A melancholic philosophical interlude: in which the chronicler discovers that you can't go home again

We are in the Southgate Mall.

Where is the Bay's malt shop, which was right here, for so long the home and source of the world's most exquisite cold concoction?

Where is Kelly's Record Shop, the site of so many exciting and usually ill-advised album purchases? (Not during math or chemistry or biology class, though...)

Where is the Southgate branch of the Edmonton Public Library?! Oh, Saturday afternoons, hopping on the bus to come over and go down and stay and stay here. Oh, Mammon!

The Mall

Do you see that mirage, off in the distance?

Not exactly like it was in my old days.

That's the view from the high school. Or, to be exact, from the Louis St. Laurent, which is the Catholic high school right next door. If there had been a mall near my school that I would have walked to for and through innumerable class skips, this would have been it. Good thing I didn't do any of that.

The Bay, or Canada's ancient, primordial retailer. It was here, in there, that the legendary Susan Duncan/Dale Salmon incident took place. Right in there is where I bought a whole lot of Beatles albums, for $5.37. Bunches of Hardy Boys books, believe it or not. Asterix!

Remember that one time? I was upstairs in the Sporting Goods. My Mum's birthday was coming up. One stone. What two birds can I kill with it? With my agonizingly limited funds I bravely bought her a hockey stick. When the day came I gave it to her. She looked at me. I looked at her. Can I use it, I asked.

No, she said, with a certain gleam in her eye.

Much, a lifetime later, my soon-to-be wife and I picked out a wedding ring for me, right through those very doors.

Harry Ainlay Composite High School

What's are you guys laughing at?!

A dreary place with just a few doors, and no windows at all. Here's where we went in for early morning Seminary. In December, at 6:30 AM, it was night-dark. When we got out, at 3:30, the same.

What can you/should you say about high school? I sure liked Phys Ed in grade 11!

What are you guys laughing at, part 2. I didn't go to this school, but Scott did, the first year that we lived in Riverbend. Cousin Bonnie brought this to my attention, and now I am happy to bring it to yours.

Riverbend IV: junior high

About a mile to the east of beloved Brookside they built our junior high school. As so often, the once so new is looking a bit down in the mouth. That big Edmonton sky either mocks man's Vanity, or consoles us in the midst of our bright impermanence

Walking there in the morning, or back in the afternoon. Or, biking it. Same with lunch. Top of the Pops in Grade 6, and merely ordinary in Grade 7. The way of the world!

I remember cold mornings, right here, waiting for the bell to ring.

By this time many of my schoolmates were heavy smokers. Here's where the teachers parked. Mrs. Govenchuk, for instance, a formidable Ukrainian lady who was unrelenting in her math demands, and who thus introduced me to the fact that life is full of unhappy trials.

Fields of Glory! Enjoying all those scurrisome track and field activities, necessarily and untragically coming to terms with the fact that I wasn't that great at it. For instance, can you see me over there, writhing a bit with my hurdle-snapped left arm? Well, there was always Dianne Docherty.

I loved P.E.! I loved jr. high school soccer! Why does this next thing always happen? In my early days I was a happy scoring inside-right forward. And here they put me back on defense! Where I felt very happy, by the way.

On occasion, I'm afraid, I intentionally hip checked guys. Over they went. Foul! And quite properly. At once point Coach Hamil pulled me off and benched me. Insufferable youth! I probably thought that was a mark of distinction too. Last thing, kids, at which you may flinch. They had me write the game summaries, for the next day's announcements. They got longer, and longer, and more and more obnoxiously precocious ...

Riverbend III: Brookside Elementary School

Grade 3 with Mrs. Merkle for heaven's sake, emerging from the infant haze, slowly establishing myself in a new space.

Grade 4 with Ms. Holmgren, joining five other students in an accelerated program, which was basically that we took grade 5 classes all year. Glimpses of culture and nature, of proto-scholarship and the life of the mind!

