Something's Got a Hold on Me

This morning as I write, I am enjoying an Americano at Le 48, a Quebec City restaurant next to the Hôtel Port-Royal, where I spent the night. On a whim, I drove up to Quebec City yesterday to see a film that's part of Les Grands explorateurs. I saw Robert Blondin's "Les Marquises." Blondin narrated the film live, and from the somewhat comfortable seat in the Salle Albert-Rousseau, I discovered the Marquesas Islands and its people.

The real story here is not that I saw a film, but that less than twenty-four hours after I returned home from a 16-day trip that took me from Montreal to Halifax to Calgary and finally Orlando (Florida) before returning "home" to Sherbrooke, I was off globetrotting again. My friend Kim, who I visited in Orlando, thinks I have the travel bug. Maybe I do. Or maybe it's something else.

For the past two years I've called Sherbrooke (Québec) home, but now I'm not so sure where home is. At the heart of it all, I think that the answer will come if I just settle down and get to work. Write. Paint. Compose. I need to, as the old yet ever-timely saying goes, keep the drama on the page. I'm trying to do just that.

I'm trying not to overanalyze my situation, to simply let the answers come. Perhaps travelling over the Christmas holidays did wet my appetite for travel. As I moved about central Florida, there was something that spoke to me, held me captive. Perhaps it was the very real and visible distinction between the haves (the beautiful homes in the gated communities) and the have-nots (the many, many, trailer park communities where the houses were rundown, dilapidated-looking. Maybe it was the shabbily dressed African-American man I saw — his age buried in the wrinkles of his face — and his staggering limp as he pushed a grocery cart full of "junk" down a long, winding stretch of road. Or was it the father, at the Kennedy Space Center, screaming at his teenage daughter who had wondered off to the washroom without telling anyone. Perhaps it was, at Disney World, the tri-cornered smiles of the children enchanted with Mickey Mouse and his friends as they paraded down Main Street USA.

Something's got a hold on me, and it won't let go.

This week I am determined to settle down, focus on what matters, what's important to me. After a long absence, I will get back to my painting, continue to work on a series of paintings I started just before the release of my novel, Freestyle Love. I will work on the novel I'm in the middle of rewriting. I'll show up at the piano and play for the love of playing. Above all, I will continue to husband my dreams. And wherever they lead me, I will follow.