PEACE AT BASS ROCK
Shortly after I arrived in Bracebridge, back in the mid 1960's, I was looking for those inspirational places to hole-up when times got tough. Even as a kid I was enthralled by long walks in the Muskoka woods, and lengthy vigils by lake or riverside, to calm the restless beast within. I was a kid on the prowl. I was an adventurer. When I had a day free of my fetters, the school in particular, I was off and roaming not long after daybreak. I didn’t waste time and I didn’t consider it wasteful in any way, to find myself in a comfortable portal, looking out over my new hometown, or the nature that cradled it in pine forests and rock-exposed hillsides. I was as much, living in one of the Group of Seven art panels that I used to drool over in the school textbooks.
I found Bass Rock, on the Muskoka River, a wonderful place to hide-out from mother’s Saturday list of chores, and the perfect retreat when I was in trouble for actions and subsequent reactions, brewing within the neighborhood. I was a bad little bugger and believe me, I was often in need of a cooling-off area. They were self imposed "time-outs," you might say, to borrow from today’s parenting jargon. I returned home many times in the low-light, to avoid my pursuers young and old. My favorite hide-out was just below the Bass Rock rapids, where the wonderfully smooth rock shore, comforted the travel-weary "Tom Sawyer" types. There were trees to hide behind and shadows to disappear into, should some of my contemporaries give up my sanctuary to adversaries. What began as a kid’s relationship with a really good retreat, from the alleged misdemeanors of the day, became a place where I came to dream and compose. It was quite common to find me there at almost any time of the day or night, staring out over that sparkling Muskoka water, reflecting mindfully on the magic of the starscape, at night, or brilliant sun on hot summer afternoons. It was a wild place in the early spring, as the force of the current pounded water through its narrows. A romantic place to bring a young lady, to impose some poetry and grandiose expectations. In the moonlight it was magnificent, and its universality made its way into my landscape writing for decades.
I can remember coming to its shores when I was bursting in love and arriving in its comforting embrace after being dumped and feeling lost in life. I’ve sat on these rocks in quiet contemplation, in moods of desperation, anxiety churning my stomach, and then arrived here on so many other occasions, joyful and contented, having made copious notes about this healing place in the heartland. I’ve sat on the trunk of that fallen tree, and talked with the love of my life about marriage and family. I’ve sought this place out when at a loss for inspiration, and have been fulfilled generously by experience celebrated here. It is the one identifiable place that has inspired more stories than even this portal at Gravenhurst’s Birch Hollow. I’ve written hundreds of outdoor essays, over the past 35 years spent exploring Muskoka, that I can trace back to some lonely but thought-provoking hiatus upon its smooth and mossy contoured rocks. I’m so glad I found this place as a child.....and as it shielded and nurtured me then, it has inspired and comforted me ever since.
It is with some irony that my mother and father, who decided to move their young family to Muskoka in 1966, decided to make their last abode.... a residence on the bay of Bass Rock. As we were closing up their apartment recently, after the death of my father Ed, his wife having died a year and a half earlier, I stood for a few moments on the bank of the Muskoka River, watching as the currented, silver water, gurgled-up against the ice-clad shore,..... enthralled, as a child in heart again, to witness the pinery enclosure being brushed everso lightly by the January wind, as if by an artist’s brush.......a caress just enough to release the snow from the burdened boughs, in a crystalline spray down over the water. My parents loved this place....... because of the river’s gentle and soothing flow, the picturesque qualities of these giant pines and Muskoka rock. Even in death’s shadow, this sanctuary was the heaven on earth I had always thought, and it softened the heartache of loss, as it had always done as a companion. It was still the healing place.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
A Writer In Residence - A Watcher in My Neighborhood
A lot of readers, over the past 20 years, have asked me why I write so many retrospectives about my youth in Bracebridge. Do I have unresolved issues? An inner turmoil about things that didn’t work out? Didn’t go my way? Relationships that went sour? Is writing about these alleged good old days a sign of the opposite holding true? Instead of the good old days, were they awful? Confining? Frustrating? Or are my readers unnecessarily hung-up on the reality I did, in fact, love my childhood days growing up on Hunt’s Hill’s Alice Street? Heck, I’ve asked myself those same questions, and can’t really say what precisely compels me to think fondly upon days that were full of hardship, arse-kickings from my adversaries, and many, many disappointments. But then there were the moments that I didn’t want to end because they were all fountains of inspiration, and I drank of them freely. My childhood days weren’t so much different than yours. If there was any difference, it was in the reality that I began my jag as a writer / reporter long before I actually put pen to paper.
I won’t deny that there are some unresolved issues. Just a few. First of all, I remember being unsettled about being a kid. I was impatient. I wished away time, which by the way is one correction I’ve made in my life from those days. I wanted to move from the neighborhood because I felt that, to be successful, one absolutely required an escalation beyond the same place you knew as a child. I only ever gave my neighborhood credit as "a half-decent place," compared to all the places my parents might have selected to call home, including Burlington, the town we left in the winter of 1966. It wasn’t until I started my own writing retrospectives, in the early 1990's for the local press, that I amazed myself about a truth not recognized previously. If I was trying to identify where and when I started to experiment as a writer, it was in a small, third floor bedroom in the former Weber apartments, a plain brick building, amidst the blue collar abodes of east Alice Street.
The Hunt’s Hill area of Bracebridge, and Alice Street in particular, were like many small town neighborhoods in North America. It wasn’t pretentious. No one had a fountain on their lawn, except if a water line burst in mid January. Most folks had one car but not two. The homes were older, small, modest, and practical in most cases. It was a mix of old residents and younger, especially as the apartment catered to those of lesser economy, of which we fit right in, and a goodly majority were workers not business owners, although there were exceptions of course. We all kind of mixed at the local corner stores, Blacks Variety, and Bamfords, at opposite corners, and there were all kinds of casual gatherings out front, on hot summer evenings, when nobody was adverse to a slower pace and a cold pop, while sitting on the front stoop watching the world go by. My roost at the store began on Saturday mornings, and could stretch to noon and beyond, when us local lads cashed in our collected pop bottles from a week’s scavenging, plus any allowance money we could pull from the family coffers. The Hunt’s Hill chums would sit on the porch of Black’s Variety (later Lil & Cec’s) and savor the sugar-rush of cent candy, nearly choke ourselves to death, on the candy powder you had to suck through a licorice straw....ah, the black balls....how the dentists of town scolded us for eating those damnation candies. Geez for a buck even in 1967, you could get enough candy to last most of the day.
