The first half of my dream was spent in search of a bathroom. After waking briefly to use a real bathroom, I found myself back in my hometown writing a poem. All I remember now is that I had constructed a beautiful metaphor comparing my city to a diamond.
My dream town and the actual city where I was raised have only the most superficial commonalities - the existence of a sewage system, roads, and electricity. The city of Edmonton harbors just shy of a million inhabitants; my dream hometown was a bona fide town, complete with quaint, columned town hall, a working ice cream parlor, and the kind of Main street which boasted the only traffic light for miles around.
"Charming" is a term that will never be leveled at the suburb I grew up in - an advancing cancer of row houses unchecked by the vast stretches of midwestern Canadian prairie available ever southward. And in the diamond metaphor, Millwoods aka South Edmonton would more likely be imagined as the eons of crushing pressure which, rather than transform coal into gems, was merely escaped as soon as one acquired a drivers license and/or admission to a far away school.
Don't get me wrong; I harbor no nostalgia for the alternate universe in which my family relocated to some adorable hamlet in the southern Ontario landscape. I have never lived anywhere with fewer than 100,000 people (and that is already a little sparsely populated). I was once offered a job in small town Michigan, population 11,000, and had a full-blown panic attack on the freeway driving home from the airport after my interview. All that closeness, the limits of social and geographical terrain. I felt I couldn't breathe.
Life has a way of making you eat your words, so it's always possible I'll spend my golden years in a place where everyone knows your name. For right now I'm dreaming of an assisted living facility in the middle of some elephantine city where the bus can take you downtown.
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