Riga, Latvia, is a place with many cheap accommodations and cheap flights in summer. It's almost too good not to book for Labour Day weekend. I've never been, but if you're a Canadian trying to fill up your passport with stamps, it's pretty much a no-brainer.
My girlfriend has a brain, though. After discussing it, we decided to raincheck on it in order to rest up for our journey back to Canada a week later. We had already been to Manchester, Naples, and Poznań during the past 9 weeks and we were returning to Montreal on the weekend following the long weekend.
We were visiting her family, as we do every summer. Staying in Poddąbie. Poddąbie is nothing like Riga. It's a summer village, closed most of the year, and few businesses. The Polish convenience store Żabka has a singular presence there and is one of two shops you can buy beer from to bring home. They also sell hotdogs. And return parcels. The other shop that sells beer is more of a ma-and-pa place that remains competitive by being owned and operated by hardworking people who always compliment my Polish the first day of every yearly visit we make there.
Even though we didn't go to Riga, I can say with certainty that Riga is nothing like that. For starters, they speak Latvian instead of Polish. On a typological level, Latvian is a Baltic language, whereas Polish is Slavic. But both bear elements from German and Russian, each eschews use of articles for nouns, and each has a case system. A German pastor in Riga, Nikolajs Ramms, is credited with committing the first use of Latvian to writing in 1530. His name is alternatively spelt Nicolaus Ramme and Nikolaus Ramm. He worked at St. Jacob's Church, the first Lutheran church. Catholic faith had been banned at some point, so the sermons were delivered by Germans in broken Latvian.
Both Riga and Poddąbie have coasts on the Baltic Sea. But nowhere is as stubbornly chilly as Poddąbie, even though Poland in general is much hotter in most cities than most people imagine. Even though every city's temperatures are readily accessible online (does the phrase "readily accessible" qualify as pleonasm?), like every other city, I remain ignorant of what the weather is like in Riga, relative to Poddąbie. I prefer to keep it this way. The climate escapes me. If I haven't been somewhere, its meteorology is unknowable to me, despite all evidence to the contrary. It's a tacit agreement with my subconscious that I hold sacred. I travel, therefore I know. If I don't travel, how could I ever find out? I simply wouldn't know.
The population of Poddąbie is 39. The people who live there year-round is likely drastically fewer, if not entirely non-existent, on account of the lack of stores and distance from the nearest supermarket by car. I can't imagine anyone gets in or out if the road there remains unplowed all winter. Patrycja says there used to be people who registered their primary residence in Poddąbie to pay lower taxes while living in Słupsk. That's why most license plates have GS in Słupsk, and some, registered on the outskirts thereof, have GSL (Gmina Słupsk-Lębork?), she says (funny that we kept all the Germanic prepositions in English: thereof, whereof, therefore, wherefore, thereupon, whereupon, therein, wherein, etc.). I hope I got that right. I sometimes have a good memory but I am terrible at paying attention to people when they speak. I would try to recall from memory but I don't think I recall seeing a GSL plate of late, if ever.
The population of Riga is 591,882. In 1530, the population of Riga was too hard to Google. I wonder if the estimate lies in a book somewhere (somewherein, somewhereupon, somewherefore, somewhereof?), waiting to reveal its underwhelming exactitude.
I was remembering a broadcast of Vinyl Café. Something Quebec writer Michelle Béland had posted online reminded me of it while I was in Poddąbie. It's an episode that was too hard to Google. The transcripts are not online. But Michelle had shared a photo of a Tamagotchi and it reminded me of Morley. Michelle said she had never heard of The Vinyl Café. Too familiar with Stuart's particular knack for maintaining that radio-tailored drawl of his, I suddenly felt thankful, certain then that her comedy had benefited exponentially from never knowing about him.