In Burlington, in order to acquire my cent candy, I had to hike quite a few more blocks uptown on Brant Street (Walmsley’s Variety), than was the case with our convenient shop situation in Bracebridge, where a short, fast hike would get you to the frozen treats, in just over a minute from place of departure. I wasn’t allowed the same liberties growing up in Burlington, that’s for sure.
I wasn’t the typical kid at school, the ordinary kid hustling the neighborhood for adventures and opportunity, and I wasn’t the kid to take for granted. I was aware of my surroundings and the people who made it interesting. While I didn’t write all these experiences down, I did make copious mental notes for a number of reasons. I was born with a reporter’s keen interest in stuff. What some would have ignored, I studied with unflinching curiosity. We had neighborhood folks who drank lots, and frequently, and partied until sunrise. I saw enough to satisfy my young curiosity. When I hung out at the train station, I watched bouncers at the adjacent hotel toss drunken patrons out on their ears, and I watched the hilarious episodes when the same beer swillers tried to get back in...not once, but sometimes for the rest of the afternoon or evening, always meeting with the same unceremonious exit.
I watched funerals for some of my chums, victims of misadventures and sudden illness, and I questioned life and these human frailties. I watched neighbors cope with tragedy, and I saw how it effected all of us partners in that ballywick of Alice Street. I observed wakes in one residence and a wedding party in another. I heard the skirl of bagpipes at one fete, and saw fisticuffs break out in another. I saw kids fall hard from trees, and I watched young lovers groping each other in the undercover of Bamford’s woods....that was, well, a view particularly unobstructed from a higher elevation.....such as my third floor window looking down through the shrubbery.
It wasn’t extraordinary at all. But I didn’t know the bounds of extraordinary. So when I began my half-interest effort to record this place for posterity, I did so initially, because it seemed this was all pretty amazing, movie-theme activity. Fodder for the writer who might eventually compile it all into a novel.....a sort of "Our Town," good and bad, happy and sad collection of intimate stories. But I wasn’t the novelist to do it, just an historian in training.
For me, this old street was the place where I decided to become a writer-kind. It was, to me, a nurturing, gentle place overall, where expectations weren’t above what could and should be accomplished by its citizenry. We didn’t want great honking swimming pools, the result of untold business successes. We didn’t need great luxury, extravagances, saunas, and gazebos. We pretty much, in those days, needed each other. The ladies in the houses down the street, needed to catch me stealing hot pies cooling in their respective kitchen windows. They needed the exercise running after me, and my mates, following yet another incident of "Nicky, Nicky Nine Doors," (not that I know the origin of this door knocking caper) and yet another opportunity of phoning my mother Merle, to relate the latest episode in my early years biography. I’d hear Merle exclaim on the phone, "Teddy did what? When I get my hands on him!" I was on the run a lot in those days from both friends and enemies.
I kept a lot of the neighbor folk on high alert, watching for me hustling through their backyards. If there were ripe tomatoes missing off the vine, they were either on the ground, where they had honestly fallen, or were in my hands, about to being flung at anybody, or any house I had previously targeted. Was I a bad kid? By standards at Bracebridge Public School, I was a tenth of the rapscallion of most. In my own mind I was a wild kid but on the grand scale, not so much. For those who knew me best, I was a pacifist. An uncompromising lover of life not a fighter. I’d surely put up my dukes but I never did so without knowledge of a sensible exist strategy, that was based more on a cunning argument than outright flight. I was mouthy above all else, just as today, and it got me into most of the dust-ups of the 1960's, when I was adjusting to rural life and times and a much tougher school than I was familiar with.
What separates me a wee bit from the rest of the old Hunts Hill gang, is that I’m doing much of the same things today as I did then, almost forty years ago. I’m still scavenging, collecting stuff, treasures from all over the place, (as an antique dealer), and I’m still observing from my front window (now my Gravenhurst abode), with the idea of writing soon again, about what I’ve witnessed out on The Bog, our neighborhood wetland. Back then I didn’t have a lot of friends, (the big mouth didn’t help) and I did spend quite a lot of time alone, wandering for much of that through the sand pits and woodlands that were in close proximity. Nature was always a good friend as it is now, and it would be pretty hard to confuse this after reading only a few blogs and websites I’ve penned recently.
The point is, I was living as a watcher in the woods, a watcher from many portals in our neighborhood, our town, because it was important to me then as it is now. I just wasn’t always aware just how much time I had dedicated, to memorizing the details of a place, I found so accommodating and enjoyable. It wasn’t that I didn’t need friends but truthfully, there were times when being alone wasn’t a great disadvantage. Maybe writing was a coping mechanism but it was an outlet I celebrated.
I remember much later in my teens, penning a short, humorous (at least I thought it was) play, with the characters being borrowed at the expense of friends. And I let them in on the connections, who they represented in the play, and after the laughs died down, at an informal reading (in one of the lead character’s recreation rooms), a few of the sections I thought to be hilarious, were the lines considered quite scandalous and outrageous. I never got the single manuscript back, and relations were cool for some years to come. I guess it wasn’t appropriate to have paired a few of them together against their respective wills, and when I suggested several of them later " made love," well, that destined the paperwork to disappear for eternity. Frankly, when I suggested the love making thing, I wasn’t really thinking of it in a pornographic sense but it may have been taken that way. I’ve been told it still exists after all these years, and may pop up one day when my ship comes in, and I get the long over-due Pulitzer. Then I’ll no doubt have to contend with this dog-eared play coming back to share the lime-light.
What made me different from that old gang of mine, was that they were moving forward while I was contenting myself being the last to leave a party, and in some cases having to be physically removed. When I have written about a wish to take up temporary residence in that apartment residence once more, to write and re-live those days, it’s not out of any great sadness or to overcome any great burden of days past. It’s more of a celebration of sorts, being able to relax with history instead of pursuing it for definition. I enjoyed being an observer. While admittedly I was impatient to move on in career and accomplishment, there was always a reluctance to discount experience as it related to capability. If I was a writer of any merit, it was necessary to have this grounding of experience to draw from, and I had a provenance that was full to overflowing. When I began writing about my Alice Street days, some folks who knew me from those days, assumed it was based on some kind of regret. The only regret was that I hadn’t put pen to paper sooner. I could have written columns about my youth in that neighborhood in perpetuity, as if they were freshly experienced. No, they weren’t being written with a tear in my eye, or sadness in my heart. They were being written because, like an artist works a panel with paint, these were my examples, warnings, sage advisories, to anyone who was interested, that we miss too much that is important in our lives, because like the billiard player, we play too many shots ahead of what is real and actual, set down in front of us, beside us, behind, surrounding us.
