four burgeoning musical personalities meant competition for the car stereo was becoming fierce, until Don-ald was gifted a CD player and speakers for his room. He and Maureen lived in the attic, while my other sister Clare, my par-ents, and I lived on the second floor. There was a hierarchy of coolness quickly solidifying. I can remember sitting as quietly as I could on the staircase landing leading up there, now unable to remember if I was hoping to absorb knowledge by osmosis or be invited up to prove I knew just as much as them. Donald and Maureen just thought it was creepy. Soon we each got our own CD Walkmans, which lent some sense of autonomy. Be-fore I could develop an attachment, iPods hit. Maureen had an early MP3 player that could hold less than ten songs of poor quality. The iPod signalled a boundless new age, and as I en-tered junior high, I got a U2 Special Edition iPod in black with a red click wheel and the autographs of the band members en-graved on the back. I promptly lost it at a track and field meet, and got another dubbed “Neil MaciPod” to last until the end of junior high, at which point Donald and Maureen both moved on to Halifax and Scotland, respectively, for university. It felt lonelier than I expected.

***

“I’m beginning to grasp how often those opinions I once held so close were reliant on my own ignorance, how each of my siblings were building their own relationships with music, and remembered a world before I came into it with living room dance parties.”

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With my iPod and an increasing interest from my dad to fill in gaps in his CD collection fuelling my listening options, I thought I could finally see the big picture. The “real music” habit died hard, and it was time to seek greener pastures. As the internet began to morph into its current form, I figured out that there were issues of Rolling Stone aside from their “500 Greatest Whatever of All Time” fare, and that there was actually good music journalism beyond Rolling Stone. I began to follow my roots into bands that updated my old interests and introduced me to new concepts. Arcade Fire taught me, through Funeral, that an album could be “classic” despite being made after 1994. Getting into Arctic Monkeys in 2008 showed me how it felt to jump on what I perceived to be a bandwagon and, in 2013, what it was like to see that bandwagon overrun. The Hold Steady were basically the Second Coming, largely because for the first time in my life I found a band that I later sold Donald on.

The older I got, the more meticulous I became in organizing my library. Regular disastrous library and organizational fuck-ups spawned by iTunes updates were weathered, sometimes deep-ening my interest as I could restructure my approach to the metadata from the ashes. All the artwork was as high-res as I could find, each album title had the year tacked onto the end in brackets, the album artist and artist fields were both filled, etc. Then came university and torrenting and streaming services and here we are. The replacement for Neil MaciPod (2007-2015, RIP) is a Touch, since the former died just after the Clas-sic was discontinued. Frequent software updates, a reduced memory, and a seemingly-deliberate awfulness if you try to do anything but conform to the iCloud/syncing standard gets on my nerves. I try to find solace in vinyl like everyone else my age that wants to be cool, but it only does so much. Whenever faced with approaching a new artist, I tend to pirate a whole discography rather than a Greatest Hits collection, populating my library with a lot of music I mean to get to and really expe-rience, y’know, but which I keep putting off.

A lot of this impulse traces back to habits developed in those early years. I still want to prove how much I know, so surely listening to everything an artist has ever done is the only way to do that? My blood boils when peers deride bands, especially

those I grew up on, without having done their homework. This reacts and synthesizes with my now-life-dominating interest in history to motivate me toward the noble futility of trying to fully comprehend the past. I’m beginning to grasp how often those opinions I once held so close were reliant on my own ig-norance, how each of my siblings were building their own rela-tionships with music, and remembered a world before I came into it with living room dance parties. Those compilations of career highlights that I’ve come to see as manipulative and dis-honest become more relatable as I try to tell my own story, and I feel more outmatched by the yawning cave of What I Don’t Know than I ever could have felt about my siblings’ knowledge.

On one occasion while driving with Clare, my previously un-sung sister, I started playing OutKast from my iPod. She excit-edly requested that I put on “Flip Flop Rock,” and proceeded to rap along almost perfectly, only losing Killer Mike and Big Boi at their most rapid and intricate lines. I was understand-ably taken aback, until she explained how she pressured mom into buying her Speakerboxxx/The Love Below on the mostly clean catchiness of “Hey Ya!” 12 years ago. A whole story—as long and self-indulgent as this one—could be written on the cultural earthquake Antwan Patton and André Benjamin must have brought into her world. And I’d only stumbled into it by attempting to show off my own sophistication.

The past is an incredible resource that we too often confine by drawing from it only what we want or what we feel is “real.” We can pine for what we once had endlessly without ever stepping back to view what was beyond us then, focused on winning ar-guments every generation starts, then fails to resolve. I start-ed writing under the above lyric, thinking I’d reflect a bit on how some compilations succeeded and others failed. Maybe I’d write Best Of these Bests Ofs and sort out which were worth-while. Maybe I’d reflect on how memory is like a Greatest Hits album, man. I now realize I was writing about albums of pho-tos, not music. Images vivid and blurry, shaped by the ceaseless progress of time and technology, with a handful of memories I thought I knew yielding something new.

