Anyone who has said goodbye to a loved one before they embark on a trip knows the emotions involved. It happened earlier this year to me when my youngest stepson left on a four-month backpacking adventure in Europe. There was a lump in my throat as I watched him go through security at Toronto Pearson International Airport, knowing he was going away and it wouldn’t be summer until he returned home.
Back for Season 2 on Friday at 8:30 p.m. on CBC, emotions as folks leave and arrive at Pearson are captured by cameras on Hello Goodbye. Host Dale Curd is back too, weaving his way up to people in the Arrivals and Departure areas and getting the personal stories surrounding why they’re there. I don’t recall Season 1 of Hello Goodbye theming its episodes, so apologies to the producers if they did. Friday’s instalment, “Lost & Found,” as Curd says, focuses on empty holes in lives being filled by those they hold dear to them.
The half hour begins with Curd stopping to chat with a man and woman named Linda. He’s her dad and she’s returning to the UK. The catch? Linda is concluding a visit to Canada where she’d met her father for the first time. At 15, the man who’d brought her up as his daughter revealed the truth. After keeping quiet about it for decades, Linda finally asked who her real father was, and sought him out. At Curd’s prompting, viewers learn dad was in the British army in Glasgow and returned to Canada, not knowing he was leaving a future daughter behind. The story gets even more interesting from there, but I’ll let viewers find that out for themselves.
I remain amazed that total strangers are willing to open up to Curd. But, as he told me in January when Season 1 launched, “I just let the conversation unfold. If I opened up the space just to allow them to share and let the conversation build naturally and ask natural questions, they wanted to tell me more.”
That’s certainly the case of the next person Curd speaks to, a young woman waiting for her fiancé to arrive from France. During their chat, she reveals how long she’s been in a wheelchair, the circumstances surrounding the incident and how the home she grew up feeling comfortable become a foreign space after her accident.
It’s an emotional episode, but then saying hello or goodbye to someone you care about it like that, isn’t it?
Hello Goodbye airs Fridays at 8:30 p.m. on CBC.