If there was any one message I had, inadvertently or intentional, with these column recollections, it was that we should all be taught, as my mother Merle etched upon me in so many ways......that you should pay attention to the glorious day at hand, and never, never wish away time......because there is always someone wishing they had more time, and none is left. Merle was a country philosopher but I know now she wasn’t wrong, and her wisdom has been appreciated.
I look at my own sons today and truly wonder if they have followed this same advice......because Grandma Merle surely extended it to the next generation, as she babysat them in her Bracebridge apartment. I ponder if they have been watching closely, how life has turned, with responsibility, and made them old, maybe before their time. It’s not an issue of age that concerns me, because time stops for no one, but rather my concern that they choose to live their days being insightful, aware, appreciative, educated and contented, as I have been over a lifetime.
I sometimes drive by the old apartment, and stop for a moment, and it is very much the case that I will feel the eyes of the watcher, staring down from that third floor window, onto what in his interpretation, is the will of the future. I am as much a vision of the future as he is a vision of the past. We meet in spiritual vibe somewhere in between, where there is at the very least, a subtle peace of mind.......that this was a positive start to a writer’s life, and still a source after all these years, for stories about the amalgamated truths and derailments of hard times, sad moments, determination and resolve, celebrations, get-togethers, new deals and better ones, handshakes and backslaps all the live long day.....and these were my neighbors.....good souls, old souls, friends to the end.
Maybe you were a watcher. A writer in waiting. Waiting patiently for the right opportunity to pen some memoirs. For your family, maybe it’s time to put memory to paper, and capture the essence of your own hometown in the years you knew it most profoundly. You don’t have to be an historian, just a story teller.....and there are no rules to fence you in.....like the ones I had to hurdle, pie and tomatoes in hand to escape my pursuers!
When I queried often this winter, about the meaning of life, following the death of my father,
(when I angrily questioned a lot of heaven and earth situations), I would find myself hanging over this keyboard for comfort, writing as a gentle means of transference. And low and behold, it was as if I had unlocked the holy grail, because for once, I understood that "experience" is of a far greater consequence, to a hungry, questing soul, than any merit characteristic of self imposed ignorance, avoidance or indifference, of which at some time or other, we are all guilty. The continuous line throughout my life, of being a "watcher" and interpreter, was as much a gift as the art of writing itself.....a conduit I have made use of many times when experience burdened down and grated most ungraciously. I have never once regretted the inherent burdens of authordom, as they have never been greater, or more daunting, than the experience I am writing about. The acceptance of circumstance, however painful, has always been my liberation. This keyboard has seen the voltage of rage, the gentleness of resolve, and the joy of discovery.
I think it’s necessary, now and again, to revisit the old places of our lives, not just to make the cliched "peace,"or satisfy a sentimental urge, but rather, to look upon one’s foundation to see if all the blocks are still in place after all the wear and tear of a long life. There’s something about a faulty foundation that haunts us with a precarious lean, and it’s altogether possible to make a repair.
When an old kindly neighbor of ours, a man I knew as one of the heaviest drinker’s of his clan, said to me one day several years ago, in a booze-influenced constitutional that, "Currie, you were a little bastard as a kid, you know," I nearly peed my pants laughing. "When something happened around here, your name always came up first, but there’s only one thing that ever saved your ass," What’s that, I asked my chortling bar-mate. "We liked to drink more than chase you." With that he laughed like a lumberjack, starting coughing, and had to excuse himself to the bathroom.
What a resume I had compiled.
A lot of readers, over the past 20 years, have asked me why I write so many retrospectives about my youth in Bracebridge. Do I have unresolved issues? An inner turmoil about things that didn’t work out? Didn’t go my way? Relationships that went sour? Is writing about these alleged good old days a sign of the opposite holding true? Instead of the good old days, were they awful? Confining? Frustrating? Or are my readers unnecessarily hung-up on the reality I did, in fact, love my childhood days growing up on Hunt’s Hill’s Alice Street? Heck, I’ve asked myself those same questions, and can’t really say what precisely compels me to think fondly upon days that were full of hardship, arse-kickings from my adversaries, and many, many disappointments. But then there were the moments that I didn’t want to end because they were all fountains of inspiration, and I drank of them freely. My childhood days weren’t so much different than yours. If there was any difference, it was in the reality that I began my jag as a writer / reporter long before I actually put pen to paper.
I won’t deny that there are some unresolved issues. Just a few. First of all, I remember being unsettled about being a kid. I was impatient. I wished away time, which by the way is one correction I’ve made in my life from those days. I wanted to move from the neighborhood because I felt that, to be successful, one absolutely required an escalation beyond the same place you knew as a child. I only ever gave my neighborhood credit as "a half-decent place," compared to all the places my parents might have selected to call home, including Burlington, the town we left in the winter of 1966. It wasn’t until I started my own writing retrospectives, in the early 1990's for the local press, that I amazed myself about a truth not recognized previously. If I was trying to identify where and when I started to experiment as a writer, it was in a small, third floor bedroom in the former Weber apartments, a plain brick building, amidst the blue collar abodes of east Alice Street.
The Hunt’s Hill area of Bracebridge, and Alice Street in particular, were like many small town neighborhoods in North America. It wasn’t pretentious. No one had a fountain on their lawn, except if a water line burst in mid January. Most folks had one car but not two. The homes were older, small, modest, and practical in most cases. It was a mix of old residents and younger, especially as the apartment catered to those of lesser economy, of which we fit right in, and a goodly majority were workers not business owners, although there were exceptions of course. We all kind of mixed at the local corner stores, Blacks Variety, and Bamfords, at opposite corners, and there were all kinds of casual gatherings out front, on hot summer evenings, when nobody was adverse to a slower pace and a cold pop, while sitting on the front stoop watching the world go by. My roost at the store began on Saturday mornings, and could stretch to noon and beyond, when us local lads cashed in our collected pop bottles from a week’s scavenging, plus any allowance money we could pull from the family coffers. The Hunt’s Hill chums would sit on the porch of Black’s Variety (later Lil & Cec’s) and savor the sugar-rush of cent candy, nearly choke ourselves to death, on the candy powder you had to suck through a licorice straw....ah, the black balls....how the dentists of town scolded us for eating those damnation candies. Geez for a buck even in 1967, you could get enough candy to last most of the day.
