When we returned home, and were leaving the airport in Toronto, I was struck by the strangeness of places I have seen many times over many years. The huge sprawling roadways, buildings staggered far apart with no rationale I could see, the space between them wasted: not available for anyone's use, not crafted to provide green space -- it looked deliberately left desolate.

I had much a similar reaction when I came back from England. Everything I saw also seemed so new, in a bad way -- cheap trash, erected to meet immediate needs, with no larger vision or perspective at work.

There were tiny houses and churches in England that had not as much as a plaque to indicate they were special, yet were older than any standing architecture in America (or Canada) to my knowledge.

In just a few days my outlook on what we're doing in this continent as a culture was radically altered and not favorably.

I also had a pervasive sense that I am not even really supposed to be here (America) -- hundreds of generations of ancestors had somehow left their mark in that I looked at England and more than liked it, I recognized it. "Oh, I see... this whole New World thing is really just a blip on the radar."