Still, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't easy.

A few Decembers ago, I went to hear Wilco and Neil Young play in Ottawa with my best friend's husband (although he wasn't her husband yet). It was a strange sort of outing for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being that my best friend Freya wasn't there with us. She was at home with a three-month-old baby. I still remember that conversation a few months previous when we realized that Neil and Wilco were TOURING TOGETHER and that they were COMING TO OUR TOWN, only to realize in the next moment that the floor of Scotiabank Place probably wouldn't be super conducive to babies. There was a moment where it seemed like Freya might still get herself a ticket; the impending uncertainty of exactly what motherhood might mean fought an epic battle with her commitment to two of our favourite musical artists, not to mention the chance to see them together on one stage. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, the nesting instinct won out.

One of the other things that made that night an odd one was the fact that my boyfriend was there too, but he wasn't there with us. Being the socially anxious weirdo that he is, Tom had resisted getting tickets till the very last minute, and then managed to talk his neighbour, a blowhard concert promoter, into getting him an incredible VIP seat and a backstage pass. That whole chain of events made me so simmering mad and sad, although I didn't actually tell him that. Something you need to know about our relationship is that for the first year or so that we were together, we used about 90% of our energy denying the fact that we were actually IN a relationship. Call it self-protection, call it willful ignorance, call it utter foolishness. We'd spent the whole weekend before the concert together at his cabin in the woods, huddled and cuddled up close, and the whole time I just wanted to ask him, what would have been wrong with coming with us? But of course, I never did. I bottled it up and shoved it down and left his house on Sunday night feeling the way I always did when I said goodye to him: like I was leaving a huge piece of myself with him, a piece of myself that I'd given him reluctantly, silently. He knew he held it in his hands and heart, but never said so. It was like we were keeping a secret from each other, a secret we each already knew.

I am the first to admit that this was not a healthy set-up. My years in Ottawa were not ones in which I was kind to myself or others.

More often than not, after a weekend together, I'd spend my Monday in my broom closet of an office trying in vain to focus on anything but my ridiculous personal life and failing miserably. That Monday of Neil and Wilco was no exception. I remember I called Freya from my office and told her to tell Greg I wasn't going to the show, that I was sorry but I just couldn't face it. I was probably crying; I often cried in my office back then, much to the fascination of the pages wandering by my door with a full truck of books. I can't remember what Freya said to me, but it was probably something to the effect of "Pull your head out of your ass, muffin." She has a way of setting me straight. I hauled myself home, suddenly aware of the fact that I was going to this show, not just for myself, but for her. Sweet baby Finn was her priority that night; my priority was rocking out for two.

So Greg and I went to the show, and drank many, many tall cans of Creemore. Wilco put on the kind of Opening Act Set that only they can--playing all their greatest hits from across their catalogue, so tightly and perfectly timed. When they played I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, I cried, like I always do when I hear them play that song live. I called my Best West Coast Friend Tara and held my cell phone up to leave a chunk of sonic love on her answering machine. It was the first and only time I've ever done that. Between their set and Neil's, Greg and I saw Tom on his VIP throne, and tried to get his attention. We were, by all accounts, unsuccessful. When the lights went back down and Neil hit the stage, I felt this strange catharsis, knowing Tom was there too, knowing we were both loving the shit out of this show, separate but equal. Maybe it was the cookies Greg and I ate in the car before heading in but I suddenly felt like the whole night was a metaphor for our relationship.

It was probably the cookies.

Neil closed down with an incredible, earth-shaking cover of A Day In The Life that hurt my feelings something fierce. I felt like my heart had been ripped open and sewn back together. I walked out into the freezing night feeling humbled and rocked out and vindicated. A good rock show will do that to a girl. As I drove back into the city, I called Tom, who told me slurringly how he'd made it backstage and shaken Neil's hand. He asked me if I wanted to come back to his hotel room--too little, too late. It took everything in me to decline the invitation. After all, I was already halfway home.

idiot wind.

The top 5 songs that are distracting me from packing right now, Ray Lamontagne doing covers / Dylan covers / Dylan free association edition:

1. Ray Lamontagne and David Gray--Dig A Pony



2. Ray Lamontagne--The Man In Me



3. Bob Dylan--If you see her, say hello


If you see her say hello Bob Dylan
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4. Ramblin' Jack Elliot--Don't Think Twice, It's Alright



5. Wilco--Company In My Back



...I always need to throw a little Tweedy in there. He's like a fine sorbet, cleansing the palate.

au revoir, oughts.