In the episode about the Tamagotchi, Morley's mother-in-law intimates that she's acquired a Tamagotchi for her grandson for Christmas or his birthday (I can't recall). Morley privately finds the device too liable to distract him from his upcoming school recital practice or something, and absconds with it, getting lured into taking it out of hiding only a day after deciding to withhold it from him. In the process of feeding the binary-bit creature, she ironically realizes some untold wisdom of middle-aged motherhood and becomes infatuated with its digital propensity for revelation. The story moseys along as Stuart McLean typically allows it to, until the abrupt sitcom ending where Dave happens to barge in on her with the toy in her hand on the brink of tucking it back away in her nightstand or dresser drawer for good, unperplexed at her suddenly exposed lording over their son's never received gift.
I really thought when I proposed this series of anti-travelogues to rob mclennan a few months ago that I would be able to just play reruns of the Vinyl Café from my phone or computer and my stories would write themselves. After all, it wasn't as though I actually had to travel anywhere to write an anti-travelogue. Nor even plan a trip (although I did have a variety of seaside accommodations bookmarked for Riga, they're all so competitively priced and ever so minutely different from one another, Patrycja's disinterest therein was an early signal that her heart wasn't in it). Plus, like other Canadians familiar with the Vinyl Café, I never wanted to commit to being a full-blown or full-time Dave and Morley fan. Too many book signings and live studio recordings. My relationship with McLean's serial was, until I came up with this pitch, twofold: on the radio and at bookfairs. That's it.
I'm really only telling you this now because, as much as I want to claim I was right about all the above, not being able to remember the name of the Tamagotchi episode threw me for a total loop. And writer's block crept in, for weeks. I tried finding it again, in vain. I ended up listening to half an episode about something entirely forgettable and the first several minutes of a half dozen others before giving up. The best place to really enjoy Vinyl Café is riding northbound in the backseat on Waterloo Regional Road 86, once you run out of rock songs to listen to.
I remember Tamagotchis from my near infancy in Waterloo. I don't recall ever desiring one. If I had had one, I would have been four and it would have had the lifespan of a goldfish. To me, the tactile reality of Lego guys was far more appealing. I used to bring them to school with me and play with them on the front lawn. But several years later, Pokémon quickly opened my mind to the idea of brooding over digital monsters. I would have been six when I got my Gameboy for Christmas, the transparent purple one. My childhood friend Tyr sold me his Pikachu-themed Gameboy Color a long time ago before moving out West, with Pokémon Yellow still in it. My brother and I had played Red and Blue together growing up, so Yellow really filled me with envy when Tyr and I first hung out: you get to start with Pikachu! I remember.
I booted it up once in Montreal, years after the fact, during lockdown in 2020—much to my surprise, there was a Mewtwo in his inventory whose info had my name on it. I was befuddled. I have no recollection of how to acquire a Mewtwo in the original Pokémon games. I would love to rely on the age-old adage of saying I was transported back to simpler times but the simplest truth is I simply forgot. About all of this. Did Tyr know that feeling? Would ten-year-old me recognize the thirty-something I aged into? I remember wondering that. Games used to hold your attention captive for years back in the day. I know for some, they still do. Yet all those hours of playtime have long been absent from my mind, and I doubt they were ever truly there in the first place. If time is money, then like poetry, time spent gaming has no return on investment.
I imagine Morley forgot about her Tamagotchi the same way I forgot about Riga, willfully and with no intention to ever remember it. But perhaps Riga, Latvia is more like my 20th-century Mewtwo, waiting in a shoebox in the utility closet with my name on it, alongside a pair of rechargeable double-A batteries I lost the charger to, undeniably mine, but hypnotically distant in the fine print of its provenance. Waiting. Waiting and waiting. Waiting to take me back to the coast, a familiar coast but all-new all the same, and start right back or start all over again.
Jay Miller is a tech writer and poet. He occasionally posts book reviews on Bibelotages.com and pics of the cat he shares with his beautiful partner Patrycja, @itsthemilashow on Instagram.