Grade 5, by Mrs. Scott, in which those parents all opted to have us go back to our original grades. Shakespeare! I was Macbeth. (And Lion, and either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. I can never keep those guys straight.) I want to reaffirm that those rumours about my arrogant comportment on stage are slanderously untruthful. Who did that Grandma Duncan think she was, anyway? Same year, me becoming aware of how some of my mates were kind of wandering their way over to the vicinity of the first entry into the vestibule of a potential forbidden path. Wished them well. Left them to it. Probably always continued associating in a reasonable friendly fashion.

Grade 6, Mr. Ammon, Ms. Lacy, and the apex of my entire academic career. Of my whole life, actually. Brookside Elementary's most outstanding student! An award I had to share with the infernal Lynn Ferrier and her dumb huge glasses!

I'm back in Grade 3. Fourth day here, at recess. Eric Salmon, who lived in this house just down the road ...

... (and then moved to Malmo [not in Sweden though] the very next year, alas), asked me if I wanted to join him and these other kids for a game of touch football. From uncertain to engaged, due to the kindness of a stranger. Whom I saw that Sunday at church. Could have gone that way! Went this!

Boot racks, twisty wet socks and toque-head in the winter time. Snow plow-piled to outlandish heights on the tarmack out back, leading to amazing extended bouts of King of the Castle. Hurling each other down, and savagely! The best was in Grade 5, when I rolled down and bonked my eye on my knee. That felt new! When we went in I looked in the mirror, in time to see my eye swelling to a close. Triumph!

The big library in the Dewey-ite Open Area, right in the middle there. The Moomins, beckoning to me from that shelf there. Detectives in Togas. Chaplin's My Autobiography. Homer Price, book-reported with a Mum-assisted batch of doughnuts. Glimpses of Alexander the Great and the immeasurable Roman Empire.

Field days in June, floor hockey through the winter, an astonishing four day field trip to Jasper National Park, where we all slept in the barest and most evocative of slotted log cabins; Film Board films projected in the gym, and Christmas plays enacted in the same spot, which is practically to say my future moral-ethical allegiances, vocation and avocation alike ...

Riverbend II: 14004 49th Avenue

Before that Christmas of 1971, our house was finished.

The street where we lived:

My house, ever and always:

It was blue when we lived there. Scott is on the upper left. He let me read a story of his there, about a man granted immortality by some Robert Howard-like eminence. Then said eminence lopped the man's foot off. I remember well how Scott described that foot, spinning and spraying off into the corner. "Enjoy your eternal life," sneered the demi-divinity.

Whoa! A brutal genius in our midst. Evidently with a degree of ambivalence on the subject of religion!

Lisa is in the middle, Susan on the right, eventually to be joined there by Sharon. Lisa was my friend, when she wasn't intermittently playing the role of antagonist. She had a sweet, crinkly smile, a sweet, crinkly personality. I'm afraid that we did sometimes send her running down the darkened upstairs hallway, shooting hockey elastics at her bottom. Susan seems a more distant presence, off on her own probably, dreaming about Dale Salmon.

The vegetation has advanced. The boreal forest! Let's get a load of that lawn, or at least part of it:

That's the living room, through that bow window there. The site of a lot of piano practicing! Piano playing too, eventually, for pleasure. That console stereo and the record cabinet. Lying in front of the heat register on a winter morning, listening to the CBC before it was tie for school. Or to Eskimos games on CJCA, on a darkening late fall Sunday evening. Or working our way through Mum and Dad's lp's. Or bringing our own music upstairs from the basement.

Blessed, blessed nerf hockey!

And every Sunday, post-roast beast, putting on one of those Funk & Wagnalls classical albums, arranging the pillows just so on the big chesterfield, lying down beneath one of Grandma Duncan's beautifully fashioned afghans, and drifting off for as long as I wanted ...

The driveway:

  














Hockey! Shooting at or defending one of a series of nets, with a series of sticks, and tennis balls. A variable array of combatants. But first and last and always, Brother Scott.

