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ocean is far too cold to swim in. Hypothermia would set in within half an hour.”
    I was relieved to have made Wallace laugh. I now knew his dourness was just his morning mood. He wasn’t angry with me. I hadn’t embarrassed him in front of his friends the night before. He was totally cool about everything. No explanation was necessary. No apologies were required.
    As we approached the scour-yellow brick building of the university, I burped, regurgitating a piece of bacon. In an instant I was three years old; it was the day I almost choked at the breakfast table. I felt my father’s big fingers in my mouth and then the tickle in my throat as he extracted the long bacon rind. Strange to think there had been a time when my father sat me on his knee and fed me pieces of rasher from his plate. That memory was alkali to my more recent acidic memories of him. In my last few years at home he had become suspicious of me, laying down rules each time I went out; he seemed to think my every action was an attempt to undermine his authority. And he often treated my mother with suspicion as well, as though she were in cahoots with me, the two of us devoted to making a fool out of him. How I had hated him for that, for spoiling my last years at home with my mother. But now I suddenly wondered if I had been mistaken. Perhaps I had not given him his due? Or maybe my second thoughts were just a symptom of my being homesick for the first time.
    My closest companion during those first weeks in Newfoundland was a fourteen-inch black and white television, which, when turned on, displayed only snow. When I finally figured out how to attach the rabbit ears antenna, a picture appeared, though one with a flickering black line down the left-hand side which bent inward about every thirty seconds, warping the screen image around itself. The Picasso effect I called it. To divine the spot with the best reception, I plugged the set into a thirty-foot extension cord and walked around the downstairs, holding the television in front of me. The clearest signal was to be found in the living room, between the fireplace and the bay window. Still, no matter how much I twiddled the ears, I could only get one English language channel, NTV. Sometimes I could tune in French CBC, but that channel only showed ice hockey, and the snowy picture made it impossible to see the puck. There was no soccer to be found anywhere. Game shows were rampant and proved addictive, particularly The Price is Right . I would stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout, “Come-On-Down!” Then I’d run to the top of the stairs, turn around, and make my descent a-whoopin’-and-a-hollerin’. I was the next contestant, the newest arrival to the New World.
    Some days it struck me as miraculous that after years of gazing longingly into my father’s 26” colour Telefunken, I had, as if by a marvellous feat of imagination, walked right through that looking glass. I’d arrived. And yet the pictures I had seen on TV and the pictures I could now see through the window of my new home were not at all the same. No matter how I positioned the rabbit ears, I could not get those separate visions to blend. Time, I assumed, would remedy the situation.
    The days passed and I fell into new routines. Still, there were moments during those first weeks when it occurred to me — albeit in passing (the thought whispering on the lowest frequency) — that I had simply traded one purgatory for another. For the most part, though, newness was still everywhere, and each day brought fresh experiences and revelations. After all, I was now a university man. Mornings and afternoons I attended fifty-minute classes in which formally spoken and sometimes eccentric professors took centre stage. English 1000 introduced me to Professor Hutchins. He had uncombed grey hair that he kept raking back with his fingers. He kept a cigarette in his mouth while he lectured, which