It is hard to know exactly when I realized that I had gone from being a person who looks at the world objectively to one of those sucks who wells up whenever they hear Farewell to Nova Scotia.
Maybe it was in the mid-1980s when I found myself praying for a bank of East Coast fog to roll in to relieve Alberta's unrelenting sunshine.
Maybe, in the same city around the same time, it was the gasp of recognition that I emitted when an Acadian Lines bus wheezed across the screen in the Cape Breton coming-of-age flick The Bay Boy.
Perhaps it was the night, a little later, heading to a Toronto corporate gathering, when I walked into a reception and nearly fell to my knees in joy upon beholding a wooden dory full of freshly shucked Prince Edward Island oysters doled out by a guy in overalls.
I concede that it shows a lack of flair that, on the one night that I spent aboard a drilling rig in the Beaufort Sea, what sticks with me is not the snowy owl perched on the railing, but the long-ago Halifax mayor I ran into below deck.
And I would be a richer man today if I had taken the money that I spent on this newspaper, to keep up with affairs at home while living in Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa, and invested it in a condo in north-end Halifax.
But this is just the way so many of us are, and may always be.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and boldly say, without a shred of scientific evidence, that Atlantic Canadians feel more strongly about home and those who share that common background than people in many other places.
I was happy to hear that Maia Greig, formerly of Sydney Forks, who now calls Ontario's Niagara region home, thought that I was on to something.
“You go anywhere in the country and you find yourself attracted to other East Coasters,” said Nova Scotia Spirit Company's Ontario marketing and sales rep. “It's this unknown thing that you can't put your finger on. This connection that we gravitate towards, that we can't get away from.”
Not that she's really trying. She's a charter member of East Coast Connected, which, from the sounds of it, is equal parts networking organization, talent pipeline, and social club. But everybody who is part of it — their newsletter goes out to 1,500 subscribers — came from here, even if they now call Toronto home.
Anyone attending events like its big annual ball gets to hear local celebs like Tareq Hadhad, the CEO of Peace by Chocolate and Jeremie Saunders, creator of the Sickboy Podcast, remind them what they're missing.
But they just enjoy getting together for donairs and garlic fingers washed down with Keith's beer, rocking out to Signal Hill, and dancing to The Rankins.
“It's great to see the plus-ones hauled along for the first time,” Greig said. “They're standing there staring, saying who are they and how do I get into it.”
Being from here does feel different. There's a sense of pride and passion that comes from shared experiences and a common way of looking at the world, points out Kaleigh MacMaster, formerly of Dartmouth, who now works in corporate marketing for BMO in Toronto, and is also the president of East Coast Connected.
Lots of people, of course, feel proud about where they're from.
“What differentiates Atlantic Canadians is how strongly we are drawn back,” Jeff Lohnes, another East Coast Connected regular explained to me.
He's a perfect example. Born in Riverport, Lunenburg County, he headed to Toronto right after graduating from Saint Mary's University.
Now 34, he's living that Toronto life: Lohnes is the cofounder of Talent Bureau, a speaker and celebrity booking agency. He and his wife, who is from Mahone Bay, have a young daughter.
"What differentiates Atlantic Canadians is how strongly we are drawn back."
- Jeff Lohnes, a Lunenburg County native living in Toronto
But in the past 12 years, he's never been back to Nova Scotia fewer than four times a year. They just built a summer place in Martins River.
“Oh, it's inevitable that we will move back home,” he said. “Whether it is five years or 20 years away I don't know, but it is a pure fact that it will happen.”
As someone who felt the same pull all the years away I've thought a lot about what draws us back to this place: that we're an old part of the country; that the settlers, Scots, Irish, African, English, German, come from cultures that treasure lineage and connection with the past; that where we're from is just so geographically stunning.
I suppose we all have our reasons.
When I heard that Gary Edwards, my neighbour growing up in Halifax, attended some of these Toronto gatherings I gave him a call to catch up.
He high-tailed it to Toronto soon after finishing his law degree at Dalhousie, because, as he said, “Anybody who grows up in a smaller city, as a rite of passage, has to get out of there.”
Except, in a way, it's like he never left. His family's charity, The Edwards Family Charitable Foundation, which he administers, donates to good causes throughout the province.
Every summer his band, The Hopping Penguins, plays gigs at Chester Race Week, the Shore Club in Hubbards and other venues.
For 25 years he and his family have had a place on Big Tancook Island, where for the first time ever they will get to spend all of September, later this year, and experience the fall.
They'll be empty nesters by then, but it sounds like it's something else too.
They've sold their house in Toronto and are renting until they figure out the next step, which could very well be back east, for more than just a month at a time.
The signs are there. One of his old bandmates in the Penguins recently sold out in Toronto, and is living with his parents in Halifax, a few blocks from where Edwards and I grew up.
His wife's parents, who live in St. John's, N.L., are aging.
Edwards, who is on NSCAD University's board of governors, is a sailor, an experienced one.
In Toronto he lives on a huge lake and is part owner of a boat. But he never takes the tiller, because it's not the same as being on the ocean.
“I long for the sea,” my old neighbour said.
Someone, in fact, recently gifted him a rowboat.
Sitting in his rented house in Toronto, he told me that he couldn't wait for September, when he would be able to row it around the edge of Tancook, just stopping where he feels like it to visit his neighbours. As one does when they are home.