In Burlington, in order to acquire my cent candy, I had to hike quite a few more blocks uptown on Brant Street (Walmsley’s Variety), than was the case with our convenient shop situation in Bracebridge, where a short, fast hike would get you to the frozen treats, in just over a minute from place of departure. I wasn’t allowed the same liberties growing up in Burlington, that’s for sure.
I wasn’t the typical kid at school, the ordinary kid hustling the neighborhood for adventures and opportunity, and I wasn’t the kid to take for granted. I was aware of my surroundings and the people who made it interesting. While I didn’t write all these experiences down, I did make copious mental notes for a number of reasons. I was born with a reporter’s keen interest in stuff. What some would have ignored, I studied with unflinching curiosity. We had neighborhood folks who drank lots, and frequently, and partied until sunrise. I saw enough to satisfy my young curiosity. When I hung out at the train station, I watched bouncers at the adjacent hotel toss drunken patrons out on their ears, and I watched the hilarious episodes when the same beer swillers tried to get back in...not once, but sometimes for the rest of the afternoon or evening, always meeting with the same unceremonious exit.
I watched funerals for some of my chums, victims of misadventures and sudden illness, and I questioned life and these human frailties. I watched neighbors cope with tragedy, and I saw how it effected all of us partners in that ballywick of Alice Street. I observed wakes in one residence and a wedding party in another. I heard the skirl of bagpipes at one fete, and saw fisticuffs break out in another. I saw kids fall hard from trees, and I watched young lovers groping each other in the undercover of Bamford’s woods....that was, well, a view particularly unobstructed from a higher elevation.....such as my third floor window looking down through the shrubbery.
It wasn’t extraordinary at all. But I didn’t know the bounds of extraordinary. So when I began my half-interest effort to record this place for posterity, I did so initially, because it seemed this was all pretty amazing, movie-theme activity. Fodder for the writer who might eventually compile it all into a novel.....a sort of "Our Town," good and bad, happy and sad collection of intimate stories. But I wasn’t the novelist to do it, just an historian in training.
For me, this old street was the place where I decided to become a writer-kind. It was, to me, a nurturing, gentle place overall, where expectations weren’t above what could and should be accomplished by its citizenry. We didn’t want great honking swimming pools, the result of untold business successes. We didn’t need great luxury, extravagances, saunas, and gazebos. We pretty much, in those days, needed each other. The ladies in the houses down the street, needed to catch me stealing hot pies cooling in their respective kitchen windows. They needed the exercise running after me, and my mates, following yet another incident of "Nicky, Nicky Nine Doors," (not that I know the origin of this door knocking caper) and yet another opportunity of phoning my mother Merle, to relate the latest episode in my early years biography. I’d hear Merle exclaim on the phone, "Teddy did what? When I get my hands on him!" I was on the run a lot in those days from both friends and enemies.
I kept a lot of the neighbor folk on high alert, watching for me hustling through their backyards. If there were ripe tomatoes missing off the vine, they were either on the ground, where they had honestly fallen, or were in my hands, about to being flung at anybody, or any house I had previously targeted. Was I a bad kid? By standards at Bracebridge Public School, I was a tenth of the rapscallion of most. In my own mind I was a wild kid but on the grand scale, not so much. For those who knew me best, I was a pacifist. An uncompromising lover of life not a fighter. I’d surely put up my dukes but I never did so without knowledge of a sensible exist strategy, that was based more on a cunning argument than outright flight. I was mouthy above all else, just as today, and it got me into most of the dust-ups of the 1960's, when I was adjusting to rural life and times and a much tougher school than I was familiar with.
What separates me a wee bit from the rest of the old Hunts Hill gang, is that I’m doing much of the same things today as I did then, almost forty years ago. I’m still scavenging, collecting stuff, treasures from all over the place, (as an antique dealer), and I’m still observing from my front window (now my Gravenhurst abode), with the idea of writing soon again, about what I’ve witnessed out on The Bog, our neighborhood wetland. Back then I didn’t have a lot of friends, (the big mouth didn’t help) and I did spend quite a lot of time alone, wandering for much of that through the sand pits and woodlands that were in close proximity. Nature was always a good friend as it is now, and it would be pretty hard to confuse this after reading only a few blogs and websites I’ve penned recently.
The point is, I was living as a watcher in the woods, a watcher from many portals in our neighborhood, our town, because it was important to me then as it is now. I just wasn’t always aware just how much time I had dedicated, to memorizing the details of a place, I found so accommodating and enjoyable. It wasn’t that I didn’t need friends but truthfully, there were times when being alone wasn’t a great disadvantage. Maybe writing was a coping mechanism but it was an outlet I celebrated.
I remember much later in my teens, penning a short, humorous (at least I thought it was) play, with the characters being borrowed at the expense of friends. And I let them in on the connections, who they represented in the play, and after the laughs died down, at an informal reading (in one of the lead character’s recreation rooms), a few of the sections I thought to be hilarious, were the lines considered quite scandalous and outrageous. I never got the single manuscript back, and relations were cool for some years to come. I guess it wasn’t appropriate to have paired a few of them together against their respective wills, and when I suggested several of them later " made love," well, that destined the paperwork to disappear for eternity. Frankly, when I suggested the love making thing, I wasn’t really thinking of it in a pornographic sense but it may have been taken that way. I’ve been told it still exists after all these years, and may pop up one day when my ship comes in, and I get the long over-due Pulitzer. Then I’ll no doubt have to contend with this dog-eared play coming back to share the lime-light.
What made me different from that old gang of mine, was that they were moving forward while I was contenting myself being the last to leave a party, and in some cases having to be physically removed. When I have written about a wish to take up temporary residence in that apartment residence once more, to write and re-live those days, it’s not out of any great sadness or to overcome any great burden of days past. It’s more of a celebration of sorts, being able to relax with history instead of pursuing it for definition. I enjoyed being an observer. While admittedly I was impatient to move on in career and accomplishment, there was always a reluctance to discount experience as it related to capability. If I was a writer of any merit, it was necessary to have this grounding of experience to draw from, and I had a provenance that was full to overflowing. When I began writing about my Alice Street days, some folks who knew me from those days, assumed it was based on some kind of regret. The only regret was that I hadn’t put pen to paper sooner. I could have written columns about my youth in that neighborhood in perpetuity, as if they were freshly experienced. No, they weren’t being written with a tear in my eye, or sadness in my heart. They were being written because, like an artist works a panel with paint, these were my examples, warnings, sage advisories, to anyone who was interested, that we miss too much that is important in our lives, because like the billiard player, we play too many shots ahead of what is real and actual, set down in front of us, beside us, behind, surrounding us.