There’s something about television. Maybe it’s that I was an only child whose parent worked a lot, but TV is just a big part of my life and always has been. Before Netflix, you watched seasons week after week, getting to know characters, storylines, and the lives of fake people. TV doesn’t last forever, but it lives on in reruns and in mem-ory. And within my own life, television has become a signifier for experience, both shaping and changing the way I remember my own experiences. The intro of a television show is a space for reflection, recollection, and analysis.

Every episode of Arthur begins with Ziggy Marley singing the prais-es of friendship and the benefits of “walking down the street, and everybody that you meet has an original point of view.” It’s a simple message that I’m glad I learned at a young age, but one that I now think is saccharine—too optimistic and overly enthusiastic about life. I remember watching the show after school every day on TVO Kids and occasionally on PBS Kids. The title credits circle through highly meta animated photographs of Arthur and his friends, re-minding me of how uncomplicated childhood is. It’s impossible not

nostalgia

On Repeat: my life in TV intros Bronwyn Nisbet-Gray/Writer

Emily Pollock/Artist

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to miss the sense that the biggest issues in life aren’t things like the Tibble twins, learning to spell “aardvark,” and discovering the truth about Mary Moo Cow.

When I was ten, my dad died unexpectedly of a heart attack. And when I watched Arthur from that point in time onwards, its mean-ing changed in my memory. Importantly for ten-year-old me, Ar-thur and his friends never changed—the outfits, the credits, the characters stay in a suspended state, someplace outside of the fast-paced, always moving, ever-constricting world. I was at a point in my life where things were always changing. Having Arthur as a daily constant became very important to me, as did its unwaver-ingly upbeat messages. The idea of being normal became import-ant—Arthur was a lesson in staying the same, in dealing with life’s big problems in small, manageable pieces. Arthur has remained relevant, even today when I no longer watch the show. At least once every couple of months I think about “Jekyl Jekyl Hyde Jekyl Hyde Hyde Jekyl” from the library card episode. But instead of bringing back the bad memories associated with that time in my life, it re-minds me of what I learned about myself and what I did moving forward.

I watched Sex and the City when I was far too young. I think I was 14 when I saw one of the daytime appropriate episodes on TV, and I was an instant fan. The show is now my go-to guilty pleasure when I’m sick, depressed, procrasti-nating, or generally unhappy. The happy, upbeat percussive theme song and fast-cutting credits present an undeniably stylish vision of what it’s like to be Carrie Bradshaw. The opening credits suggest something of the fun of the city and a sense of alternostalgia: the feeling of the show is not introspective or focused on the past, but, instead, oriented towards the future.

During my teenage years, I thought somewhat cringingly that everyone in SATC had their lives together. In the eight years since I first watched it, I’ve realized that no one on that show has it together. When I started going through my more serious issues with anxiety in high school, I watched a lot of SATC, hours upon hours of the series, to the point that I could quote characters. For me, it was a break from the stress of real life, and a show without real life consequences. It’s total trash, but it’s the kind of expensive trash that might come from an upper east side dumpster. It was helpful because it wasn’t serious and didn’t make me think about my prob-lems—and while for many people escapism is bad, for me it was one way to cope. The show was unapologetically focused on a group of seemingly together people who were imperfect behind the scenes. While the show definitely didn’t replace my psychiatrist, it helped me make sense of the feelings of imperfection and insignificance I felt, and gave me examples of how being less than able to cope would be okay. In testament to my past, I still watch Sex and the City when I need a break.

Mad Men was the first prestige drama I really watched. I started it when I was 15, and I remember watching the entire first season during a weekend AMC marathon when I had the flu. The thing is, I didn’t even like the show when I first saw it. It was boring and pretentious, and at that time I didn’t appreciate Jon Hamm. Once I got past episode five where (SPOILERS) Don is revealed to be Dick Whitman I was invested, but up until that point the opening and

closing credits were what kept me from changing the channel. Or maybe it’s because I was lying on my couch and was too nauseous to sit up and use the remote, but that’s somewhat beside the point. What matters is that I followed the show right through to its closing episodes in April 2015, and the credits remain one of its salient, highly evocative features. As an animated Don floats downwards in slow-motion from the building of his executive office, past images of 1960s culture to a seat on a couch, cigarette in hand, there’s a sense of mystery that accompanies the lilting score. The music is melancholy, but also driving and intense. It’s a title sequence that seems timeless and forever appropriate as the series progresses through Don’s rise, fall, and rebirth. It evokes Dante’s Inferno, re-al-life associations with New York’s ad man culture, and the Amer-ican Dream effortlessly.

