Great things have happened by Alden Nowland

I came across this beatiful quotation last Christmas and treated it as a real gift as I had no idea about a wonderful Canadian writer Alden Nowland. As yesterday my Canadian brother-in-law celebrated his birthday there is something for him: a piece of prose of Alden Nowland which sounds like poetry. Look...

We were talking about the great things

that have happened in our lifetimes;

and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing

was the greatest thing that has happened

in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.

The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean

one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963

when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been

the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince

(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),

on a street where by now nobody lived

who could afford to live anywhere else.

That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,

woke up at half-past four in the morning

and ate cinnamon toast together.

“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness

and, under our windows, the street-cleaners

were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and

everything was strange without being threatening,

even the tea-kettle whistled differently

than in the daytime: it was like the feeling

you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited

before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,

the butter is a small adventure, and they put

paprika on the table instead of pepper,

except that there was nobody in this country

except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder

of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.