If there was any one message I had, inadvertently or intentional, with these column recollections, it was that we should all be taught, as my mother Merle etched upon me in so many ways......that you should pay attention to the glorious day at hand, and never, never wish away time......because there is always someone wishing they had more time, and none is left. Merle was a country philosopher but I know now she wasn’t wrong, and her wisdom has been appreciated.
I look at my own sons today and truly wonder if they have followed this same advice......because Grandma Merle surely extended it to the next generation, as she babysat them in her Bracebridge apartment. I ponder if they have been watching closely, how life has turned, with responsibility, and made them old, maybe before their time. It’s not an issue of age that concerns me, because time stops for no one, but rather my concern that they choose to live their days being insightful, aware, appreciative, educated and contented, as I have been over a lifetime.
I sometimes drive by the old apartment, and stop for a moment, and it is very much the case that I will feel the eyes of the watcher, staring down from that third floor window, onto what in his interpretation, is the will of the future. I am as much a vision of the future as he is a vision of the past. We meet in spiritual vibe somewhere in between, where there is at the very least, a subtle peace of mind.......that this was a positive start to a writer’s life, and still a source after all these years, for stories about the amalgamated truths and derailments of hard times, sad moments, determination and resolve, celebrations, get-togethers, new deals and better ones, handshakes and backslaps all the live long day.....and these were my neighbors.....good souls, old souls, friends to the end.
Maybe you were a watcher. A writer in waiting. Waiting patiently for the right opportunity to pen some memoirs. For your family, maybe it’s time to put memory to paper, and capture the essence of your own hometown in the years you knew it most profoundly. You don’t have to be an historian, just a story teller.....and there are no rules to fence you in.....like the ones I had to hurdle, pie and tomatoes in hand to escape my pursuers!
When I queried often this winter, about the meaning of life, following the death of my father,
(when I angrily questioned a lot of heaven and earth situations), I would find myself hanging over this keyboard for comfort, writing as a gentle means of transference. And low and behold, it was as if I had unlocked the holy grail, because for once, I understood that "experience" is of a far greater consequence, to a hungry, questing soul, than any merit characteristic of self imposed ignorance, avoidance or indifference, of which at some time or other, we are all guilty. The continuous line throughout my life, of being a "watcher" and interpreter, was as much a gift as the art of writing itself.....a conduit I have made use of many times when experience burdened down and grated most ungraciously. I have never once regretted the inherent burdens of authordom, as they have never been greater, or more daunting, than the experience I am writing about. The acceptance of circumstance, however painful, has always been my liberation. This keyboard has seen the voltage of rage, the gentleness of resolve, and the joy of discovery.
I think it’s necessary, now and again, to revisit the old places of our lives, not just to make the cliched "peace,"or satisfy a sentimental urge, but rather, to look upon one’s foundation to see if all the blocks are still in place after all the wear and tear of a long life. There’s something about a faulty foundation that haunts us with a precarious lean, and it’s altogether possible to make a repair.
When an old kindly neighbor of ours, a man I knew as one of the heaviest drinker’s of his clan, said to me one day several years ago, in a booze-influenced constitutional that, "Currie, you were a little bastard as a kid, you know," I nearly peed my pants laughing. "When something happened around here, your name always came up first, but there’s only one thing that ever saved your ass," What’s that, I asked my chortling bar-mate. "We liked to drink more than chase you." With that he laughed like a lumberjack, starting coughing, and had to excuse himself to the bathroom.
What a resume I had compiled.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Bracebridge As It Was - I Need To Know It Again
Since my father Ed died in late January, of this year, I’ve tried to reconcile a lot of things. Aspects of my teenage years that frankly, I’ve been unsure about for several decades. Some nagging personal questions about my days growing up in Bracebridge, Ontario. Not that there was anything particularly troubling, in my rapscallion, terrorizing forays into neighborhood peace and quiet. I think it’s more a case that I haven’t given as much retrospective to my Alice Street days, as they most certainly deserve, in this sudden reassessment of how I got from there to here.....still writing after all these decades. Just as I did as a fledgling writer, frustrated and unsure of myself for years, I sometimes now, will startle myself with the question, "why write at all?" The last day in Ed and Merle’s apartment, at Bass Rock, having one last look at their newly barren former retirement nest, I couldn’t help but recall the words of the song, that went something like..... "Is that all there is.....if that’s all there is, then let’s break out the booze and have a party." Forgive my liberalities with the words.
Looking out the third floor balcony, and then scanning the sad, empty, clean, hollow apartment, inspired another whispered verse of the same...."Is that all there is?" I’ve never been too sure about the reasons I can’t stop writing. While our family was distraught about Ed’s passing, for me it was a time to write, and for weeks after, I sat at this keyboard for lengthy jags, in one of the most prolific periods I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to write. Wanted to sit uncomfortably at this computer and pound out copy, haunted, driven, as if I knew the end was coming for me as well. Maybe that was it more than anything else. I was scared of being on my deathbed and feeling I’d left tasks unfulfilled. Even at 85 years of age, Ed wanted to do more with his life. Alas, his time had run out. I felt for the first few weeks, as if this had been his message to me. Don’t dilly dally son! Don’t question the desire to write. It’s not an important or necessary analysis. Fulfilling your ambitions is most significant. If this was his paranormal footstep into my life, it was a welcome intervention.
It was Ed who brought us, as a young family, to Muskoka, in early 1966, from Burlington, which was well on its way to becoming a major Southern Ontario city. While Ed used to say we moved to the hinterland because of a good job opportunity, when that went bust after only a few months, we certainly didn’t hit the road again. We stayed, and I’ve always felt he kept us here because it was a good and gentle place, with a much less stressful pace, to raise a family and, enjoy life. He was pretty disappointed his dream job fell through but I never remember hearing, even once in those next few years, of any plan to move back to the urban jungle. He did us all a great favor in life, because of course, we would have moved south again for the same reason we had come to Muskoka. Ed and Merle needed work. Merle did recognize however, that remaining in a small town did mean lesser opportunities, and for quite a few years, she had to work as a shop clerk to make ends meet, as there were few jobs in banking, a career she had enjoyed in the city.