While I would say Arthur and SATC have consistent associations for me, Mad Men has changed significantly since I started watching it. What started as aspirations for Don’s intelligence and shifted to allegiance with Peggy has, at its end, turned to associations with loss and being lost. While I watched Sex and the City after the se-ries had finished airing and Arthur never had that strong, overar-ching narrative thrust, Mad Men is one of the few shows I’ve stayed with for years without losing interest. When I got to the second part

of season seven, I felt an intense amount of longing for the things that came with early-season Mad Men, and in

many ways I think I just wanted to be a younger me. I identified with late-season Don. As I near the end

of university, Mad Men’s tagline “the end of an era” really hits me with its literal application to my own life. I look back at the show and its pro-gression and see a mirror of my own feelings of being lost.

I don’t see myself as Don by any means, but the series generally brings me to a place where its conclusion feels like the conclusion to a part of

my life. I watch the opening credits and remem-ber how Don’s fall is refashioned by the show to

mean different things. I’ve recently reflected on how low points in my life are too moulded by my reactions and

experiences to mean different things. I came away from Mad Men with a better sense of how the end of something is hardly ever its conclusion. Out of all my life experiences, graduation looms some-what ominously for me and represents a set moment where I’ll need to grow up. Reflecting on Mad Men somewhat delays the panic that accompanies the moment.

Nostalgia is not artful and rarely are its sources. It’s not about thinking amazing, mind-altering thoughts, but instead about mem-ory and its fraught inconsistencies. My experiences with nostalgia are not about looking at the past in wonder at my perceptiveness, but are instead about repurposing memory, attaching it to cultural objects, and remaking those objects to suit my life. Television be-comes part of life, both present and absent. It’s an argument made about film and literature by lots of smart people, but little has really been written about television. Taking its timelessness further than film or music, television is always both stuck in the past and caught up in the future. Opening credits signal this dissonance with every single episode and ignite the memory of the watcher while silencing memory’s impact. Nostalgia is rooted in its repetitions and remem-brances, and in its little details that aren’t strictly part of a story or a narrative, but can be subsumed into our personal lives.

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Driving down Queen’s Park Crescent was one of the most exhilarat-ing moments of my life. Three days before move-in and I had never seen Victoria College before, let alone my new residence, Annesley Hall. My mom was driving, and I could tell she was already exhausted by my incessant recap of the college’s history and the Annesley trivia I had pored over during the summer. Nearing the end of the street, I caught my first glimpse of my new home, the beautiful, red brick building with its own themed fence and mysterious towers and chim-neys. I’ll admit I gasped at the sight of it; I couldn’t believe I was going to call this place home.

Choosing Annesley was one of the easiest decisions of my university application process. It is the first residence built for women in Cana-da, situated across from the ROM and close to the Royal Conservatory (both places I frequented when I was younger), and it even—sort of—shares my name. Well, my name is a mispronunciation of the Annes-ley region in England, but you get the idea. It was like it was meant

to be—what more could a Canadian, museum-loving feminist named Ainsley want from a residence?

Exploring Annesley Hall for the first time was an experience within itself. Between the majestic grand staircase, the green and wooden fireplace in the library, the lovely pastel portraits, and the “AH” em-blazoned chairs, I’m constantly reminded of the many years this res-idence has seen. Black-and-white prints on the walls from the 1910s to the 1950s give a glimpse of the women who lived there before us, wearing long woollen skirts and elaborate hats, abiding by strict cur-fews (…or not) and taking gym classes in the basement.

Living here makes me long for times I have never known. I find myself “missing” the good old days where women living here would study their books, drink a lot of cocoa with their friends, and go skating with boys all the time. When doing my laundry in the basement I sigh, imagining the tearooms and a gymnasium I will never see there be-

The place the same, the world how different

nostalgia

Ainsley MacDougall/Writer

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Photographs courtesy of Victoria University Archives (Toronto)

tween loads of whites and colours. I’m disappointed we can’t use the fireplaces and sit around a crackling fire together, or hold an annual fancy Christmas party in the foyer. I never knew these times, never sat in these tearooms or used the fireplace, but I ache for them anyway. A lot has changed over 112 years. We have nice carpets now, kitchen-ettes, more rooms, and no curfew. We can have boys over whenever we want, we can have keys to both our rooms and the building (more on that later), and we can vote. This is all quite important, if you ask me, yet it is still hard to appreciate the here and now.

This is not to say that everything has changed since Annesley was opened. Starting university this year, it has become much more ap-parent to me how much an education means, to the point where it can even incite violence. For some, it means so much that they wish to kill people—specifically feminists—who want to educate themselves at a world-class university. Some like to record women showering in residence bathrooms. Some like to discount Women and Gender Studies as a legitimate discipline. Things like this are disheartening and outrageous. I felt tremendously vulnerable, scared, and appre-hensive while learning of all the obstacles we still face as a society in achieving equality. Annesley Hall and women’s education have been around for more than 100 years, and still women are being threat-ened on this very campus for learning, achieving, and becoming fully engaged citizens.

