Cosmic Prose

Natasha Regehr

Tag: decisions (page 1 of 3)

Do Not Enter

September 13, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Three years ago I had a disastrous encounter with a maestro who shall not be named.  It would not be a stretch to say that there were elements of trauma to that evening.  Before you go any further, you should probably read the amusing, but heart-wrenching account of my first audition experience in Casablanca.

Now, three years later, I did the unthinkable thing, and repeated the experience.  Same never-ending round-about.  Same obscure church entrance.  Same ghastly maestro.  Same everything.  But not the same me. Continue reading

Faux French, Riviera Style

July 11, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Have you been wondering how I’ve been faring since I bade farewell to les vaches?

I am slowly adjusting to life on the French Riviera.

Slowly.

My drive here was uneventful, except for that time my GPS became my enemy and led me in circles for two hours in downtown Nice during the height of tourist season.  Navigation systems don’t do well with pedestrian-only streets.  That’s all I’ll say about that.

And now I am perched on a hill overlooking the uppity town of Villefranche-sur-mer, with its uppity yachts, BMWs, and fake hedges. Why anyone would need a fake hedge in this lotus land is beyond me, but there it is.  Why water a real hedge when you can buy a fake one?

No, to be honest, I’m missing the friendly, down-to-earth charm of my village in the Alps.  Well, okay, the cows were not so friendly.  But there was an endearing honesty to that place, a sense that life had substance, and that everything else was somehow false.

Not so with the French Riviera.  Everything here feels half-empty, like the soul of the place just drained out into the Mediterranean when the people all arrived. I’m sure at one time it was quaint and delightful and historically significant; but right now, it feels to me like a toy neighbourhood, constructed out of blocks and toothpicks and dotted with plastic accessories.  Doll houses, all, papered in Euros…

But I, too, am a falsehood, here on the French Riviera.

Continue reading

Maybe!

June 18, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I have been stressing out about French. Have you noticed? Likely not, because you think I’m still obsessing about the Royal Wedding.  Forget that.  I’m over it.

No, French is my ongoing obsession, more than ever now, as the stakes creep higher in equal proportion to my rising self-doubt.

What if I can’t do it? What if, no matter how much I study and how long I persist, I never pass beyond the blundering idiot phase of language learning? Oh, sure, I’m less of a blundering idiot than I was three years ago, when I couldn’t say, “I want to walk up the hill.” But the subjunctive has its own mode of blunder induction (did you catch that, French-speakers? Its own mode?).  The more I learn, the more I blunder.

Now, these rising stakes of which I speak so melodramatically.  What are they? Well, you know.  Employment. That about sums it up.  You see, I miss Canada. Continue reading

Royal Wedding Recant

May 23, 2018 / / 1 Comment

True story: I posted my Royal Wedding Rant in the wee hours of the night, and then hastily took it down the next morning, when, in the cold light of day, I realized that I had typified myself as a bitter old woman with no hope – but not before a robust 39 people had had the opportunity to read it and form opinions about my perceived state of ongoing misery.

Therefore I feel I must further unpack my comments, and perhaps qualify them with a few points that, in my state of royal grumpiness, I had overlooked.

First: I stand by my suggestion that perhaps there was a touch too much money poured into this particular matrimonial event. No woman, princess or not, needs a $600,000 wedding dress.  I also feel duly entitled to my opinion that all of the media hoop-la was a little excessive.  But then again, I feel the same way about the idolization of rich and famous people in general.  I simply have no interest in pop culture and its dull derivatives.  I prefer dead baroque musicians.  Call me quirky.

So there we go.  The royal wedding phenomenon, as a newsworthy event, struck me as a rather silly over-investment of time and money, when there are so many more interesting things in the world with which to occupy oneself.  French grammar, for instance.  I truly do get a kick out of French grammar.

Yes, I’ll concede that I’m an anomaly when it comes to entertainment.

But that does not make me a bitter old woman with no hope.  For that, we must address my feelings about weddings, and marriage, in general.  And that is a stickier topic indeed. Continue reading

La Grande Vie

May 13, 2018 / / 2 Comments

I want to talk to you about The Big Life (or La Grande Vie, as I called it in my first work of French pseudo-fiction, which I may or may not share with you at a later date, if you promise not to judge me by my grammar).

The Big Life: what is it? What makes a life small, restricted, or ingrown, and what makes it expansive, possibility-ridden, unencumbered? Is it where you live? Is it the people with whom you surround yourself? Is it finances, or family, or a sense of independence?

I remember doing a family history project with a bunch of six-year-olds a few years ago for social studies.  One of the things I asked the students to do was to talk to their parents about their origins.  Paper after paper came back to me, saying, “I was born in Lindsay.  My parents were born in Lindsay.  My grandparents were born in Lindsay.”

Now, Lindsay is not Toronto, or Montreal, or New York, or Paris.  Lindsay is a small, rural community in the middle of (pretty much) nowhere.  It has its charms, to be sure, but there is nothing particularly distinguishing about it.  Even Bobcaygeon, a small rural community even deeper in the middle of nowhere, has a massive shoe store to commend itself to the wider world.  But Lindsay? It’s just a little Canadian town, surrounded by lakes, trees, and farmland.