Also, just as much, we shoveled, to clear space, or at the behest of the Patriarch. In 1973 we had nine feet of it. Scott and I, down the centre, then one on one side, and one on the other.

More kids? Make it street hockey, right here:

Remember that time our neighbour David Boake tripped me, and I rolled over and whacked him on the ankle with my stick, really hard? And his dad came out and yelled us?

Here's the back, from one of the broad expanses of public land that stretched out behind us, to the north toward and around the ravine (of which more, later):

Do I remember a hedge back here? I remember mowing! And playing, endless games of catch/CFL/dynasty. With Scott of course. Catch with our ball mitts. That crazy throwing a golf ball game, trying to sink it in the hole Scott made with his knee when I managed to tackle him one wet day.


The folks' room on the upper left, and mine on the upper right. Dad's den in the middle.

Dining room, down below to the left. Prime rib, of course. Plus the miseries of Chemistry 20 and 30 (flunked it twice!), and of Math 13, 23, 33 and 30. An expanded kitchen window in the middle. Brutal winter mornings. Or luminous winter mornings. Deer and rabbits and a bunch more sometimes surprising fauna in the back yard. Porridge, with the brown sugar dispersing in it. School lunches, prepared and eaten at home, while Mum read to us books that were sympathetic to socialism ...

The family room, lower right. An oft-used fireplace, and Dad's recliner. Hockey Night in Canada, and Star Trek, Walt Disney, The Beachcombers, and Coming Up Rosie. And Aunt Maude's Charles Dickens books. A VCR! Christmas.

P.S. The phone number was 403 434 0528.

Riverbend I: the townhouse

In 1971, owing to Grandpa's continued tearing up of the provincial government, we moved from Meadowlark to an upscale new development on the south-west outskirts of the city. It was called Riverbend, which is not an affectation but an actual geo-topographical description. Or practically, anyway.

Upscale and out-skirted at the time, at least; in the intervening years, as the grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away, and as all is Vanity, Riverbend has been built beyond and superseded.

At the time, though, how abundant it all felt! To the point of swelling pride, I must confess. Slightly blameworthy. Understandable, somewhat. Probably pretty harmless. There were six of us in the family at the time, of course. We were two parents, Scott, Susan, Dean and Lisa. Sharon, owing to a remarkable to the point of possibly unprecedented popular uprising, was produced, on demand, just under two years later.

While our house was being built, we lived in a exhilaratingly multi-leveled, endlessly step'd townhouse, just about a mile away.

Rows, after a fashion:

#220; which was where we lived:

Doesn't seem so impressive now, does it? Well. "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,/The earth, and every common sight,/To me did seem/Apparell'd in celestial light..."

I have images and fragmented townhouse episodes in my mind. We ran up and we ran down, continuously. I turned eight. I got sick. I stayed home from school for two weeks. I was on the top floor, looking out my window at the kids playing on the playground of the adjacent school. There was snow on the ground. I had somehow put my hand upon Scott's evocative and already very well thumb'd edition of The Hobbit. Physically, I still felt poorly. Beyond that, beneath and transcending that, I felt transformed. Imagination! Look at those poor kids down there, I thought, much like Harry Lime up on that Ferris wheel.

Through here, to that very school:

Here's a liminal space. Mike Jones and I had a really good fight here, after school one day in Grade 6. I remember making some delicious contact. And being made contact with. No fear, strangely enough, though I definitely wasn't any kind of a bruiser. Don Cherry is partly right, I guess.

Meadowlark, V

By now Claire, who has been a very good sport and a very capable photographer, has run out of energy. She can't quite make it out of the car.

No matter. Here is Meadowlark Elementary School, where I attended grades one and two:

Which of these memories most dominates? Wm. Pene du Bois' The Alligator Case, which actually reached out to me from the library stacks, and initiated a whole lifetime's worth of reading stuff, instead of actually doing stuff. Or, Mrs. Neufeld, my grade one teacher, who was remarkably, consecutively mean to me. Ask the folks. This is true. We don't know why.

