The West End Cultural Centre in Winnipeg feels like a place that has decided, quietly and firmly, to take music seriously. Jorge runs it like someone tending a long-burning fire. Things make sense. The room is set up to listen, details are attended to. It does not feel accidental. And then there’s the piano. A Baldwin. Not just good. Best. The kind that makes you sit differently before you play a note. Press a key, it responds as if it had been waiting for that exact moment. Someone told us Glenn Gould had something to do with these Baldwins, a hand in their design, or their refinement. I don’t know if that’s true, but playing there it felt plausible. There are nights where you spend half your energy compensating. This was not one of those nights. Strange how much a piano can change the experience. Same person sitting at the bench but the instrument alters the conversation. Suggests directions you might not have considered.

Winnipeg for me is such a drug. Knowing another language despite spending years at a time in Toronto, once I’m back I love all the various ghosts I speak with so personally. Stayed in the luxury hotel at Portage and Main. My father had a camera store store in the basement, the Lombard Concourse. The elevator alone deserves its own union. Lavish in a way suggesting diplomats, royalty, and at least one person who thinks oatmeal should not cost thirty dollars at the Velvet Glove restaurant. The elevator becomes its own social experiment. You get in with a wedding party at night, everyone dolled up and optimistic. Then, next afternoon, sharing the same vertical with NHL players from Las Vegas, large and moving like refrigerated furniture with purpose. Parallel universes share a button panel. Same elevator, different realities.

My room looks behind Portage Avenue but what I really see are the ghosts. The stores from childhood assembling themselves in layers. Places where I learned what mattered, or at what I thought mattered. Gone, of course, replaced by something less memorable. But the brain refuses to delete. Present Winnipeg overlaid with Past Winnipeg, like a badly aligned film projection, both insist on being seen. Back upstairs, the bed is perfect, the desk ready for serious thoughts, and ghosts continue holding a conference inside me. All those first piano teachers.