This is a rather gloomy way of being reminded, but this week, it was the anniversary of Marc Lepine’s massacre of 14 students at the École Polytechnique, and I realized, “I’ve lived in Canada now for 20 years.” The Montreal massacre is one of the first news stories I remember from my first year in my adopted homeland.

A few months prior, my step mother had picked me up from the international airport, which at that time was adorned with posters saying: “Edmonton: Official Host City for the Turn of the Century.” I did not realize that Edmonton’s official city slogan was “City of Champions,” and that sloganeering was actually taken quite seriously by city council. I just thought, “Wow, how exciting to be in the official host city of the turn of the century!” Edmonton was clearly a futuristic kind of place.

Edmonton, AB, Canada

I was about to turn 14 and my mind was entirely open to the idea of Edmonton. It was my first time living in a city, and having just started to interest myself in girls, buying records, even clothes, I welcomed the chance to be somewhere with more to offer than Little Beckford, England (population, approx. 300).

It was a late-August day, and the weather was what could best be described as in-between weather: neither hot nor cold. I sat on the patio of my new home, which struck me as modern and, yes, futuristic, and briefly suffered a feeling of emptiness, realizing I was going to have to rebuild my life practically from scratch. The sky was the colour of a sheet of paper. In the following days, I would explore the environs on a newly-purchased bike. I was particularly drawn to 23rd avenue’s westwards path out of the city. In only ten minutes, I could be pedalling along the rolling farm fields, dotted with the occasional copse of trees. I would occasionally see hawks circling in the sky.

I went to my first shopping mall: Heritage Mall. I had been told that it was an amazing place, but my first impression was lacklustre. I entered through Woolco, a department store, and wandered around.  I thought, that store is OK, but where’s the rest of this mall? I couldn’t figure out how you were supposed to get from one store to another. There was no central corridor or square; from the outside, the mall just looked like a bunch of independent boxes clustered together. I walked from Woolco to Safeway via the dusty parking lot.

When I first went to school — Grandview Heights Junior High — I was bored out of my mind most of the time. In comparison to the schooling I’d received in England, classes in Canada were repetitive, dull, and… well… I said to my parents at the time, “The work hasn’t started yet. We never do anything.” The education system mostly called for sitting still at a desk, listening to the teacher, and being required to memorize stuff in order to later regurgitate it for a test.

I was very unhappy in school for most of my first couple of years in Canada. I fared even worse at Harry Ainlay High School than at Grandview, making exactly zero friends. It was only after I was well ensconced at Victoria Composite High School — an arts school — that I  started to enjoy myself. I suppose I could say that the pinnacle of my teenage life was appearing in The Taming of the Shrew at Victoria’s main stage. I played Petruchio.

The sense of place that I craved for many years was never satisfied in Edmonton, despite my lot improving significantly after high school; eventually having a great run at university and several stellar jobs afterward. At 30, in some respects, I still felt just as perplexed, confused and somewhat alienated from the place as I was at 14.

If you go down 23rd avenue westwards from where my parents live, it would now take you a good 20 minutes before leaving the city. All the farmland has been replaced with new residential subdivisions; vinyl-sided houses and strip malls and box stores. The turn of the century came to Edmonton, but by then, the “Official Host City of the Turn of the Century” idea had come and gone; you never saw posters about it anywhere. Victoria School has been a roaring success; you have to audition to get in, whereas when I went there, it teetered intriguingly between being a poor, inner-city school and a place for the petty bourgeois to indulge their creative side. Heritage Mall was demolished years ago. It has subsequently been turned into a professional and commercial development called Century Park, with gleaming steal and glass edifices. There will soon be a subway station.

Two and a half years after leaving Edmonton, I never miss Edmonton. I miss people, but I never miss the city itself. I’ve learned that Edmonton is not exceptional: there are countless suburban, bland, boring cities all over North America. Many people are happy to call them home. My erstwhile rage against Edmonton was somewhat misplaced. Like most of North America, it suffers from what James Kunstler called “The Geography of Nowhere.”

I can thank Edmonton for furnishing me with good friends, family, a university degree, and a good CV. My sense of gratitude ends there. I cannot thank the city itself for anything except  fuelling me with the determination to get out and make life better elsewhere.