Back in the day

I often wonder when I got bit by the Gypsy bug.

Sometimes I think it was from when I was a kid, before I even knew my ass from my elbow. My moma told me once about the time I just got pissed off at her and took off. I snagged a penny from the counter, pulled up my diapers and headed out the door, down Painter Circle street, took a right up the main street Poirier, walked for half a km and plopped down my penny at the local depanneur, the Quebec equivalent of a 7/11, and asked for an ice cream cone. I was not quite two at the time.

Or the time when I would periodically pack my bag with some G.I. Joes, cookies and other precious possessions and take off for half a day before getting bored and coming home for dinner. I was ten when this started happening every other weekend. Once, while we were living in Greece, I pissed off my mother and she locked me in the house while she and the rest of the family went on a day trip. I packed a bag of canned salmon, went to the edge of our balcony on the 4th floor of our condo complex, threw my feet over the edge, swung back and forth to time my fall onto the balcony below us and repeated the process two more times before skipping the entire last floor of our building to fall an entire floor and a half onto the sweet hard concrete of freedom. I headed for the nearest park, cracked open a can of salmon, ate it, and decided that being a bum wasn't for me, so I went back home. Problem was I was locked out and my mom would have killed me if she found out what I did. Not only was it the riskiest thing I've done with my personal safety and health but I directly went against the will of the matriarch. A crime punishable by death.

We were living in a posh area outside of Athens next to a shipping magnate who owned the biggest house I'd ever seen, complete with pinball machines in his game room and a giant Saint-Bernard that slobbered it's own body weight every day. The groundskeeper was Ahmed, from some Arab country. He was a friend of mine and had actually let me drive his motorbike when I was 14. I went to him with my problem and he decided it was a noble thing to help me back into my house, keeping my skin intact. We went to the roof of our condo complex, he tied a rope around my waist and legs and gently, ever so gently, lowered me back down to the balcony I started from. I thanked him, went back inside and didn't tell another soul until all threat of reprisal was gone.

Our family bounced around for a little while longer, going from Athens to Belleville to Montreal in the next four years while I went away to school at Bishop's University where I studied football for four years. Most weekends and holidays I spent in Montreal. I started feeling the need to travel again and headed out to Amsterdam to meet up with a friend and teammate of mine from university, Gus. We headed through Europe, seeing Holland, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Greece and were finally on our way to Constantinople but before getting there I was arrested as a deserter from the Greek army. Long story.

At the end of my studies I fell for the woman who would be in my life for good. We married and divorced while I tried to dislodge her from the idea of settling down and becoming the Jones'. It never worked. We ended up staying in the same city for the next ten years and I almost went crazy. Well, the almost part was debatable for a while but in the end it was simply too much for me to handle.

I started travelling again, slowly at first, seeing places around Quebec, then further down the road as far as Niagara falls, then off to Costa Rica and finally starting my Israel/Palestinian Territories/Jordan/Thailand/Laos trip. The more I traveled the more I wanted to see. The landscapes, colours, tastes, cultures, people and architecture of the different places I visited were a drug that lasted for as long as my curiosity and money would allow. Sometimes I would feel like staying in one spot for a week, at other times an hour. Regardless of the reason, the next place called to me through the fabric of spacetime, ripping me away from the people and places I loved in order to love the people and places that wanted to meet me next. Every step I took brought me closer to the end of a road that stretched through my mind and into the endless horizon.