It's been a banner year for me, and as usual, as I come to the end of 2Cait9 I make the realization that I've been so caught up in the pure winningness that is my life these days that I've forgotten to keep track of whether the things I loved in this last year of the decade were actually released in the last year. I'm pretty sure most of them weren't. I'm gonna go by some 2009-specific stuff on iTunes now but here's a list of the Best of Everything, 2009, to keep you occupied.

Best move: Ottawa to Kingston.

Best non-moving-related decision: forsaking vegetarianism and eating a lot of bacon (and also, a bird).

Best private radio discovery: 98.9 The Drive. For real! hardly any commercials and they reintroduced Banditos by The Refreshments into my life. If only we could somehow convince their lobotomized idiot DJs to never, ever speak ("We call it essential alternative because we play music that is essentially alternative! EXTREME!").

Best public radio standby: Wire Tap with Jonathan Goldstein.

Best book set in the grainy, sepia toned streets of 1970s New York involving latchkey children and the 20000$ Pyramid: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.


Best love-hate relationship: Q, with Jian Ghomeshi. (Seriously though, Moxy Fruvous was fucking awesome. This song was the best.)

Best terrifying dystopia: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Best re-read: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank.

Best Batman comic: All Star Batman and Robin, Volume 1, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee.

Best emo comic memoir: Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffrey Brown.

Best superficially stupid movie that is actually awesome and involves Muppets: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (Oh Jason Segel, you have my heart.)

Best song that totally reaffirmed my faith in pop rock when it came out and then slowly, so slowly, made me want to gauge holes in my eardrums whenever I hear it: Help, I'm Alive by Metric.


Best musical rediscovery: Pavement.

Subsequent best song of all time discovery: Stereo by Pavement.

Best show: Plaskett at the Charles Bronson Centre. Or maybe, just maybe, the sheer anticipation of possessing orchestra level seats for Wilco at the NAC this winter. That might be better than all the shows in the world lined up in a row.

Best non-Plaskett album that actually came out in 2009: Hold Time by M. Ward.

Best friends: every last one of you.

Here's to the happy couple.

I've been stewing and stewing over how to address the sad and extremely deeply felt event of John Hughes' death all week, to the point where I've given myself writer's block in the process. Not good, friends. Not good. So instead I'm putting those feelings on hold for now, because this weekend is pretty much going to be the best weekend of all time. Saturday is my best friend's wedding. I never get tired of saying "my best friend's wedding," partly because it is the name of one of the goofiest movies ever made and no pop culture reference could be less apt. But mostly I never get tired of saying it because it is going to be so frigging fun, and because I love the happy couple so frigging much. There's nothing I enjoy more than tripping out in my head about how fast life moves and how much things can change and stay the same all at once. This party's going to be a big old object lesson in that very thing, with a side order of spinach dip and love.

This morning when I woke up, my mind was on this funny channel-surfing kick where different ridiculous Freya moments kept passing through my head--the time I played After the Gold Rush and made her cry, the time she wrote out a whole Gord Downie poem in a letter to me from a tree planting camp in Alberta, the time Greg, then only a casual twinkle in her eye, showed up on our Walmerhaus doorstep bearing Balderson cheese for one and all, the time I came home to find her curled up watching one of my My So-Called Life videos proclaiming, "Cait, this explains so much about you." So much has changed in the last ten (TEN!) years, and yet so much is still exactly the way it always was, and either way it's all the way it ought to be.

Which probably makes this next thing fitting. My favourite love poem, and maybe my favourite poem, is "Departure," by F.R. Scott, which maybe isn't even a love poem at all, since says goodbye more than it says hello. But more than that, it's about the vast landscape that becomes a part of every relationship when you live in this snowy minefield of a country, the eternity of the natural world and of the love you could find there, knowing it might not last forever but hoping that it does.

Departure

Always I shall remember you, as my car moved
Away from the station and left you alone by the gate
Utterly and forever frozen in time and solitude
Like a tree on the north shore of Lake Superior.
It was a moment only, and you were gone,
And I was gone, and we and it were gone,
And the two parts of the enormous whole we had known
Melted and swirled away in their separate streams
Down the smooth, granite slope of our watershed.

We shall find, each, the deep sea in the end,
A stillness, and a movement only of tides
That wash a world, whole continents between,
Flooding the estuaries of alien lands.
And we shall know, after the flow and ebb,
Things central, absolute and whole.
Brought clear of silt, into the open roads,
Events shall pass like waves, and we shall stay.

--F.R. Scott

Here's to you, Tony and Lily. I searched the annals of YouTube for "We're Hardcore" but clearly Gord hasn't left the digital footprint one might have hoped for. Anyway, this one's just as good, and just as true.