I look through Vic student and Annesley resident Kathleen Cowan’s published diary, written over 1907–1911, and think about what she couldn’t do when she went to Victoria College. She would not have been allowed to vote, she would not have been considered a “person,” and she was not allowed to leave Annesley on her own accord—she wasn’t even allowed a key to the building. It becomes easy to take ad-vantage of all the strides our society has made in gender equality and instead see the past as a black-and-white veneer of fun and loveliness. We forget the people that fought tooth and nail for women’s suffrage, the people that pushed for universities to accept and educate women in all fields, and the groups that fought for protection from sexual violence of both genders. A lot of these women went to Victoria Col-lege, and a lot of them lived here. I cast my vote for the first time in a federal election—in which the two top candidates for the riding were

female—15 minutes away from my dorm, and I couldn’t help but feel proud to live in the same place as many women who fought for my right to vote.

Usually when I think of nostalgia, I think of times I have known per-sonally that I miss: driving through the mountains with my family, passing notes to my friends in Grade 9, swimming in Denmark un-der beautiful sunsets. But I find it’s also easy to become nostalgic for the feeling we get or assume from old photographs and period films. Watching or reading Pride and Prejudice makes me wonder how my English got so bad, enjoying music from the 50s reminds me of the worst modern pop I’ve heard, and black-and-white photographs with girls in elaborate long dresses make me wonder why the hell I wear pants. It’s fun to long for things we’ve never known, since it’s some-times easier than appreciating what we do have and why. In Jane Aus-ten’s time women had to be completely dependent on men; a lot of music from the ‘50s wasn’t that original for its time either; girls wore dresses because they were hardly even allowed to wear pants.

Living at Annesley makes it easy to fall into this nostalgia trap. Re-membering the past and respecting it is essential. You don’t have to tell me twice—I’m the weird one who tears up at traditional ceremo-nies and our national anthem. But longing for the past is quite dif-ferent. Reading Kathleen’s diary, I expected to find myself immersed in an emotional and social narrative completely different from my own, to travel to a completely different Toronto, but was surprised at how familiar it was. Of course there were differences that sparked a twinge of envy, like the cocoa and skating rinks, but for the most part, Kathleen’s story is much like anyone else’s. She skipped lectures, read her Homer and Virgil, and bought small presents for her friends at Eaton’s. In her first year, she was called a “freshie,” debated the pros and cons of sororities, and imagined what lay inside the mysterious upper attics of Old Vic’s columns and spires.

Since 1903, a lot has changed in our society, in our university, and in our residence, but altogether the past is not a completely unfamiliar place. In every era there are struggles, luxuries, and controversies. And though we must always progress as a society and as a university, we must also remember our past in a thoughtful way absent of wist-ful nostalgia that detracts from legitimate criticism and education. I think Annesley stands to remind us of our past, but also to encourage us to look forward to our futures and appreciate the present. Living at Annesley does not cause me to speak in fine, embellished English or allow me to pull off hats and petticoats, but it does support me as I explore a new place, earn my degree, and start to form my life. And I hope that for many decades to come, Annesley will continue to stand here to fulfill that purpose.

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Maa magab karu

“Land of the Sleeping Bear”—that is how I’d annotate Estonia on a world map. No, it has absolutely nothing to do with the coun-try’s historical past, nor its geographical location. When most people talk about travel destinations, Estonia isn’t typically the top choice, as my friends ever so nicely pointed out once or may-be twice. When I told them it was an all-expenses-paid trip they settled down, looking the other way. It is a “sleeping bear” of a country in the sense that you see it on the world map but never think much of it (or not, depending on what you look for—here’s a hint: look for the Baltic Sea first). But it’s a country that left a lasting impression on me, and I have a vein-like network in my brain filled with streets of Old Tallinn to thank.

I will remember Viru, Tallinn’s main street, for many things, one of which is the loose cobblestone that I kept persistently tripping over during my one-week stay in the city.

Viru was like the trunk of the tree that was the Old Town of Tal-linn, running through the old city wall and into streets that could easily be mistaken for the setting of a medieval fairytale. The only detail that broke through this illusion was the McDonald’s on the left-hand side, just past the city wall. It was on Viru that my artist friend and I ogled a set of umbrellas through a shop

window, their handles formed into jewel-clad leopard heads or peacocks with their tails fanned out (each with their own appro-priately jaw-dropping price tag, of course). Every other street was connected like extending tree branches, equally winding and confusing. Connected to Viru was Sauna, the narrow street where our group stayed in a cozy, hidden little house. Uus, run-ning to the north from Viru and right under the old wall, was a daily pop-up bazaar of old ladies selling handmade sweaters, socks, and mittens, all crafted from genuine wool (as one of my friends found out after irritating one of the ladies with her doubts). It was also through Viru that I stumbled about at an ungodly hour one night with a couple of friends and two (at-tractive) older twins we had met at the Depeche Mode Bar, who showed us around town.

