Chapter 6: Bienvenue au Canada: The Nonlanguage of Music and Dreams

This personal essay explores the palpable connections between music, memory, dreams and language through the lenses of international auto travel, a commingling of the author’s adult and adolescent recollections and a rock’n’roll band called the Tragically Hip. The vitality of Canadian music, radio, growing up on the US-Canada border, new parenthood and familial bonds are through-line themes. Death takes centre stage, of course, via rumination on the Tragically Hip’s final performance of its final song in 2016 – during which most, if not all, listeners and viewers knew that the group’s singer, Gord Downie, would shortly thereafter succumb to a terminal illness.