Oh The Places You'll Go

Last Monday, after I wrapped up a show in Nova Scotia, I missed my flight home. The form I needed for my US visa renewal still hadn't arrived, so at 10AM the morning of my flight, I had to call the show's travel agent to cancel.

The way I came onto that show in the first place was in a whirlwind. Two days notice to pack up my kit and my personal belongings to get onto a plane from LAX to Halifax for two months. I landed at midnight, set up the trailer, and started work at 6am to prepare the lead actress for set. 

When I caught up on sleep I wandered around that tiny, beautiful East Coast City. I toured the peninsula on a long run. It felt good to be there, not only because I was back in Canada but because it was Scottish Canada. The citadel atop the hill was Edinburgh-esque, and the quaint seaside homes reminded me of the neighborhood my dad grew up in in Glasgow. 

For the last couple of years I've gone back and forth about whether I wanted to move back to Canada. If I should commit to being in LA, or be closer to my family where things feel safe and familiar. 

Before I moved to LA I was sure that I would stay forever. I remember telling my sister, in a very dramatic fashion, that I felt like I was born in the wrong place. That I'd never had a positive memory from the winter, and that I couldn't be happy in Toronto.

When I arrived in LA and went on a run in my new neighborhood, the sun saturated the air the way that it does on vacation. I looked up the palm-lined street to the hills at the top, and I honestly thought, "how could I be sad here?" 

It got me through while I was enrolling for health insurance, getting my SSN, looking for a job, and navigating all of those things that you have to do when you move countries. Nothing could be too stressful when I lived in warm, sunny, Hollywood dream land. 

One day shortly after I moved I was running errands for my first show, and I paused in the front seat of my car to take a photo of the view. I was sitting in a bank parking lot in Burbank in awe at the fact that I was wearing a t-shirt in January, and again admiring the mountains that made the backdrop everywhere I went.

While I was taking the photo, there was someone watching me. They watched me while I went into the bank to take out cash and then followed me to my car and to the next place I drove. They broke in and took all of my money, my credit cards, my laptop, and my passport with my work visa.

It took me a while to feel safe again after that and one morning I was so sure that my car got stolen, I took a 100 dollar cab out to Pomona for work. When that happened, I said I would leave. I said I'd finish the show and go back to Canada, but we found my car on the street the next day. 

When the show wrapped I stayed and then the Hollywood strikes happened, which triggered a multi-year work slowdown for the LA entertainment industry. 

I spent a lot of time on my own when work was down, away from my support system and my family. I considered whether all of it was worth it. Sticking it out for the perfect weather, getting to run in the Santa Monica mountains every weekend. 

I thought about how my little brother was getting married, and that he would soon have kids. About all of the Thanksgivings and Easters I'd missed with my cousins. If I ended up getting married in the US, would I want to raise my children there? I went back and forth until the summer of this year when I told myself that I would decide in November.

In September I got the Nova Scotia show, and while I was on set my brother had a baby. We learned shortly after that there were complications with his birth, and that the baby was being airlifted to SickKids. When I got off the phone I wondered if I should leave work to support them somehow. 

I stayed in Nova Scotia and worked 100 hours that week while my brother and his partner relocated to Toronto to be with their baby for the foreseeable future. And on my last day of work, when I should have been getting ready to go back to LA, I'd still not received the visa approval I needed.

So, I made my way to Toronto with all of my six suitcases and booked a hotel for a couple of nights close to the hospital.

When I went in to meet them the tears started to pour out before I even saw the little guy's face. He was tiny. Smaller than he seemed in the photos, but he was doing well. It was obvious once I got there how well he was being taken care of. He couldn't have made even the tiniest fuss without all of the nurses tending to him, and my brother and his partner spent all of their waking hours next to him. 

My brother learned somewhere that reading to babies made them more intelligent, so he dutifully read to him all day long. He carried a bag full of books back and forth with him to the hospital. They'd even gotten through all of Harry Potter, too.  

He gave me "Fox in Socks" to read.

It started "Watch out. This book is dangerous." It was dangerous if you wanted to seem like you knew how to read or speak. Full of tongue twisters. I took it really slowly, and then my brother read it like a pro. 

