New Neighbors and A Composer who also Left

Today Pam and I were start­ing the mam­moth labor of pack­ing our life away in prepa­ra­tion for the move. The movers dropped off some boxes and we got started with books and win­ter clothes. It’s still pretty cold, but it has to get warmer some time soon, so we put away the parkas and gloves not into their usual bags in the stor­age we had built years ago but instead into card­board boxes. Don’t ask when we’re going to wear them in mild British Colum­bia. Maybe it will be for trips up Whistler and Grouse.
Dur­ing our pack­ing, we heard our door­bell ring. It was a friendly young fel­low at the door with his wife, who intro­duced them­selves as our new neigh­bors. They wanted to let us know that their mov­ing van will be pulling up (and no doubt caus­ing a lit­tle dis­rup­tion, as ours will in July). They are mov­ing here from Tuc­son, Ari­zona, but both are from South Korea.

It’s always been inter­est­ing to Pam and me that Lilac Court, the lit­tle ‘pedes­trian pocket’ that we’ve lived in for nearly the past 20 years or so, has always had dis­pro­por­tion­ate rep­re­sen­ta­tion by immi­grants, and more recently, those from Asia, who now con­sti­tute more than a quar­ter of the units. I think it’s because Amer­i­cans want to live in the sub­urbs and are put off by the court’s mod­ern archi­tec­ture and open plan. (here’s a photo) They also want front lawns, which we don’t have; the cob­ble­stones go right up to the houses, form­ing a lit­tle piazza for the group of 24 or so units of the court­yard. With­out going into a New Urban­ist tirade like James Howard Kun­stler , author of The Geog­ra­phy of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere — a book I par­tic­u­larly liked, I have to say that this is a shame. It also sug­gests to me that even though we’re tech­ni­cally still Amer­i­cans, it may be that Pam and I are not really cul­tur­ally typ­i­cal Amer­i­cans, and per­haps we haven’t been for a while. If right-wing blog­gers want to point out that fact and say that urban lib­er­als like me hate Amer­ica, then I say we don’t hate this coun­try, but mourn it.

At any rate, as we were intro­duc­ing our­selves to the new neigh­bors (Dong and Wei, I believe), they asked us why we were mov­ing to Canada. At first he joked that it must be because of Bush, and when I said that this was true, and no real joke, he was taken aback (and actu­ally laughed, I think). I’ve noticed that this is often the reac­tion by peo­ple; David Pogue reacted the same way when I told him a cou­ple of months ago. Maybe we’re just act­ing out the punch-line of a joke.

I feel badly, par­tic­u­larly to peo­ple who have immi­grated here, to tell them that this is not the coun­try I knew, and that it has reached the point where I am leav­ing because of that. After all, they chose to come here, and prob­a­bly went through a lot of lone­li­ness, cul­ture shock, annoy­ances, and per­haps even seri­ous sac­ri­fices in order to come here, and there I go, talk­ing about how it’s not good enough for me any more. Oh, you may have saved, moved far away from fam­ily and friends, given up money and valu­ables, but I gotta tell you, the place isn’t worth it any more, not for us. I don’t have a clue what they must be think­ing, aside from amuse­ment and confusion.

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Ear­lier this evening I was lis­ten­ing to music by one of my favorite com­posers: Eduard Tubin. Tubin is utterly unknown by the clas­si­cal music crowd (and the clas­si­cal music lis­ten­ing pub­lic is a pretty small one to begin with). He was a tal­ented and very expres­sive com­poser who was sim­ply in the wrong place (Esto­nia) at the wrong time (just as the Soviet Union was mov­ing in and tak­ing over). Tubin fled to Swe­den and spent most of the remain­der of his life in exile in Stock­holm. The move for him was shat­ter­ing, com­pletely chang­ing his music from the folk-music inspired, glo­ri­ously roman­tic works of his ear­lier years, into an angst-filled and angu­lar style that is thorny, but also very affect­ing. Maybe I’m begin­ning to appre­ci­ate Tubin all the more because he also had to leave the coun­try of his birth. For­tu­nately, unlike in poor Mr. Tubin’s case, bombs are not falling as I am doing it. Nev­er­the­less, I feel a new kin­ship with the guy. I’m curi­ous to see if I’ll still feel that way after the move.