A Love Letter and an RPM Menu

To St. John’s, on our 5th Anniversary,

You look to me today, just the way you looked while I was driving through each of your neighbourhoods for the first time. Years, houses, careers, and a family later I can still remember that first view. I hold each landmark up and compare it, new eyes versus accustomed eyes. Oh my Newfoundhome, you imprinted on me from that first airport pick-up. My heart dropping into my stomach in the back of a taxi on the small roller coaster dell crossing Rennies River into Georgestown as I fell wholly in love. The victorians along Bannerman park, just shabby enough to signal there may be a place for me there, or somewhere close by. Then on through downtown and faded pub signs tucked into alleys behind piles of grey plow snow, whispering “we are worth the work” “never mind cold feet” “comfort and intrigue here inside by side.” My first night I followed the whispers to The Ship, butterflies swimming in pints inside me.

But I know what happens to new love. It mellows and it softens into background, or it hardens into foundation, or it fades altogether, or it explodes and burns the sap right out of you and leaves you smelling of creosote and bitters. It only stays gold in sonnets and romance novels. Well I don’t know whether Shakespeare or Steele is the constant welcome cliché of my island fate, but that drive from the airport, through town, down towards the harbour still thrills me through my skin each time I come home.

How many times in the last two decades have I found myself on my real and metaphorical kitchen floor, cold and emptied, having thrown off all burdensome and reassuring scaffolding of whatever life I had just built. Only to find that what I had built wouldn’t hold my weight as I tried to climb onto my feet come morning. Now these past 5 years, I have had you surrounding me, laid out for me to embrace and trample each time I’ve burnt my house down the night before or pulled the pin on my job, or scared away some other kind of love by falling through my front door when I should have been wiping my boots and putting on the kettle. You are always old and never tired. St John’s, you are the love of my life. I am yours. Be mine. Be all of ours.

RPM MENU:
NO TIME FOR DISHES WITH TEN SONGS TO WRITE AND RECORD!

BREAKFAST:
Egg-in-the-Hole. Butter slice of bread on both sides; cut a hole in the centre and fry with an egg in the middle. Flip, cook yolk through and eat like a piece of toast.

LUNCH:
Microfauxne Cocktail Salad. Fill a regular ice cream cone (unsweetened) with a scoop of an avocado and some pre-cooked cocktail shrimp, sprinkle with lemon and salt. [alternatives: egg salad, chicken salad.]

SUPPER:
Buckwheat Pancakes – 2C flour (mix of buckwheat/wholewheat/white), 2C milk and yoghurt mixed, 2 eggs, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp soda, 2 tbsp oil/melted butter. Mix and fry in butter/oil. Nutritious, easy and they make great cold PB&J sandwiches for tomorrow’s equally rushed lunch.

DRINK:
For once I recommend beer/wine over booze. We are in this for the next four weeks and nothing says “artist” like wine glass rings on hand written sheet music