One Year and Three Days in a New City

Wayne talks about the one-year anniversary of his move from Ottawa to St. John’s ▬ 

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about me and the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 31: “One Year and Three Days in a New City.”

I arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on November 2, 2023, from my former home in Ottawa after driving and riding the ferry and staying in hotels along the way for a few days. It was raining hard at night when I arrived at my youngest brother’s place, my beloved Audi scraped along the driver’s side from my having side-swiped a guardrail after I’d fallen asleep at the wheel. Sleep apnea, and I had discarded by BIPAP machine. Oh, and that doesn’t count the two other times I’d fallen asleep en route, ending up in the grass down a small slope off the highway, but each time being able to manoeuvre the car back onto the highway as if this were an entirely common thing to happen when you’re driving cross-country. Getting from Ottawa to St. John’s involves driving in five of the ten provinces of the country and a distance of about 2,700 kilometres (or about 1,675 miles). That’s almost exactly halfway across the country.

I had retired about three years earlier, had sold my condo only days before, and had bought another condo in St. John’s, sight unseen except for online, for less than half the price. I’ve always been someone who not only doesn’t get apprehensive about change but in fact welcomes it. I get tired of things, no matter how good those things are or that place is. I’m single and solo and don’t have pets or even plants, so whatever happens after a big change affects only me, and I tend to think, What’s the worst that could happen anyway? It’s a chaotic universe with no life after death, so, hey, I’m good. That’s not to say that I don’t like life or living. For the record, they are two of my favourite things. But there are advantages and disadvantages to any choice of life, so I may lose a few things but I’ll gain some too.

I’m happy to say that I like the new city. It’s big enough so that I can feel anonymous but not too big so that the people are aloof. I may be the first person to say this about St. John’s, but I love the weather. RDF, as the Newfies call it (rain, drizzle, fog), suits me well, and I never find it dreary or depressing or grim as some other people do. I live in the sector called centre city, and that makes me about fifteen minutes or less from just about everything. There are some good restaurants. There is a very lively arts scene, and arts of all kinds. I love standup comedy, for example, and though there’s no standup club in St. John’s, there are several bars and other venues where I can see comedy easily.

I’ve never been in a city where they fix the potholes and cracks in the paved roads so systematically. Much of the summer you have to dodge the indentations about three centimetres deep where city workers have sliced out the bad bit to prepare it for paving or filling in. Snow-clearing during the winter is of course a major venture, and the city doesn’t bother to clear the sidewalks. That means that a typical street has a small mountain of snow on either side, and so pedestrians have to walk sometimes very close to the middle of the road in order to get anywhere. Driver beware.

I mentioned about being solo. I’m an introvert (though not a hermit) and so being solo in a condo in a city of a million people like Ottawa is about the same as it is in St. John’s, with about a quarter of that population. I find that the older I get (I turned 65 during the year) the more I want solitude and silence. I don’t want to hear a racket everywhere I go. The same thing applies mentally. I don’t want to be on all the social media and keeping up with this, and being insulted over here, and fashioning a post for some other platform. Or also staring at my phone for hours on end. I like peace. I like to sit in the dark in my favourite leather chair and just exist. I like simple and minimal surroundings. I don’t want complications. I don’t want any more meetings or too many commitments that I can’t get out of. I want to do the things I like doing during the, let’s say, thirty-four more years that I have to live.

A few negative things have happened, and I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve pissed a few people off, and a few members of my family have had an upheaval year during 2024 too. I’m trying mostly, in the midst of all this, to be myself and to be true to myself. Maybe that sounds grandiose. Maybe that sounds vague. I don’t know. What I mean is that I’m trying to be open and honest. Trying to leave myself open to new adventures. Trying to preserve what’s good. It’s easier when you’re retired but it’s still no piece of cake (I’m starting to get hungry so my writing clichés are tending toward food). Editorial note for those who are well fed: don’t use piece of cake in your writing. It’s a silly and worn-out image.

I wonder overall if there are two broad categories of people, neither category worse than the other. I’m in the category that wants to move on to something else, but there are others, say, right here in Newfoundland, who have never travelled off the island let alone lived outside it. For these people there must be something comforting about staying where you are and where you have been. Being born in a town and growing up and then building a house right next to where your parents live. Learning a trade or profession in your early 20s and then practicing it in that town, where you retire and then pass the business or the enthusiasm along to your children.

I’m really too—I’m not sure what the right word is, let’s say detached—I’m too detached for that kind of life. I don’t like not to be able to get out of something. I like being just me, independent. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never felt comfortable in groups. The spirit of the group, the shared goals or activities—I always have trouble just naturally feeling all that. One of my favourite writers from the 18th century is the great satirist Jonathan Swift, who once wrote in a letter to his friend Alexander Pope:

I have ever hated all Nations professions and Communityes and all my love is towards individualls for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Councellor such a one, Judge such a one … but principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I hartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth.

This is not exactly the way I feel, but I can see where he’s coming from. We homo sapiens are a bit of a disappointment and embarrassment to the rest of the planet, let alone being a bit of a scourge as well. Sometimes you just want to skulk away and live in a cabin in the woods.

And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. And please join me again next Tuesday.