a level or point at which something would start or cease to happen or come into effect

Threshold #1: Vancouver has a drug problem.
Threshold #2: Vancouver has a poverty problem.
Threshold #3: Vancouver's real estate market is "healthy".
Threshold #4: Some of my favourite people are leaving. People whose company I haven't properly made time to enjoy. It's starting to feel like Regina all over again, with all the things I like, all the things that make me want to feel engaged with my surroundings getting further and further out of reach.

Yesterday, I crossed the bridge and looked back at my neighbourhood from the other side. I sat there in Yaletown until it rained, and then I sat there some more. I covered my novel (the one I was reading, not the one I'm writing--I feel I have to make the distinction sometimes, esp. when uttering the phrase "I'm almost done my novel", that one will mean the novel I'm reading for some time yet) with newspaper and watched the women with ridiculous dogs head for cover. Then I made tracks myself when it started to hail. There was even thunder, which is rare here, and made me long for the dramatic thunderstorms of the plains. I thought about the night we sat under the Broadway Bridge, watching a sheet lightning light up the Meewasin Valley. I thought about all of our secret places in Saskatoon, about how wide open the city was when we were young and couldn't get in to bars.

I think about Saskatoon, I've been invited back for a visit. An old friend is getting married. We are all old friends now. I think about what Roger said to me, a little over a year ago at a house party in a single-unit, unattached home: "I'm old, bald and married. What do I have to lose?" I'm not as old, not as bald, and not as married as Roger, but I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I'm finding the security of self-knowledge, the inner saintliness of being who I know I am. The freedom of having made a few good choices and of having been the object of someone else's good choices.

I still act in poor judgment, the four stitches at the top of my head are proof of that, but I'm getting there.

I'm getting there.

mp3: "Threshold" by Roger Dean Young & the Tin Cup