I’m not one for the cute, coincidental meetings associated with rom-coms, but whenever I tell this story, I get winks and smiles from my friends. It was on that night, walking with the older of the twins (a guy around ten years my senior), where I had felt in my proper place within the universe. Perhaps it was the fact that we got into a discussion about the downfalls of social media and the merits of various beliefs despite our age difference. That night I wasn’t looked at as some small and ignorant teenager,

Margaryta Golovchenko/WriterRosa Kumar/Photographer

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but rather as an adult with a valid opinion worth listening to. I was myself, comfortable and chatting away with someone I met only a few hours ago in a way I never would have done back home in Canada.

I’ve come to associate many things with that city. Coldplay’s “Sky Full of Stars” became the week’s anthem, and snails and bears battled it out in my mind as the mascots of the city. I will forever remember walking down the street and hearing the gos-sip roll off the tongues of passing locals in familiar Russian or the foreign-sounding Estonian. I will always recall the sight of several shops in a row selling glassworks or felted toys or an-other type of beautiful craft that, if not for the price tag and the limited suitcase space, I would have instantly bought and brought back home with me. I fell in love with the city and its people, and it all began after stumbling through the gates onto Viru, eyes wide open, my internal compass malfunctioning as always.

One day I will go back to Tallinn and stand on that street, my feet now familiar with the rough edges of the cobblestones, the street-corner McDonald’s no longer a new sight. I’ll no longer feel lost; rather, I’ll be losing myself in the labyrinth of shops and old streets, knowing that all of them lead to Viru. In my adventures, I have dived into the den of the sleeping bear and made him open his eyes. This bear will wrap you up and pull you in, and once you manage to slither out of his arms, you won’t be the same again.

nostalgia

These are photos of spaces I have called home for the majority of my life. All of these were taken in the presence of someone I love deeply but will not spend my life with. They were taken the day I recieved a phone call telling me that my best friend of seven years was dead.

Victoria Butler

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Victoria Butler

I haven’t left UofT yet. I haven’t tossed my cap or clutched my degree with trembling fingers. I haven’t comforted my proud and teary-eyed parents or broken down myself, overwhelmed with disbelief that four years could have gone by so quickly. I haven’t made my friends photograph me on Front Campus, leaping up and down until the moment is memorialized in the perfect mid-air frolic.

I haven’t left UofT yet, but I’m already starting to think of the past four years as if they were a well-played film. The whir of a projector. The graininess of worn-out celluloid. The crack of a voice recording. Scenes that make you laugh until your sides hurt. Scenes that make you cry until your sides hurt.

I haven’t left UofT yet, but I feel like I’ve already written an ele-giac love letter in my head, a lamentation for the fading expe-riences that have formed me into the person I am. The adult, I hesitate to say, that I am.

But it isn’t over yet. Fourth year isn’t over yet. We’re still in 2015, with the new year months away. So why am I filled with this constant nagging sense of premature nostalgia? A pang of pain for every last.

I know I’m not the only person to experience this sentimentality for something. This premature nostalgia for the places that we have to leave too quickly. Places of transit. The feeling hits with powerful inevitability.

UofT has become like a trip that I mourn before its completion. UofT was supposed to get me from point A to point B; the prob-lem is, though, that I still don’t know what point B is and, frank-ly, I like point A. Here, I have a sense of purpose. I have a rou-tine. I’m not being thrust headfirst into a world of not knowing. Along the winding, jagged path that is my UofT undergrad, I’ve

discovered my genuine love for this community, this abundance of people who are in this together, this collection of fond memo-ries. The late-night conversations, the drunken consumption of Kraft Dinner, the guitar, the caffeine, the moldy cups of tea.

Of course, to say that attending UofT is nothing but a positive experience would be a downright lie. When I entered university, I was full of brimming, dizzying optimism. Naiveté. Every part of me believed in the possibilities that university would bring. I had no doubt that in the next four years I would figure out exactly who I was. It didn’t surprise me when I made friends and became part of communities and felt like I was truly at the pinnacle of happiness. That was supposed to happen. I was prepared for it.

But I wasn’t prepared for the misery that would accompany it. I wasn’t prepared for the isolation, the nail-biting, soul-crushing anxiety that would follow me from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep. I wasn’t prepared to feel so disappoint-ed with myself and with the people around me and with the state of humanity. I wasn’t prepared to feel so fucking confused. Those are the parts I won’t miss.

