Dr. Seuss once said, “Don’t be sorry that it’s over. Be glad that it happened.” That’s how I remind myself to feel about my time at 680 News when another year passes since I left, and I feel wistful about leaving a job and a work family I loved so much.
Halloween marked five years since I departed. Four and a half since I told John Hinnen, who announced his retirement this week, that I would be leaving in six months. It wasn’t an easy decision but I knew then and thankfully I still feel that it was the right one.
London is the home of my soul. Until I married into a London family almost four years ago I had no family of my own living here. But my parents’ town doesn’t feel like home and neither do the two towns we lived in before it or any of the other ones I inhabited during my career. Brantford, where I was born, might have had that aura about it if everyone I was related to wasn’t either dead or estranged for various reasons. This city is the right size, shape and temperament for me. It has beautiful parks and waterfront, crazy politicians, live music, theatre, cultural events and celebrations. It’s Canada’s 11th largest city but it’s small enough to know every nook on a personal basis. I can manage it. Toronto, much as I love it, was unmanageable for me. I’ll continue my quest to explore every corner of London and look past, or try to improve, the blight of its requisite “bad areas” and concentrate on the good.
The other thing London has is a family I love. Inlaws and outlaws and neices and nephews and a whole tribe of people the likes of which I haven’t been part of since I was a kid and all of us cousins were close. London isn’t perfect. It aches to my soul sometimes over how much I miss a select few people I rarely see. But then I get off my butt and do something I could never find time for when I was commuting or I didn’t know how to or whatever, and remind myself how very, very lucky I am.