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.