Three-and-a-half years later, I’m still nervous for what comes next. For that point B, whatever it is. The perils of having a lib-eral arts degree, I guess. What I know is that I don’t want adult-hood to mean cynicism. I don’t want my life to become a series of events to pass the time. Taking a break is okay. Doing work is okay. Traveling the world is okay. Breathing is okay.

Three-and-a-half years later, I’m less anxious, less confused, and after all this time, I’ve finally learned about who I am at my very core. I’ve learned more than I could have ever dreamed of at 17 when I was submitting my university application, and for that reason I will always value UofT and what it’s given me.

Yes, I’m filled with nostalgia, but I’m excited for what comes next.

night ou

t w S.

graduation!!!

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PrematureNostalgia

Jenna Borisevich/WriterEmily Pollock/Artist

super gross!

Alexandra Scandolo

The Future

a photo essay

home/home:

nostalgia

Finding a new place to belong can be difficult, but those new homes remind us of old ones. All words are from anonymous students.

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nostalgia

nostalgia

“But where are you really from?” is a question so common that by now it must be the subject of a million think pieces by people of colour in any predominantly white nation. Yet whenever it is brought up as a source of frustration, fervent nods of familiarity from myself and others who have heard it one too many times fill the room. To have our place of origin questioned seems inevitable for those of us who aren’t white or white passing. “I was born here,” has never been a satisfactory answer for those who have already embarked on the project of locating me as an immigrant, as an exotic other, and for those who use my face as an ex-periment in order to test their skills at distinguishing between different “kinds of Asian.”

It’s ironic that these questioners feel as if they belong here any more than I do on indigenous land that has been colonized, but questions of my origin do call attention to where I differ in my lived experience. I am not an immigrant, but mine is an immigrant family, and this has inevitably complicated my own idea of “home.” Clinging to my identity as a born and raised Torontonian has always felt hollow. I don’t entirely know what it means to be from this place, because my ideas of home have been so heavily swayed by the stories of another.

On the rare occasions when rain falls steadily overnight in Toronto, I mentally transport myself to the rainy evenings of Chengdu and awaken to its cloudy mornings. I remember the smell of breakfast on the table: youtiao and warmed, unsweetened soymilk, fresh-bought baozi, and the huge, juicy peaches I’ve never been able to find anywhere else. There are lush plants threatening to grow in through the window, and chatter fills the air from playing children and their watchful grandparents. These are memories from the last time I visited Chengdu, my mother’s home city, just after graduating high school. I consumed a stack of incomprehensi-ble English novels as days of rain flooded the courtyard and washed out bridges in the city. These real-life experiences in Chengdu have been few and far in between for me, since I’ve only visited the city three or four times in my life, and never for longer than two months at a time.

It’s a testament to my mother’s storytelling ability that a different memo-ry comes to mind with the rain, one where those children are squelching on their own through the bordering farmer’s fields, stealing crops and daring each other to eat mud. They made the simple breakfast of rice porridge on the table themselves—sometimes for the whole family—and on their way out of the courtyard, they passed a neighbour’s big, mean guard rabbit. Their books were filled with classic, centuries-old Chinese poetry recited from childhood, and the bridges hadn’t been built.

This memory isn’t mine, and it never will be. But somehow I miss this city in my dreams, an image obtained through years of listening to my mother’s dinner-table performances for our immigrated family from her unusually detailed memory. She tells the same stories repeatedly, recounting the city that she left over 20 years ago for a colder place. It’s as if I’ve inherited my mother’s nostalgia for her hometown, where her parents and younger sister still live, and where the streets are lined with busy teashops and little restaurants selling cheap and delicious dan dan noodles. Sichuan cuisine is growing more and more popular here, and when I see restaurants in Toronto advertising their “authentic” food,

I’m reminded of my own efforts at recreating my mother’s recipes. The same meals that garner pointed commentary from onlookers who can’t stomach the spice, or those who voice their wonderment and disgust at unfamiliar ingredients, were the comfort foods of my mother’s youth.

The first time my aunt tried this signature spicy food was during the 1976 earthquakes. As most of the building’s residents sheltered in tents to avoid the worst-case scenario, she acquired her first taste of spice while my mother watched. As a toddler, my aunt cried as she ate the hot peppers, eliciting roaring laughter from the adults as she wiped her eyes and scratched her bum like any other young child. It was unfortunate for her that the chili still lingered on her little hands, but that occurrence brought the stressed adults some much-needed relief in the face of po-litical and natural upheaval. To the children, living in the tents offered great potential for adventure. The way my mother told it, earthquakes weren’t scary for her and her two sisters—they were new and interest-ing. Their worst fears consisted of the warning tone in my grandfather’s voice as he yelled each daughter’s name before landing on the trouble-maker’s, and my grandmother’s steely gaze. For them, eating spicy food in mingled pain and pleasure was a rite of passage that opened the gate to enjoying the culinary offerings of the province. Years later, and half a world away from her little sister, my mother laughs when she recalls this memory.

