ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Photo: The Golden Boy atop the legislative buildings in downtown Winnipeg.

Today is Day One of my Canadian book tour. I am in Winnipeg, where my first reading will be tomorrow evening. Winnipeg: the city in which I was born, grew up, went to high school and university; Winnipeg: the city where my grandparents and parents are buried; Winnipeg: the city full of memories of happy and not-so-happy times. But what Winnipeg means to me more than anything is family. I have an unusually large family and when I was growing up, we all lived in Winnipeg and celebrated holidays and family events together. We lived next door to each other - and with all three moves during my time in Winnipeg, we always lived next door to our relatives. My extended family is very close to me. Now, some fifty years later, many of us have moved and live in other places, but I still have many cousins, aunts and uncles that have remained here.

One of the best things about these book tours is reconnecting with people and places from my past. It is such a gift to be able to see people I have not seen for a long time, for whom I care about and miss in my life, and be able to reconnect and talk as though all the many years have not interceded.

On my way to a TV interview, my cousin Ruthy and I stopped in front of a house on Stella Avenue.

"I think this is the house," she said.

"Naw, it can't be. It looks too nice," I responded. We went up and back with her saying she thought it was the house and my saying I thought it looked too nice. A man standing in the front yard watched us with interest and then walked over to the car.

"Excuse us," we both chirped, "we think we used to live here."

"Well, was it more than thirty years ago?"

"It was more than sixty years ago," I answered.

"Who was the family?" he asked.

"Simkins," I answered.

"Oh yes, I knew them. I often wondered what happened to them."

We chatted for a while, and he told us how he had put new siding on the outside.

"The outside is very different," he explained, "but the inside is pretty much the same."

And that was the house in which I was born. Behind the house was a tiny garage where my uncle Abe had told us they used to park four trucks. I couldn't imagine getting one truck in there, much less four. My parents were married in that back yard. And I lived in that house until I was almost six.

Ruthy and I drove on to Grant Park Mall which houses McNally Robinson Book Store where the reading will be. I had a TV interview there on location. The bookstore is huge, and as I walked in, I was very pleasantly surprised to see a whole table with my books on display, and everywhere I looked, there were beautiful posters advertising the reading. John, my contact from the store, told me they had been getting a lot of calls about it, and so I am very much looking forward to the reading tomorrow. Stay tuned.

It's good to be home.