My fascination, for many years, was our time living in a three story apartment, up on Alice Street, owned by Wayne and Hilda Weber, two unique but kindly folks who had nothing in common with each other, beyond the ownership of the property. They fought like the proverbial cat and dog but they were soft on each other most of the time. She called him Satchmo, and he was very careful to call her the boss. They lived in the small house next door. Wayne and his father had built the apartment, using brick from the former Bracebridge public school, which was being replaced with a more modern facility. I think they also had a hand in building the new one, though I may be mistaken.
Alice Street occupied my life, from my early teens up to the driving, dating and drinking milestones. So I have an unconditional loyalty to that short stretch of asphalt, up on the town’s northwestern plateau, called Hunt’s Hill, named after a prominent early businessman / banker. I think it was a more profound period for me, than most kids my age, because without really planning for a career, I was becoming more active with pen and paper. My first legitimate forays into short story writing came in Grade Six, at Bracebridge Public School, and these were war tomes, that accompanied some very basic drawings as part of a comic book project. I wasn’t a very good artist but I could write pretty well. I didn’t become prolific as a teenage writer, that’s for sure but I did like this kind of composition. My next adventures were in essay writing and oral presentation.....which like most kids, scared the hell out of me but made me crazy for the theatrics and celebrity of it all. Writing the essay well, and then making a good show during the public speaking competition, was a chance at major self-promotion, worth all the nervous sweating leading up to the podium limelight. As a new kid in town, anything I could do to win over classmates, including the generous provision of Merle’s freshly baked cookies, were big positives in the school’s pecking order.
I didn’t win, or place above tenth, and my finish was most likely closer to the bottom than the top but creative writing seemed a good fit at the time. When I eventually went off to York University, in the autumn of 1974, I was enrolled in english and creative writing. When I graduated, I did so as an "historian." Somehow in that first year, I decided that becoming a novelist or poet was out of the question. I couldn’t even read a work of fiction. Never have, except a wee bit of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens. I was a non-fiction loyalist, and if I was going to write, it would not be compromised by make-believe, and a theme that couldn’t be supported by hard fact. Even as a bookseller, I don’t have more than a few novels, and the only reason they’re still on my bookshelf is that they were written and autographed by friends, or signed first editions of major works. That I can live with as a capital investment. I write a lot of "actuality" these days, particularly with my outdoor pieces, all that have been experienced in person, not simply via imagination. Every now and again I will write something that appears to be fiction, and is written such that a reader may assume it was created and not fully experienced. On each occasion however, the copy was indeed based entirely on real events, and actual experiences I’ve enjoyed, or endured over a lifetime. I’m kind of flattered when someone comments on my vivid imagination. I won’t correct them. That’s not as important as the fact they liked something I wrote, fiction or non-fiction. A writer can never have too much positive input. Especially when you can get a dump-truck load of the opposite.
Shortly after graduating university, I took a job as a cub reporter with Muskoka Publications, and before I was in my mid twenties, I was editor of our hometown newspaper, The Herald-Gazette. I was in heaven. It was a remarkable period of my writing life. I enjoyed every minute. I hated office politics though, and the conflict between writing and being a manager, ended in my own failure to compromise. I wanted to write and be published, not tangle with management over what I felt were routinely moot and ridiculous issues. When one of my overseers, who had been appointed after an amalgamation of publications, suggested that he was going to "nurture his writing staff, like flowers in a garden," I knew it was time to plan an exit strategy. I opened my antique business as a direct result of statements like this. In the short term, I did remind this chap to never again use the flower-watering analogy in my presence. They continued to use the same therapy over the next couple of years, and I’d had quite enough. I didn’t mind being nurtured but by someone more worldly than me, and who I looked up to for leadership. I quit!
I have re-visited many times, those so called "creative" years, living up in that modest, blue collar neighborhood of old Bracebridge. It was the palette for so many writing forays, of which a majority failed to earn me fame, fortune or any significant recognition as a writer at all. In the early 1990's, long after my Herald-Gazette years, I wrote a column in a paper known as The Muskoka Advance, and I called it "Bracebridge Sketches," I believe. In this well received weekly editorial, I wrote about those wonderful days of budding teenage-hood, and all the buddies and good neighbors we had in that ballywick of ours. It ran for many years and it was by far my most successful project that only ended when I ran out of reminiscences.....or at least I thought I did!
There were a few hard-assers out there who didn’t like the idea of a relative newcomer, writing about their hometown history, as if I had a vested pioneer interest. This haunted me for a couple of decades until a married a local girl with family roots, dating back to the first tilled soil, during the Homestead Land Grant period of the 1800's. I gained inherent rights simply by marrying into one of Muskoka’s founding families.....which was okay, and I’ve thanked my wife many times since, for giving me a boost in status in local heritage matters. The point is, my history back in the 60's, was more about my own nostalgic days hanging out at Toronto Street’s corner stores, Blacks (then Lil & Cec’s) and Bamfords, also known as Woodley Park Cottages and Corner Store. And I reported on the rapscallion friends of mine who made the whole Hunt’s Hill gang so dynamic and adventure-keen.
Only a few days after Ed’s death, I took a couple of trips up from his apartment (which we had to clean out), up the Hunt’s Hill incline, and found myself waxing nostalgic in front of the former Weber apartments. I could see Ed and I tossing the baseball around on the front lawn, while my mother Merle sat in a lawn chair with Hilda Weber, enjoying a spring evening and a cup of freshly brewed tea. It was so clear to me. So vivid. It was as if I could have jumped out of the car, and made a threesome for the ball toss. I was looking back on my own history, almost the same as when I’d be house-bound with a cold or the flu, and watch from our third floor window, as another kid in the apartment played catch with his dad.
I said to my wife one day recently, that I would cherish the opportunity to rent our old apartment, and for the period of a year, write daily about those early years, long before I’d authored my first significant essay. I’d like to experience the hollow echoes of those family and apartment moments, that made me want to write. Events that begged to be recorded for posterity, anecdotes which made up the strange mosaic of thoughts and inspirations, living in close quarters to so many other effervescent souls. Not to herald a sad re-visitation of a now-gone family but to investigate what it was, about that simple, humble, two bedroom accommodation, the basic, uncomplicated life and scenes of every day life, that pushed me to compose, or plan for it one day. I knew it would become an important impetus in my writing career. I just didn’t know how much, until a few years ago.....at a time I suppose, when I considered an early retirement due to lack of interest.
