Coming Home

In Vienna, the symbolic half-way point of our trip, Jenn and I got a little maudlin about its waning days. To hear us talk, the horizon was very bleak indeed.

Doris, of course, would have none of this. Coming home is always a highlight of any trip, she insisted. Sure, we agreed half-heartedly at the time.

But "home" is a fairly nebulous concept for us right now. How do you quantify home? Where you have a legal right to sleep? Where your worldly possessions are? By the first, we're homeless; by the second, our home is a rather stuffy 8' by 5' apartment with poor lighting in a seedy part of Kitchener.

Clearly, the house as home concept only gets you so far. Maybe home is where you return to in triumph after a successful invasion. This seems to have some legs--we were sort of a modern-day imperial phalanx in miniature, going from far-flung outpost to far-flung outpost ensuring that the local culture was dying. "Speak English?" To which we usually got the correct answer: "Yes, how may I help?" So successful was the cultural imperialism, in fact, that we could always rely on hearing English songs on the radio no matter where we were.

You might suggest they were playing something screechy by Alanis Morissette as a deliberately showy facade, as if to say "So fully is our own culture vanquished, we consider even the worst English crap to be better." Not true! For reasons of our own, we had two portable radios with us for the trip. France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands...they're all playing the same crap. It was a jagged little pill to swallow.

On the flight back to Toronto I jacked in my headphones and twiddled the channel dial on my seat.

Click. Movie dialogue, English.
Click. Movie dialogue, French.
Click. African drums?
Click. Mongolian throat-singing?
Click. Someone murdering a set of bagpipes.
Click. An Italian ballad--a fairly timeless one, if I recall correctly, where a young Lothario is forced to eke out a living on the mean streets of Rome, selling ombrellos to passersby for the rather reasonable rate of five euros. The refrain still echoes in my head.

And then it hits me. None of this is English pop music, but I've heard it all before somewhere.

It's like seven Sundays of CBC, all compressed into one seven-hour long flight.

Clearly, home is where the CBC is. Right now, that's Tyler's apartment (thanks!), and Doris was right: it's one of the many highlights of the trip.