On Thursday, Rachelle and I made the drive from Toronto to Ottawa in order to visit my family. It was an ugly March day, feeling more like the end of autumn than the start of spring. It was overcast, and all I could see in the world were subtle variations of grey. It was kind of depressing.
However, as we got closer to Ottawa, blue skies emerged, and I began to notice lines of geese flying overheard. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I had a remembrance of driving back to Ottawa from Montreal.
It was also in March, and it took place about twenty years ago. I was in university at McGill and I was an unmitigated academic disaster. Worse, I was an emotional disaster, too, in love with a person who didn’t love me, I ended up spending all of my time drinking beer, shooting pool and listening to sad music. I had run out of money, was failing out of school, and was unhappy, even though I didn’t know it. The only solution was for me to move back to Ottawa, to live with my parents, and of course, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to stay, or at least I wanted people to believe that I wanted to stay.
The car ride back to Ottawa was pretty quiet. I sat there, humiliated at having failed life in every possible regard, still needing my parents to save me and shelter me from the storm. I must have radiated resentment.
At some point on the drive, a flight of geese returning home flew right over the car. For whatever reason, this excited my mother, and she broke into a sort of girlish delight. She pulled the car over, and we got out and watched the geese, my mother exclaiming, “Look, Michael, the geese are coming back! Isn’t it wonderful!”
Honestly, I didn’t know what the big deal was. Geese. Alright. Geese.
However, it was completely out of character for my mother to behave in this way, and I noted it as strange, and although I didn’t think much of it at the time, I remember it now, decades later. And yesterday, as the grey turned to blue, I realized how comforting it must have been for my mom to rescue her son, and to have him, like the Canadian Geese, return safely to her in the spring.