Half a world away, she giggled as I refused the spicy dishes she placed in front of me. It’s taken nearly two decades for me to appreciate the spices that have made Chengdu cuisine world-famous. This personal inability to stomach their daily fare meant that at every return, our family and friends would tease me over the lengthy dinner parties that comprised the majority of social gatherings and family reunions. With unreserved glee, they would offer the red dishes to me and ask my mother in lilting dialect why she didn’t teach her daughter to tolerate the taste. They’d clarify the region-specific slang that rolled seamlessly off their tongues, allowing me access to a language I can’t speak and can barely under-stand. Here, my mother seemed right at home, offering me a tenuous connection to the people close to her heart. I couldn’t eat their food or understand their jokes. Yet their teasing was light, meant to include rather than exclude me from the culture I had inherited, yet didn’t quite belong to.

Whenever I hear the Sichuan dialect spoken in the streets of Toronto, I recall those moments of community and belonging in a place I’ve known through my mother’s memories. A melancholic reminder accompanies the familiarity: much of the culture will remain out of reach. I can only recognize that they’re speaking in dialect without the capacity to follow the meaning in their words. Like the fragmented phone conversations with my grandparents, one of whom does not speak any Mandarin, I’m always reduced to having the most basic conversations that are often muddled in miscommunication. Similarly skewed are my own impres-sions of my mother’s Chengdu, communicated as they are to me in a mother tongue I abandoned for so long. The rose-tinted lens through which I view her hometown functions as a filter comprised of years in distances travelled and years of language lost, generating an imaginary home I manage to miss without ever having lived in it.

nostalgia

Inherited Nostalgia:Losing a home that was never mine

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I’m not the only one missing an imaginary home. Though my sense of loss is only a distorted echo of my mother’s feelings, she too has been cut off from the Chengdu she knew. You’d think that all it would take to restore her memories would be catching the 13-hour flight through as many time zones. However, for my mother, rekindling the nostalgic memories of childhood is not as simple as going home. It’s not just that the trees have grown taller and that the people have grown older—it isn’t even because my grandparents have moved house; in fact, they’ve stayed in the same apartment for decades now.

Rather, my mother’s Chengdu has been transformed into a different beast altogether. The farmer’s fields are long gone, replaced by a super-market that has already fallen into disuse, now slated for destruction. The street in front of their apartment courtyard is being gutted to be-come a subway. Life will become much easier for my aging grandpar-ents. But as the cab took us down a newly built ring road and I listened to my mother query the driver in dialect about the construction, I won-dered if homecoming could ever be within her reach again.

Change is a fact of life and, seemingly, of essence to modern China and its newly forming identity. For those of us who have inherited fragment-ed stories about a place long lost, I fear the ways memory and language can fail us in our recollections of what we hold most dear. The landmarks of my mother’s childhood are already lost to the burgeoning city growth. She should grieve it. That I, too, mourn the loss is unexpected—it was never my place to lose. But when those of us with diasporic identities are constantly reminded through familial stories of where our roots are, is it so odd that we yearn for a home that was never ours?

My mother flew back to Chengdu this month, and I’m certain she’s al-ready witnessed even more changes to the place she once called home. The truth is we can never return to the settings of our memories, but it’s still unexpected to find a city with a new face after only a few years’ absence. As the sun sets in Toronto and rises in Chengdu, and as she makes breakfast for my grandparents—who still cycle through her sis-ter’s names before reaching hers—I wonder if she can still recover that sense of belonging that eludes her here in Canada.

I continue to dream of a home I’ve never belonged to, of sights and sounds conjured up by my mother’s limited accounts, filtered through my fumbling grasp of her native tongue. Where am I from, really? I’m not sure the question can ever have a straightforward answer. In one sense, I’m from Toronto, Canada. It’s true; I have memories I could re-flect on from my upbringing, and they’re irreplaceable and crucial to my self-identity. But I can’t deny that a part of my wistful heart is drawn elsewhere, to a childhood that isn’t mine, located within a rainy city with food I can barely eat and a language I can barely speak. When it rains here, I’ll still remember the lush vegetation and the smell of spicy pep-pers wafting out the windows and across the farmer’s fields. As a Chi-nese proverb states, “Falling leaves return to their roots.”

Perhaps my return is long overdue.

Victoria Liao/WriterLynn Seolim Hong/Artist

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This fall has been exceptionally warm. While the small talk along the lines of “this weather can stay for as long as it likes” is nothing less than intellectually devastating, the feeling of delay is hard to deny when it’s 17 degrees in November. The warmth reminds me that, very soon, a pud-dle courtesy of global warming may replace us, but it also reminds me of that feeling one gets during the last days of summer, just before fall starts to sink in.

