You know how sometimes you can listen to a song dozens of times and never really pay attention to its lyrics, and one day when you're driving your ear just happens to lend some concentration to the task and you hear a really nice line and you say 'wow, this is a pretty nice song'? (the next part of the story for me involves playing the song to death, but that's besides the point)
"i remember that fight 230 am, you said everything was slipping out of our hands, i ran out crying out and followed me into the street, braced myself for the goodbye, cause that's all i ever known, then you took me by surprise, you said you'd never leave me alone. you said, i remember how we felt sitting by the water, and everytime i look at you it's like the first time..."
Why am I citing Taylor Swift? As I was driving up to Beaverlodge, the place I am doing my rural rotation, I tuned into the radio about 400 km northwest of Edmonton and noticed that 3 of the 5 clearest radio stations were playing country tunes (Yes, Taylor is as crossover as you can get, but let's not deny her heritage) - it was a whole new world, a far cry from the Toronto metropolis that I had inhabitiated just 72 hours prior. What was this nova terra like?
Now that I've been here for all of 48 hours, it would be awfully presumptuous of me to make ponderous generalizations about what life in Beaverlodge is like, and even more presumptuous to make these generalize the Beaverlodge experience to 'small-town' life in general. I sometimes feel that Edmonton, a city of a million, is too small, too narrow-thinking, too uncultured, etc. etc. for my tastes (what a day for gross generalizations, and let it be known I do love the people). But if that is how I feel about Edmonton, what could I say about a place that is 300 times smaller yet? What is it like to live in a city where you can almost say that everyone knows everybody, or that there should at least be no more than two degrees of separation. What is it like when your peer group could consist of only a couple dozen individuals, particularly when you're growing up? More salient to my time here, what the heck do you do on a weekend? The experience should be very different from the city one. As I might expect, the people I have met here are very friendly and welcoming. I am staying at the home of a couple that have hosted medical students for the past 10 years with open arms. The hospital staff is congenial and pleasant. I went for a jog, and in 40 minutes ran in a loop that traversed half of the town's area. There is so much to discover and learn about, a cultural immersion that one might normally travel across the oceans to experience.
From my musings, one idea has stood out: Yesterday, someone at the hospital told me that it was awfully lonely in Beaverlodge if you were an adult and alone. It really is a bit of a small place, without much of a nightlife, wheere everyone kind of knows everyone tangentially, where you can do outdoors things, but Jack Frost might put a bit of a damper on things when things are -40. It occurs to me that maybe one thing that Beaverlodge might really win at is being a place where you could fall in love and raise your kids and grow old together and just really, really focus on one another.
Sometimes couples will do really fun and interesting things together. Go to an art gallery, attend the ballet/opera/symphony, go skydiving, jetset across the world's great cities, book a seat on Spaceship Two and head off into the stars (literally). But what if you were so in love that all you wanted was to be with that person and nothing else really mattered (I exaggerate, and these things are obviously not mutually exclusive, but I hope you get my point). What if you really just wanted to focus on one another, and everything that was going on around you was a monochrome to your sweetheart's colors. Then, maybe, living in a little out-of-the-ways hamlet would be as vivid to you heart as Paris or Milan. I think have always believed that falling in love, really, truly falling in love - intertwining experiences and souls and bodies so intimately - would be even more rewarding than setting out and exploring the world and all its adventures.
At the end of the music video for 'Mine', you see the two of them getting married, having kids, growing older (though they don't get very old in the video, Ms Swift has to look her normally pretty self). For some reason, I've always imagined that in the end the two in the music video would end up growing up somewhere out-of-the-ways, and really just focus on one another. How nice and lovely would that be?? Very...
[I've played 'Mine' on repeat throughout this entire blog post]
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