“What small lives these people lead,” I thought to myself, as I imagined generation after generation living, marrying, and dying on one little speck of this great earth.  “I don’t want a small life.  I want The Big Life.  I want to Go.”

Going is a form of enlargement, I’m sure of it.  In the last three years, I’ve visited a dozen countries scattered across four continents.  I’ve lost track of the cities and airports I’ve passed through, the mountains I’ve climbed, the seas I’ve sailed, the terrain I’ve trekked.  And I live now in a foreign land that is about as far removed from little Lindsay, both geographically and culturally, as it could possibly be.

Is this The Big Life? It sure feels like it, when I’m scuba diving in the Mediterranean or camping out in the Sahara.  One does not ride camels in Lindsay.  One does not barter for one’s daily necessities.  One does not wonder how to say “thank-you” in Polish or “please” in Hungarian.  One certainly does not climb the Great Wall of China.  These are Big Life things.  They are things that cannot be done in any alternative form of “elsewhere.”  They are unique, defining, unreplicable experiences.  That’s what The Big Life is all about, right? It’s about Doing Big Things and posting them on Facebook for all the world to see.  Look at me and my gigantic, interesting life!

The Great Wall of China
The Bavarian Alps
The Eiffel Tower
Surfing in Dar Bouazza
Tiananmen Square, under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao
The Greek Acropolis
Berber bridal wear
The Sahara Desert
Camel trekking
Venice, Italy
The Atlas Mountains
Nice, France
Scuba diving in Greece
Buying oranges at the medina

You should know, though, that taking selfies with Chairman Mao is not representative of the real, everyday, Standard-Sized Life that I live in Casablanca.  If anything, my Moroccan life has been one of shrinkage and thinning (not in body-size, unfortunately, but that’s another story).

Let me tell you what I mean.

Continue reading

Leap!

May 6, 2018 / / 10 Comments

Have you ever received a message like this?

It’s a little surreal. It feels quite final. I’ve made the leap.

I’ve made leaps before. Big leaps. Resigning, house-selling, relocating leaps. Blind leaps, for the most part. Great, optimistic, terrifying leaps into a new unknown. Leaps I’ve later questioned. And here I go again.

Continue reading

Greece, Part 2: A Little Gruff Around the Edges

November 6, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Greeks can be gruff.  This is my studied opinion after spending a week in the myth-infused homeland of the gods, with its gruesome stories of bickering deities vying for power and favour.

My Airbnb hostess in Athens was the first to freak out at me.  “Why are you late? You should have called! I have a baby! I’ve been waiting for you in this apartment for eight hours now!”  For the record, I was not eight hours late, my hostess lived a mere 15 minutes away from the apartment, and I communicated with her the instant my plane landed, so now that I think about it, I’m kind of sorrynotsorry…

Then came the old couple on the ferry.  The ones who freaked out when I took one of six empty seats around a table, because they had, in absentia, appropriated all six seats for themselves – only to abandon them after I meekly relocated.   I sat at the next table and gave them the evil eye for the rest of the trip.  Yeah, mister.  You’d better get out your worry beads. Continue reading

Greece, Part 1: Taking the Plunge

October 22, 2017 / / 1 Comment

IMG_4731I love water.  I love being in water.  I love being in deep water.  I love being upside down in deep water.  I love gliding through it, feeling its silky caress against my skin.  I love the aquamarine blueness of it, the way the light dances through it, the way I drift and float and submerge and emerge with perfect ease and grace.  I love the serenity of this glowing world to which I can escape and suspend time — until my lungs oblige me to surface for a little bit of oxygen.

You can imagine, then, the appeal of staying in this underwater world indefinitely, unconcerned about the trivialities of inhaling and exhaling — just drifting from one delight to the next in a slow ballet of submarine bliss.

Scuba diving, I thought, is exactly what my life has been missing.  I must go scuba diving.  I will be a natural at manoeuvring through this liquid paradise.  I will feel utterly at ease in my favoured element.

Not so. Continue reading

Here Goes…

September 1, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Expat life is full of comings and goings, and right now I am feeling the goings much more than the comings. I am suffering the loss of some of my favourite people, and I find myself tempted to retreat to my magnificent new bedroom to while away the hours in comfortable solitude instead of mustering the energy to go out and intentionally cultivate new friendships.

Does anyone else out there understand how uncomfortable it is to watch others socialize freely and effortlessly, but to remain on the outside of their banter? Does anyone find the thought of trying to weasel your way into others’ already-established friendships borderline-terrifying? Does anyone find the thought of spending long, unstructured stretches of time with large groups of people absolutely excruciating?

If so, perhaps you can help me to remain accountable to my new Anti-Isolation, Starting-Over, I-Can-Do-This Social Policy – drawn up just this morning, with a mixture of dread and optimism: Continue reading

A Whole Lot of Normal

February 12, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Last week I tapped on my neighbour’s door to ask for a bit of flour. Because that’s what you do when you neither cook nor bake, but you find yourself craving cheese sauce, and that sauce needs thickening, and you know your neighbour has flour, because she gave you some the one and only other time you felt a need to cheese things up.

It’s pleasant, having neighbours from whom you can acquire flour twice a year, in exchange for several kilos of peanut and almond butter. It’s pleasant, walking in and being welcome in someone else’s home. It’s pleasant, chatting about how we’re really feeling about this juncture in our lives. Continue reading

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