One of my favourite feelings is the gentle chill you get during the summer nights as you creep closer to September. You may have been dressed for the afternoon, but you’ve stayed out all day and now you’re just slightly underdressed. The nostalgic effect is in full swing if you’re on a bike: a mode of transportation equally childish and adult.

Those end-of-summer nights are completely defined by the fact that they won’t last much longer—soon the sweaters and jackets will come out in preparation for fall. This feeling of impending finitude at the hands of pleasurable delay is pretty much the most resonant feeling of my university career: being able to choose to be childish while gently being reminded that you won’t be able to keep it up for much lon-ger.

September can feel like a magical month of limbo, especially if we’re to take the songs of Earth, Wind & Fire or Frank Sinatra as truth (and why wouldn’t you? Have you ever listened to “Boogie Wonderland”?). Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” aligns the month with “golden dreams” and “shiny days” of the past. Sinatra’s “Septem-ber of My Years,” aside from being a pretty cheesy song, has some emotional sway to it as he sings about happily nearing old age: “I find that I’m smiling gently as I near September, the warm September of my years.” Both EWF and Sinatra celebrate the warm memories associated with September, but they also acknowledge the passing of time and the feeling of something special having passed.

There’s a complicated joy and loss attached to September that makes it such an interesting month of both promise and finitude. Here with some resignation, I’m compelled to acknowledge the relevance of Green Day and how Billie Joe Armstrong was onto something when he sang “Wake me up when September ends.” The month is rife with feelings of beginnings and endings, and it is overwhelming to the point where hibernation seems like a pretty good solution.

I wouldn’t acknowledge the mood of September if my life as a university student wasn’t tied to that familiar “back to” feeling that comes with the end of the summer. For some, September is the time when you go back to school only a few months after having gone back home. September is a time of new housing and movement, of painful tuition payments and rent deposits. It’s a time of the promise of the new school year, and the loss of hard-earned summer job money.

***

I remember one summer in my early teens spent climbing jungle gyms after dark with my friends , singing (for some reason or another) Har-ry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” The song was hilarious to us, and we cracked up over and over again as we crooned in pseudo-macho tones, our eyes closed and heads thrown back: “And the cat’s in the cradle and

the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man in the moon. When you comin’ home? Son, I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then…”

Sentimental father-son songs still have a special place in my heart and, strangely enough, my social life. Years after those jungle gym nights, songs like Neil Young’s “My Boy” make my friends and I giggle with its heavy-handed message of time passing too quickly, and yet something has changed: joking about artists like Jim Croce or Cat Stevens has be-come a tricky game of emotional chicken. It’s easy for me to dramatically pull a fist to my chest while whispering lines from “Father and Son,” but after a while the humorous façade fades. I slide from the ironic to the sincere and I take Cat Stevens to heart.

***

I recognize the risk of confessing to these pressures and possibilities of “going back”—is this a rare feeling reserved for the most pes-

simistic of millennials? Perhaps, perhaps not. There’s plenty of evidence in the discourse of universities to

suggest students are slower to move on from this period of safety. University as a place to come of

age is a narrative that captures the experience of many. In 2013, Forbes reported that only 49% of university students graduate in the projected four-year time, suggesting that ei-ther students don’t finish at all or they feel unprepared to leave after four years. Addi-tionally, the fifth-year allure strong (albeit widely inaccessible), and many students treat graduate studies as a way to postpone reality for just a little while longer.

To be a university student means that, in so many ways, you have the choice to go back to

the way things were, and at the same time you just can’t quite get there. You can choose to round

up your friends for a birthday dinner at East Side Ma-rio’s (although I might not recommend it), but you will

surely stand out from the ten-year-old’s birthday party across the room. You can take the advice of so many wise columnists and consider moving back in with family, but that is not a viable option for everyone. Furthermore, choosing to go back to school for extra stud-ies often comes with anxieties and apprehensions. We live in a sort of metaphorical exodus from our slightly younger selves, dislocated from comfort while we revolve hesitantly around the future.

We want to go back to where things were okay. We have grown used to certain ways of going about our days, and we have grown used to having certain people in our lives. While there’s a certain comfort in the way things used to be, that magical time where things were perfect didn’t necessarily exist at all. The only difference between driving a borrowed car to your best friend’s house at the age of 23 and doing the same at 16 is the sense of nostalgia that you impose. As our good friend Cat might say, “It’s not time to make a change, just relax, take it easy…”

Sometimes winter barrels down autumn and forces us to bundle up early, and other times we get extra sun and the feeling of a summer de-layed. It’s up to you, though, if you want to put on your jacket and sweat through the day. For now at least, it won’t do you any harm to take off your jacket and indulge in the sun.

Paula Razuri/Writer & Photographer

To Go Backa meditation on September