And Change We Did

I always say this but it’s true, there areso many thingsI don’t understand,I don’t mean steak tartare,

I mean irony, corpses, how to not see yourself everywhere in comparison. How to see instead what’s there. — Anne Carson

My sweeping experiment with life on the left began when I was nineteen and living in a student commune in Ottawa. Moon House was a dilapidated three-storey detached brick building with a leaky roof, an oil furnace that often broke down, and rickety wooden steps that led to an unlatched front door at the corner of Laurier Avenue West and Percy Street. On still, snowy nights, we could hear the bells of the Peace Tower, less than two kilometres to the northeast.

I moved to Moon House in summer 1970, after my boyfriend headed to Toronto to help invent new Canadian theatre. Anything seemed possible that year, and everything was...