Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Quit Drinking

I found myself thinking about college during the two days it took to travel by train aboard the Rocky Mountaineer between Vancouver, B.C., and Banff. It's possible to think about almost everything that's going on in one's life, or almost nothing at all, on a trip like that. I'm not sure which extreme I came closest to, but I did think about college; maybe remembering what can be remembered of those halcyon days between 1979 and 1985 (never mind the math on that one) was a good substitute for NOT remembering the things I'd promised myself that I'd allow myself to forget about until after the holidays. (We boarded the train on December 21st, so I was running out of time for forgetfulness.) I was traveling with my 9-year-old son, but he was happily spending most of his time raising hell, being precocious, and voicing restrained, hedging-his-bets skepticism about the existence of Santa Claus with the older children among his new friends, so I was left pretty much to my own devices until I'd get to missing him and go drag him back to our dome-top car to entertain me. I can be a real handful when we travel.
For one thing, I hadn't been in the Pacific Northwest since graduating from Reed College in Portland--what? almost 23 years ago?. I'd forgotten how even the big cities in that part of the country feel small and intimate, and I'd forgotten how green and wet it is even in the middle of winter. We boarded the train in Vancouver just as the sky was beginning to get light and the mountains around the city, snow-covered and with mists pouring down like liquid through the spaces between them, revealed themselves. The crew immediately passed out mimosas and muffins, and we were on our way. (I had told myself that I was going to have a couple of wholesome, relatively alcohol-free days on this trip, but who can resist free mimosas at dawn? No one else was, as far as I could tell.)
I had my iPod with me, and as the train slid through deep green fields through which horses galloped and from which Canada geese rose in silver formations, I began to realize how many of the songs on it were by people from Canada--Joni Mitchell, K.D. Lang, Gordon Lightfoot (don't laugh--go back and really listen to "If You Could Read My Mind" when it's not being played on one of those Lite radio stations), The Band (I think), Crosby and/or Stills and/or Nash, and definitely Young, and probably a few others. I'd only been to Canada once before the trip, and that was on a very short cruise to Nova Scotia years earlier. I swear the songs by the Canadians suddenly seemed to make more sense here in British Columbia in December.
In particular, I was listening to songs from Joni Mitchell's "Blue" ("It's comin' on Christmas/They're cuttin' down trees/They're putting up reindeer/And singing songs of joy and peace/I wish I had a river/I could skate away on..."), which I hadn't really listened to since college, when my voice could actually reach Joni's endless high notes with ease (and did so on a regular basis--in the '80's, in college, girls and womyn alike listened to Joni and Patti Smith with maniacal fervor, especially in the midst of bad breakups, which tended to happen every few weeks).
And then there was Thadee (there's an accent on that first "e", but I can't figure out how to put it there now), the senior, very French-Canadian member of our ridiculously charming and attentive crew of four (the others being David, Matthew, and Jennifer). I can't remember how it came up, but there came a moment when we found out that we both speak some Arabic (Thadee, it turns out, has worked all over the world as a tour guide and probably knows quite a few other languages as well in which to toss out his funny, barbed, French-Canadian-laced remarks on things such as, oh, waterboarding and Tasers and the glee with which certain members of the American and Canadian administrations view such disciplinary options). "How did you learn Arabic?" he asked me. "Egyptian lover?"
Well, yes, as a matter of fact--I did learn most of it with the help of an Egyptian lover back in the early 1990's. Didn't everyone? But what got me thinking about college in this instance was the use of the word, "lover". In college, people rarely used the words "boyfriend" or "girlfriend". "Lover", or, in some cases, "Sweetheart", was the preferred way to refer to the person one was sleeping with between Joni- and Patti-fests. I hadn't heard anyone use the word since shortly after 1985, and I realized how much I missed it. "Boyfriend" and "husband" really don't cut it when you're in the midst of something. Or maybe I just miss being in the midst of something, and the wild, cold, open spaces of Canada reminded me of what I miss.
The Rocky Mountaineer, in western Canada, was only the second place in which I've found people who are willing to throw together a hot buttered rum for a stranger; the first, of course, was Ireland. Good luck finding anyone other than a lover who will do that for you, and good luck turning it down (whatever your resolutions) just before Christmas, in a place called the "Land of a Million Christmas Trees", where everything sparkles with ice and spotless snow, and people refer to lovers as "lovers", and the light of the moon slices the darkness, and you can see every star you're meant to see in the black sky, and your child is still thinking about Santa Claus, and you're on a train in the middle of a frozen nowhere where the only interference would be a landslide/avalanche, and the people around you are singing Christmas carols with only the slightest sense of irony. It's not about drinking, really. It's about how clear everything was when you were in college, or younger, and everything was about choosing just the right elements to complete a perfect moment.