THOUGHTS ON MOVING/THOUGHTS ON NORTHSIDE

I moved recently, and the new place felt alien to me for weeks, like a spaceship I’d been press-ganged into boarding after some ill-judged mid-week bender. It was stocked with everything I’d need to survive a long voyage, sure, but everything was piled artlessly in the corners or onto bendy, cheap shelves. I recognized most of the bits and pieces, as well as some books that mean an awful lot to me, but they didn’t exactly fit. There was no comfort to be gained from any of it. It was as if I’d arrived in another universe wearing someone else’s shoes.

It’s been nearly a month now, and the anxiety is less all-consuming when I wake middle of the night. The road ahead feels just slightly less alarmingly rutted, the main axle less likely to collapse. It seems the body, even at my age, will accommodate new routes to the office and the bedroom without generating a cold sweat; the brain will dry out and regain most of its shape after even the fiercest midlife storm.

From a business perspective, it is good for me (I guess) to go through what my clients so often go through: the packing up and the leaving behind. But still, that’s a perspective I could have done without. To hell with business.

One of the more challenging parts of the move (the hardest, by far, is the kids not being around every day) has been buying furniture to fit against walls of new, awkward-feeling lengths, and rooms not nearly so wide; to find a lamp that can stand in the corner without seeming to lurk there like a burglar, as well as a bulb of the right wattage. It is not easy, I have discovered, to figure out what I like, after decades of living more or less intuitively, relying on aesthetic sensibilities picked up in those books I need to organize now,  and a million films I only half-remember. Picking a new bed, and a mattress to go with it, is not a reflexive action. I have no talent for this sort of work. It proved an entirely foreign sort of exercise, one that left me aching and hobbled for days.

Part of that difficulty has to do with trying to decide whether to buy quickly or slowly, practically or indulgently. It has to do with how long I might inhabit these new/old rooms, and whether I should focus on the short-term or go big, gamble recklessly on an entirely opaque future.

I was thinking about this as I ate brunch recently at the new Northside, which has opened at the corner of Montreal and Princess, in a complete reimagination of the space.

What is most striking, I think, is the formidable bravery of what they’ve done, and just how exhilarating their vision is. Jess and Cade, the owners, have introduced enough light to the space that it feels positively oceanic, and the interior design is gobsmackingly lovely. There are long lists of revelatory detail: the new chairs are wondrous, their legs rise, like a giraffe’s, all the way into a joint set high into the shoulders and back; the tile on the face of the central wait station is luminous, like stacked candles, or jug milk; the scarred and polished concrete floors hit like a silvered mirror held up to reflect all the hard work. The old windows from the previous iteration have been installed along the side of the entrance to ease the transition from the old place to the new one as surely as if someone was there to hold your hand.

I can only imagine how slim the margins are in the restaurant business. You don’t get into hospitality with the intention of getting rich. You do it, I think, to make art from wholesome ingredients, and to create rooms where your customers can celebrate boisterously (the new room is louder than the old, more communal) or sit in a corner and feel not quite so alone in the world. You make it so that your team has somewhere beautiful and safe to work. And it is precisely because those are the reasons you build such a beast, that you must stop at some point during its conception and evolution, and decide what concessions you’ll make to budget, and time, and market realities.

Or perhaps I’m wrong, because in the case of Northside, no such concessions seem to have been made, or even considered. There is nothing in the materials or the execution, no sign in the food or the plating, the mood of the new restaurant, to suggest they did anything other than aim for distant stars. Which is beyond brave. It is a commitment to the long play, to Kingston, to its people and its visitors. It also involved a serious and unreasonable commitment to their bank, I’d wager, and a willingness to face futures both thick and thin. They (and all the other independent restaurant owners out there) deserve our gratitude and our patronage. They have committed themselves to us and, in Northside’s case, added stupidly beautiful elements to our routines; we really must show our appreciation.

Northside’s rebirth has come at a good time for me. It demonstrates that it is possible to begin again, rather than simply subside into dark puddle. It is even possible, though vanishingly rare, for the new beginning to build on the original. This feels, in other words, like the first inklings of the comfort I have been looking for.