Leaving on a jet plane

and travelling hopefully

IT WAS ODD, to put it at its mildest, when I first landed in the United States, mid-August, 1973.

I knew so much about America. Conversely, I knew damn all.

I certainly had no inkling, as Lesley and her dad met me at Philadelphia airport and we drove to their small hometown in a gargantuan (gloriously so) Chrysler, that in a neighbourhood not far off the Schuylkill Expressway out of the city there was a house that would one day have my name on the mortgage.

(Schuylkill… pronounced “skookle,” nicknamed “sure-kill”)

(Street View image)

5019 Copley Road, in the Germantown section. We bought it for $30,000, which seemed like a financial burden we’d never climb out from under.

In fact, when we moved to Canada three years later, we sold it for six grand more. All the while, each time we’d visited friends in Toronto with nary a thought of living here, there was another house in our future, built in 1887, two years before my paternal grandfather was born. Like the place in Philly, which dated back to 1930, it had been waiting for us all our lives…

A curious corollary: Lesley researched the house we rented for eight years when we moved to Toronto, and learned that it had been built by a Newfoundlander named Frederick Phillips.

After we bought the house we’re in now, about two kilometres away in a completely different neighbourhood, Les went back to the city archives and discovered that it, too —and the house on either side — was the work of Frederick Phillips. He built no others in Toronto.

We’ve lived here for 36 years. It seems to have been ordained. I don’t believe in coincidence. We’ve had ghosts here, though never in residence, only visiting.

But all that was in the future, and I’m talking about the past.

I knew it wouldn’t be easy to establish myself in the US. I had no idea how hard it would be. It almost broke me, forced me back to the UK briefly to regroup, but I was raised stubborn.

I’d read so many books, seen so many movies, dreamed so many dreams. I recognized so much, could rhyme off chapter and verse, and tried to feel at home with it.

Realizing that as I dangled on a fraying thread, all around me, everywhere, were people who were at home, who were established. Who knew no life but this.

Americans. I wasn’t one of them.

Until one day, I was. In everything but passport and accent.

Though even that…

Settled and finally financially secure enough to be comfortable taking a trip back to north-east England for a couple of weeks, I was chatting with my sister when she suddenly pointed accusingly at me:

“‘Gotten?’ You said, ‘gotten!’” And to my parents, “He said, ‘gotten!’”

Well, hush my mouth…

It struck me then that I was in a foreign country. It was no longer where I belonged. Where I really wanted to be was New York City.

Home.

I’d learned to function there, in the toughest of tough schools. Just as I would learn to function in Philadelphia. In the equally tough school of tabloid journalism in what was, at the time, the only city in North America with four dailies.

Four years later, two of those papers, mine included, folded within a month of one another. As a take-no-prisoners columnist, I’d burned too many bridges with the remaining pair to have any hopes of being hired.

America was wearing off at last.

Lesley had a job waiting in Toronto.

For me, it was back to square one. But at least now I knew the drill.

It didn’t come near as close this time to breaking me.