Exits and Entrances - Chapter Three, Part Four.
In late 1966, my mother and father head off to Vancouver. Valerie, my younger sister who's just come back from a disastrous stay in London, England joins me on a train ride out to this west coast city. So in 1966 I cross Canada three times by land.
Once in Vancouver I head off to San Francisco by bus. I go back there the next winter for seven days or so. I then take a long journey by bus to the U.S. and Mexico in the winter of 1970 to 1971. Once back in Vancouver, I stay with my father but get restless again. I soon head off to Europe to meet my dad's family after 18 years away from them. I don't get on with most of them save for Jon Breslaw, a Reaganesque son of my father's cousin Dot. Jon and I have already met in Berkeley where he's taking his Ph.D.
Two years after this in 1973 I bus across Canada once more to Montreal. "You sure must have been restless," a therapist tells me a few years later. I definitely was.
But the 1973 jaunt across Canada turns into a disaster. I get thrown out of one place I stay in, and have to leave another person's place after an argument with him. Then I crash at another person's place which makes this young man with a wife and a child feel very crowded. Montreal to my surprise, doesn't turn me on anymore. It now looks old and not beautiful like Vancouver.
I was now 31 years old. Most of my age group had grown up, toiled away in careers, got married, bought houses' had children and settled down. Here was I, an ageing hippie, still moving from place to place with little money and a dropout from a teaching career that went nowhere. "There's teachers and learners," the main character in John Updike's novel 'The Centaur' says in effect. "I was meant to be a learner." I still didn't have a clue of what I was meant to be.
Tragedies too piled up along the way. I had to make choices in my life. Soon life made those choices for me.
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