Where Memory Takes Us

The summer I turned 14 our family moved from Brockville, returning to Ottawa from which we had decamped four years earlier. I went to visit my aunt Alma at her cottage near Renfrew while the move was happening. On my return to the family I was picked up at the Ottawa train station by my father and was driven to our new home on Tilbury Ave, an inauspicious duplex on a newly developing street. When I saw these new digs my heart fell. Our funny little house in Brockville was set on a half-acre lot, surrounded by climbing trees, a side lawn bordered by flowers, a back yard where we played baseball, and great spots for secreting oneself when at dusk we would play hide and seek. I could tell that my father wanted me to be happy with this place that they had found, so I kept my feelings to myself. In some way the setting of the new house, not necessarily the house itself, so bereft of sidewalks, trees, and greenery, is for me a kind of metaphor for this new phase of life that we entered into by leaving Brockville.

Now that my sister, Valerie, was old enough to start school, my mother decided to get a job. I doubt that this would have happened in Brockville where the peer pressure of their more well-to-do friends and the zeitgeist of the 1950s would have pronounced such a move shameful, not for her, but for any man unable to support unaided his wife and children. My mother told all who enquired that her decision was simply based on her desire to have a job. Decades later the narrative changed to one of economic necessity. So we entered not just a new town and a distinctly different neighbourhood, but a greatly altered domestic scene. In Brockville my parents had enjoyed a rich social life, filled with late afternoon cocktail parties, evening gatherings, formal affairs, and sun-filled days spent at friends’ cottages along the bordering St Lawrence.

In retrospect I can see the many advantages that this life gave to us, their children. Because she was not working outside our home, my mother was able to support all of this extra-familial activity very well. Domesticity was not her strong suit but she could handle the tasks demanded of her at home as well as be up for all that their social calendar demanded. And she loved it. She was happy and as far as we could tell my parents got along very well and enjoyed their lives together. This in itself is great for kids. But there were other advantages. They often had people in “for drinks,” giving us the experience of other adults who would sometimes talk with us in an interested and interesting manner: lessons in how to be sociable. Even more: lessons in how to tidy up quickly because people were coming over; how to set up a table for company; how to hang out in the kitchen sampling the extra desserts and listening in on the adults’ conversations and jokes. Linda and I got asked to babysit for their friends’ younger children, a great source of revenue for a kid like me always hankering after cash for candy and comics. Sometimes we were asked along for the cottage visits, making friends with same-age kids of my parents’ buddies. Then, of course, there were the many occasions that my parents were simply out having fun, allowing the mice at home to play. It definitely gave us greater latitude in doing as we pleased about staying outside on summer evenings and in going to bed late.

The move back to Ottawa closed that entire chapter. My mother soon got a job in the credit department of Simpsons-Sears at a shopping mall west along Carling Ave. Within a few years she was the assistant manager, a position she obtained no doubt because of her smarts and her efficiency on the job. Linda became more and more her domestic stand-in, taking responsibility for getting suppers started and probably, though I have little memory about this, picking up Valerie after school. Without their extended group of pals in Brockville my parents’ social life was considerable constricted. Besides, the sheer intensity of her five day a week job took up much of my mother’s energy and focus. When she was around, she was more tired and increasingly more irritable.

In Brockville our little house had four bedrooms allowing all six of us to cluster on its second floor. The Ottawa house had three upstairs and a windowless room carved out of the mostly unfinished basement. Craig, not quite ten, was elected to sleep there. But he was unhappy being downstairs alone, so Valerie was given my bed in the room I shared with Linda, he took Valerie’s room, and I moved to the basement. I lived there for the two years that we stayed on Tilbury. As I recall it was not a very pleasant space. I had a large old bed and a dresser set on a linoleum floor. The lighting was poor, probably from an overhead fixture. No one, including myself, gave any particular thought to decor or comfort in my new dwelling place. It was just to be a place to sleep, though in many ways it became my home for those two years. My companions were books. I discovered down there a box or two of novels that my mother had read in her earlier, more leisurely days, and I hoovered through them all. Mainly I loved historical fiction. I read all of the stories by Thomas B Costain and then went looking for other authors who could take me into the heart of adventure and romance in other eras. In my basement nest I could set my own, unexamined sleeping times. Often I would read well into the night, enduring exhaustion and, of course, the consequent inattention at school the following day. I fervently wished that I could travel in time to those earlier periods to see for myself what life was like there. Were those people like us or were they substantially different? I puzzled over this question in some fashion for decades. Reading Sam Pepys diaries many years later confirmed for me that human beings have been essentially the same creatures for millennia.

The prompt for this little jog along one memory track came this morning as I thought over this past week. Some things have held my attention and concern: the daily dance with encroaching carpenter ants (hopefully arrested yesterday by a visitation from the fumigators), and, some unpleasantness with our landlords  – not yet settled to anyone’s satisfaction. Then the more happy and interesting things: reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove for our up-coming book club meeting; seeing a documentary (112 Marriages) at the Bloor with Mark – we agreed afterward that we would do the marriage thing all over again; having lunch with Max Dublin, a neighbour from our Walmer Rd days, and with my good buddy Roz, of whom I am more fond all the time; seeing Elizabeth for supper and Billie after her hip-hop class on Wednesday; starting with a couple of new clients; spending time with my brother Craig and his lady, Dale last Sunday; walking out along Bloor both east and west, taking in the spring air and sometimes sprinkles; being ridiculously happy about the Blue Jays’ new spot at the top of the AL East; and etc., and etc.

Thinking of all these things and of all of the vastly important events going on in the world right now, I remembered a program that Craig and I used to watch on the first TV set purchased by my parents in 1955 while we were still on Tilbury. Colour television had yet to come; there was only black and white. Moreover, in Ottawa there was but one channel: the CBC. Programming began at 4 PM and finished around midnight. Some programs were in English and some in French. We could never have imagined then the array of media now available to us. The particular show that I thought of was hosted by Walter Cronkite. It was kind of cheesy as I recall, but we liked it. Each week an historical event was dramatized and commented upon by Cronkite. Its title was You Are There. At the beginning and end of each program Cronkite would intone solemnly, “It was a day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our lives, and,  ---- You Are There.” It was impressive and it was also funny. Craig and I would from time to time over the years recall that summation of the nature of “all days” to one another in imitation of Cronkite’s baritone. So there I was this morning, musing over the ways that the various events of this week, personal and global, have altered and illuminated my life. Off I went into that place on Tilbury where Craig and I would listen to Cronkite and where we found ourselves living a life so very altered to that which we had experienced in Brockville.

And so it goes. Be well.