The next book he gave me was "Oh the Places You'll Go." He warned me that that one was a hard one, too. 

"Congratulations," it said, "Today is your day. You're off to great places. You're off and away." 

The picture illustrated a little boy, just like my nephew, setting off on a long pink maze with fuzzy purple trees. 

"You have brains in your head and feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose." 

It was emotional to think about little Evander getting out of that hospital big and strong and navigating the world on his own. I started to choke up as I was reading.

"Out there things can happen, and frequently do, to people as brainy and footsy as you." 

The baby was still sleeping. He slept the entire time I visited him, but I wondered if there was a part of him that heard us crying and wondered why we were reading such a scary book.

"You'll come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lightened. But mostly they're dark."

I tried my very best to remember that life was just like that sometimes, and that surely there would be a happy ending to this Dr.Seuss book. The tears fell from my brother's face onto the floor. 

Then the story went on to "the waiting place." 

"You can get so confused that you'll start in to race down long wiggled rocks at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, to a most useless place. The waiting place... for people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or a No or waiting for their hair to grow." 

I thought about how my brother, Evander, and I, were all there waiting. My brother and the baby for news that they would get to go home. Me for the form in the mail so that I could go back to the U.S. 

I thought about what a miracle it was that I was there in that moment. How thankful I was that God's plan for me was so much better than my own, that he forced me there to spend precious time with my family after I'd moaned and complained so much about how badly I missed them. That there was nothing I would have wanted to trade for being next to my brother and the baby in the hospital that night. 

After our visit my brother went back to where he was staying, and I to my hotel room. We returned the next day and Evander was wide awake. I got to see how strong he was while he used his tiny legs to lift his body up away from my brother as he changed his diaper for the first time. 

After two nights in the hotel my visa paper still hadn't come, so I asked my cousin if I could come stay with all of my suitcases for what I thought would be just one more night. But it didn't come the next day or the next. We watched silly television together on the couch, Christmas movies and the Tindler Swindler. 

And every day I went to visit with my brother in the hospital. We sang over the baby and said prayers and read books. On Sunday, after I found a beautiful church service to attend, my brother got the news that they were going home, so I went and spent the afternoon at the AGO for the first time since I moved. 

It used to be my favorite place to visit. I savored the rich coloured rooms where the renaissance paintings hung. A woman sat reading on a leather couch across from a stone pieta while her husband dozed next to her. 

I went up to the contemporary rooms. The sculpture gallery. I viewed my favorite painting by Andrew Kurelek, titled "The Bachelor." It always made me so happy to look around the old man's minuscule apartment and see all of the things he crammed in there. His pots and pans and his kettle and honey all bursting out of the cabinets and drawers while he sat content reading his paper. 

It gave me the feeling that things were always going to be alright, no matter how chaotic it got. That we always had the things we needed. 

I stopped to look at all of the blistery winterscapes that I would normally walk past. A depiction of life in Northern Canada. A mother inside the kitchen window cooking stew with her toddler close by. A young boy in the front yard all dressed up in his snow suit, gathering freshly cut logs that his father and a friend loaded into a horse buggy. 

They were happy, even in the snow. It reminded me of a quote I like to think back on every now and then that I saw in a book once. It said, "if you aren't happy at home, you won't be happy in Italy." 

I wanted to get to LA so desperately I could conceive of no other option. And I romanticized moving home to get back to how things were. Humans seem to come with that insatiable longing. The feeling that if we just got that one thing, life would be good. 

If I made it to LA. If I got to come back home. If I changed careers. If I met my husband. If the visa came in the mail and things just went how they were meant to.

I don't think it's a mistake that we were made this way, with a longing that never goes away no matter what we achieve or obtain. We can keep searching and moving the target and take the trip to Italy or win the award in Hollywood and still wish we were somewhere else. 

Because we were designed to be in community with God. And whenever I deny my life circumstances and long for something else, I deny his presence in the place he has me in, mistakenly thinking something else could better satisfy me. 

The day after my brother was released from the hospital, I got the form in the mail and got to go home. I flew back to LA with just enough time to unload my things and make it on the flight I'd booked from LAX to Rome the next day. And now I sit, in a hotel room in Italy, knowing that I am exactly where I'm meant to be.