When we moved from Alice Street, in the mid 1970's, it was, in my mind, a necessary progression, and I didn’t look back once, or even visit over that next decade. I couldn’t have cared less about the Weber apartments. Yet I have a strange and haunting feeling that it was this fundamental failure to reckon with its attachments to my soul, which has caused me so many heartaches in my own recent history. As I held my father’s hand and made peace with his passing, content we were best buddies to the end, I had left Alice Street without so much as a passing glance, without even the slightest recognition of what it had all meant to the young author-apprentice. I had owed it, at least in my own heart, a sincere credit for the way it nurtured me in a most positive way. It was a safe neighborhood that harbored many fine citizens, and they all helped me, in one way or another (sometimes plain old discipline) adjust to life in a new community. As I am a big believer in bestowing credit to those places and associates who have helped me in the past, I was guilty of a terrible neglect. This is what I would like to correct, for my own peace of mind, and for my boys, Andrew and Robert, so one day they will more clearly understand, the interesting nuances of their nostalgic, history burdened father,...... looking to comfort his own lost wee ghost, still hustling with enthusiastic spirit, playing road hockey in the dim lamplight, on all those snowy winter evenings, in front of the Alice Street apartment......with that familiar echo from the player /narrator..... "He shoots, he scores."
I may not be able to move back to our old apartment, as I might wish, but it won’t stop me from writing about the old neighborhood, as if I was still looking out that third floor window. See, I do have an imagination. I just won’t write a novel any time soon. The insights, I hope, will also remind you of your own childhood ballywicks, which were all interesting and entertaining places, with their own unique characteristics, held special in reminiscence.....the good, the bad, happy and sad, for reasons we will never truly understand......but that’s of little importance or consequence to our journey. Discovery is the holy grail! Please join me this spring for a trip to our respective childhood neighborhoods - consider mine your own, and enjoy. Just like the old Hollywood flick, "Our Town," there’s something grand and wonderful about the way a hometown impresses subtly upon the soul, such that even if we hated it, and couldn’t wait to move away...... and never gave it a second thought, its essence lives in concert, in biography, ever after.
Since my father Ed died in late January, of this year, I’ve tried to reconcile a lot of things. Aspects of my teenage years that frankly, I’ve been unsure about for several decades. Some nagging personal questions about my days growing up in Bracebridge, Ontario. Not that there was anything particularly troubling, in my rapscallion, terrorizing forays into neighborhood peace and quiet. I think it’s more a case that I haven’t given as much retrospective to my Alice Street days, as they most certainly deserve, in this sudden reassessment of how I got from there to here.....still writing after all these decades. Just as I did as a fledgling writer, frustrated and unsure of myself for years, I sometimes now, will startle myself with the question, "why write at all?" The last day in Ed and Merle’s apartment, at Bass Rock, having one last look at their newly barren former retirement nest, I couldn’t help but recall the words of the song, that went something like..... "Is that all there is.....if that’s all there is, then let’s break out the booze and have a party." Forgive my liberalities with the words.
Looking out the third floor balcony, and then scanning the sad, empty, clean, hollow apartment, inspired another whispered verse of the same...."Is that all there is?" I’ve never been too sure about the reasons I can’t stop writing. While our family was distraught about Ed’s passing, for me it was a time to write, and for weeks after, I sat at this keyboard for lengthy jags, in one of the most prolific periods I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to write. Wanted to sit uncomfortably at this computer and pound out copy, haunted, driven, as if I knew the end was coming for me as well. Maybe that was it more than anything else. I was scared of being on my deathbed and feeling I’d left tasks unfulfilled. Even at 85 years of age, Ed wanted to do more with his life. Alas, his time had run out. I felt for the first few weeks, as if this had been his message to me. Don’t dilly dally son! Don’t question the desire to write. It’s not an important or necessary analysis. Fulfilling your ambitions is most significant. If this was his paranormal footstep into my life, it was a welcome intervention.
It was Ed who brought us, as a young family, to Muskoka, in early 1966, from Burlington, which was well on its way to becoming a major Southern Ontario city. While Ed used to say we moved to the hinterland because of a good job opportunity, when that went bust after only a few months, we certainly didn’t hit the road again. We stayed, and I’ve always felt he kept us here because it was a good and gentle place, with a much less stressful pace, to raise a family and, enjoy life. He was pretty disappointed his dream job fell through but I never remember hearing, even once in those next few years, of any plan to move back to the urban jungle. He did us all a great favor in life, because of course, we would have moved south again for the same reason we had come to Muskoka. Ed and Merle needed work. Merle did recognize however, that remaining in a small town did mean lesser opportunities, and for quite a few years, she had to work as a shop clerk to make ends meet, as there were few jobs in banking, a career she had enjoyed in the city.
My fascination, for many years, was our time living in a three story apartment, up on Alice Street, owned by Wayne and Hilda Weber, two unique but kindly folks who had nothing in common with each other, beyond the ownership of the property. They fought like the proverbial cat and dog but they were soft on each other most of the time. She called him Satchmo, and he was very careful to call her the boss. They lived in the small house next door. Wayne and his father had built the apartment, using brick from the former Bracebridge public school, which was being replaced with a more modern facility. I think they also had a hand in building the new one, though I may be mistaken.
Alice Street occupied my life, from my early teens up to the driving, dating and drinking milestones. So I have an unconditional loyalty to that short stretch of asphalt, up on the town’s northwestern plateau, called Hunt’s Hill, named after a prominent early businessman / banker. I think it was a more profound period for me, than most kids my age, because without really planning for a career, I was becoming more active with pen and paper. My first legitimate forays into short story writing came in Grade Six, at Bracebridge Public School, and these were war tomes, that accompanied some very basic drawings as part of a comic book project. I wasn’t a very good artist but I could write pretty well. I didn’t become prolific as a teenage writer, that’s for sure but I did like this kind of composition. My next adventures were in essay writing and oral presentation.....which like most kids, scared the hell out of me but made me crazy for the theatrics and celebrity of it all. Writing the essay well, and then making a good show during the public speaking competition, was a chance at major self-promotion, worth all the nervous sweating leading up to the podium limelight. As a new kid in town, anything I could do to win over classmates, including the generous provision of Merle’s freshly baked cookies, were big positives in the school’s pecking order.
