… or lose you to a summer love? Well, I’m back, and I wish I could blame my recent absence on an endless prairie summer vacation with Shelley Fabares, and a summer love with her or anyone else. Sadly the facts are not so sunny as that, and involve a bleak, unfriendly and spiritually debilitating winter, nearer to the South Pole than people ought to go. This is all the complaining and excuse-making you’ll get from me; happier and warmer days are here again.
In Stephen King’s 11/22/63 , the hero Jake has a portal, in back of a diner, through which he can flip out of his present and into September 1958, and then back again if he needs to—but of course why would he want to? I winced each time he returned, however necessarily and briefly, to his 21st century situation, and dreaded that he wouldn’t be able to flip back again into the entirely more charming Eisenhower/Kennedy version of Maine and then Texas, settle in, and stay forever.
To write Winnipegland I similarly have not simply to remember, but actually to be in the right time and place. My portal is the “gopher hole” of the subtitle, and for the past couple of months I’ve been required to be so very much involved in my own 2015 that I’ve had trouble remembering where that gopher hole could be. So Winnipegland has been in hiatus, but now the hiatus needs a hiatus.
While I look for that old gopher hole, or stumble upon some new portal to genuine time travel, I’ll have to resort to memory and to the occasional secondary source. I might begin with an account of my brief career as a four year old skirtlifter, a discussion of the lurking evil of playground equipment, or maybe something about a summer camp run by an alarmingly liberal branch of the Mennonite church. We shall see. God forbid I should have to emulate Mr King, and start making stuff up.
Winnipegland 