I didn’t win, or place above tenth, and my finish was most likely closer to the bottom than the top but creative writing seemed a good fit at the time. When I eventually went off to York University, in the autumn of 1974, I was enrolled in english and creative writing. When I graduated, I did so as an "historian." Somehow in that first year, I decided that becoming a novelist or poet was out of the question. I couldn’t even read a work of fiction. Never have, except a wee bit of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens. I was a non-fiction loyalist, and if I was going to write, it would not be compromised by make-believe, and a theme that couldn’t be supported by hard fact. Even as a bookseller, I don’t have more than a few novels, and the only reason they’re still on my bookshelf is that they were written and autographed by friends, or signed first editions of major works. That I can live with as a capital investment. I write a lot of "actuality" these days, particularly with my outdoor pieces, all that have been experienced in person, not simply via imagination. Every now and again I will write something that appears to be fiction, and is written such that a reader may assume it was created and not fully experienced. On each occasion however, the copy was indeed based entirely on real events, and actual experiences I’ve enjoyed, or endured over a lifetime. I’m kind of flattered when someone comments on my vivid imagination. I won’t correct them. That’s not as important as the fact they liked something I wrote, fiction or non-fiction. A writer can never have too much positive input. Especially when you can get a dump-truck load of the opposite.
Shortly after graduating university, I took a job as a cub reporter with Muskoka Publications, and before I was in my mid twenties, I was editor of our hometown newspaper, The Herald-Gazette. I was in heaven. It was a remarkable period of my writing life. I enjoyed every minute. I hated office politics though, and the conflict between writing and being a manager, ended in my own failure to compromise. I wanted to write and be published, not tangle with management over what I felt were routinely moot and ridiculous issues. When one of my overseers, who had been appointed after an amalgamation of publications, suggested that he was going to "nurture his writing staff, like flowers in a garden," I knew it was time to plan an exit strategy. I opened my antique business as a direct result of statements like this. In the short term, I did remind this chap to never again use the flower-watering analogy in my presence. They continued to use the same therapy over the next couple of years, and I’d had quite enough. I didn’t mind being nurtured but by someone more worldly than me, and who I looked up to for leadership. I quit!
I have re-visited many times, those so called "creative" years, living up in that modest, blue collar neighborhood of old Bracebridge. It was the palette for so many writing forays, of which a majority failed to earn me fame, fortune or any significant recognition as a writer at all. In the early 1990's, long after my Herald-Gazette years, I wrote a column in a paper known as The Muskoka Advance, and I called it "Bracebridge Sketches," I believe. In this well received weekly editorial, I wrote about those wonderful days of budding teenage-hood, and all the buddies and good neighbors we had in that ballywick of ours. It ran for many years and it was by far my most successful project that only ended when I ran out of reminiscences.....or at least I thought I did!
There were a few hard-assers out there who didn’t like the idea of a relative newcomer, writing about their hometown history, as if I had a vested pioneer interest. This haunted me for a couple of decades until a married a local girl with family roots, dating back to the first tilled soil, during the Homestead Land Grant period of the 1800's. I gained inherent rights simply by marrying into one of Muskoka’s founding families.....which was okay, and I’ve thanked my wife many times since, for giving me a boost in status in local heritage matters. The point is, my history back in the 60's, was more about my own nostalgic days hanging out at Toronto Street’s corner stores, Blacks (then Lil & Cec’s) and Bamfords, also known as Woodley Park Cottages and Corner Store. And I reported on the rapscallion friends of mine who made the whole Hunt’s Hill gang so dynamic and adventure-keen.
Only a few days after Ed’s death, I took a couple of trips up from his apartment (which we had to clean out), up the Hunt’s Hill incline, and found myself waxing nostalgic in front of the former Weber apartments. I could see Ed and I tossing the baseball around on the front lawn, while my mother Merle sat in a lawn chair with Hilda Weber, enjoying a spring evening and a cup of freshly brewed tea. It was so clear to me. So vivid. It was as if I could have jumped out of the car, and made a threesome for the ball toss. I was looking back on my own history, almost the same as when I’d be house-bound with a cold or the flu, and watch from our third floor window, as another kid in the apartment played catch with his dad.
I said to my wife one day recently, that I would cherish the opportunity to rent our old apartment, and for the period of a year, write daily about those early years, long before I’d authored my first significant essay. I’d like to experience the hollow echoes of those family and apartment moments, that made me want to write. Events that begged to be recorded for posterity, anecdotes which made up the strange mosaic of thoughts and inspirations, living in close quarters to so many other effervescent souls. Not to herald a sad re-visitation of a now-gone family but to investigate what it was, about that simple, humble, two bedroom accommodation, the basic, uncomplicated life and scenes of every day life, that pushed me to compose, or plan for it one day. I knew it would become an important impetus in my writing career. I just didn’t know how much, until a few years ago.....at a time I suppose, when I considered an early retirement due to lack of interest.
When we moved from Alice Street, in the mid 1970's, it was, in my mind, a necessary progression, and I didn’t look back once, or even visit over that next decade. I couldn’t have cared less about the Weber apartments. Yet I have a strange and haunting feeling that it was this fundamental failure to reckon with its attachments to my soul, which has caused me so many heartaches in my own recent history. As I held my father’s hand and made peace with his passing, content we were best buddies to the end, I had left Alice Street without so much as a passing glance, without even the slightest recognition of what it had all meant to the young author-apprentice. I had owed it, at least in my own heart, a sincere credit for the way it nurtured me in a most positive way. It was a safe neighborhood that harbored many fine citizens, and they all helped me, in one way or another (sometimes plain old discipline) adjust to life in a new community. As I am a big believer in bestowing credit to those places and associates who have helped me in the past, I was guilty of a terrible neglect. This is what I would like to correct, for my own peace of mind, and for my boys, Andrew and Robert, so one day they will more clearly understand, the interesting nuances of their nostalgic, history burdened father,...... looking to comfort his own lost wee ghost, still hustling with enthusiastic spirit, playing road hockey in the dim lamplight, on all those snowy winter evenings, in front of the Alice Street apartment......with that familiar echo from the player /narrator..... "He shoots, he scores."
I may not be able to move back to our old apartment, as I might wish, but it won’t stop me from writing about the old neighborhood, as if I was still looking out that third floor window. See, I do have an imagination. I just won’t write a novel any time soon. The insights, I hope, will also remind you of your own childhood ballywicks, which were all interesting and entertaining places, with their own unique characteristics, held special in reminiscence.....the good, the bad, happy and sad, for reasons we will never truly understand......but that’s of little importance or consequence to our journey. Discovery is the holy grail! Please join me this spring for a trip to our respective childhood neighborhoods - consider mine your own, and enjoy. Just like the old Hollywood flick, "Our Town," there’s something grand and wonderful about the way a hometown impresses subtly upon the soul, such that even if we hated it, and couldn’t wait to move away...... and never gave it a second thought, its essence lives in concert, in biography, ever after.
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