Let's go for that first memory, domination-wise. Because just around the corner from the school, on this same spot (though not in the same building), we have the Jasper Place Branch of the Edmonton Public Library. I remember going in there, very small, and I remember that my eyes got very big.

Then there's this:

Meadowlark Elementary again. Just a gate in the fence, into the school yard. But it was here that Allison, the giant girl in my grade 2 class who was definitely more than 6 or 7 years old, caught up with me, and instilled a measure of female-related anxiety that lives with me to this very day. Sorry about that, Sharon!

Meadowlark, IV

Before school, church. Here's the 142nd street chapel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints:

Unprepossessing, eh? You can just see the narrow windows, right below the roof line there. Sacrament meeting was late, pre-block, and in the winter time it was long dark outside. I looked at those hanging light fixtures with the little bolt-like things sticking out. Always thought of Frankenstein, which is to say his monster. Hadn't seen the movie, but Scott and I made monster models together for a few years there. We did see Robinson Crusoe on Mars, though.

Once, I think, I kicked the bench in front of me. Don't, they said. That man will get mad at you. I still have nightmares about that.

Graduating from junior primary, and then being ushered down the hallway and into another classroom. Senior primary?! The first of so many deep, wrenching disappointments. Reciting What Was I Scared Of? for a talent show. Doing a remarkable job of it too. Similarly, singing, right in church. The Queen of the Night aria, I believe.

I seem to remember getting up and bearing my infant testimony, or at least my childish one. I seem to remember, somehow, incorporating Jerry Lewis into one of these performances.

Baptized here, just on the brink of moving there ...

P.S. I don't really have nightmares about that.

Meadowlark, III

I mentioned that Jane Fonda movie, didn't I?

Such a little front yard. Nana says that as an obese infant I sat on the grass for several hours, trying to figure out whether I wanted to actually touch the grass. Leap forward. Scott and I, kicking a volleyball at each other. (Volleyballs are amazing for kicking, even though accountants and purists insist that kicking wrecks the volleyball. I wonder. Did I grow up to be an accountant?) Scott taught me to be good, both at shooting and goal. But why, whenever I made a great save, did he have to keep saying that the Gumper was hot tonight?!

Here's the Gumper, by the way:

See what I mean?

Also, there was that time when Scott threw me a football, which I caught, at the same moment that he tackled me right in the knees, right from the front. My knees then went backwards, and lo I was crippled. I seem to recall he thought that was funny. Still, always, a perfect brother.

Another photo!

This is the back. That window that you can't quite see is to the bedroom room that Scott and I shared. That's right: the dirty underwear game. Also that portable radio with the padded fake-leather back. Our family was the Beatles, but I am hearing "A Boy Named Sue."

Just outside, of course, the aforementioned rumpus room. Also, between the two, steps down into the dark basement. "Spook Alley," someone called it. Not quite scary. Exhilarating, rather. I think we remember this correctly. You could go down there, and then climb all the way up to the upstairs bathroom, right beneath the tub.

Further. Yes, it's at the top of the way-basement stairs where the incident with the kick, the wooden block, and Susan's blood-pouring forehead happened. Sometimes the snow was so high that we could easily climb up on the garage roof. We'd piled up the snow that lay underneath, and then jump and jump. Dad built a two level wooden playhouse/fort, on the left there. This was summertime. Once I was standing on that roof. And fell off. On my head. Then I got up, and ran off. Probably a twelve foot fall. Angels, probably.

Speaking of which, I lost a ball back here. I asked Mum to help me find it. She helped, and also suggested I say a prayer. I did, and then walked right to it. Then ran off.

What's that noise, coming out of that box? Off comes the lid. Cookie the dog! "One-two-three-let 'er go!" Little green plastic soldiers carefully arranged and hidden in the sand box, and in the grass around, and in the flowerbed and the bushes. Scott, Susan, me, on one side or the other, throwing rocks and marbles until we killed them all.

See this innocuous object?

It's a telephone pole, just behind the house. I am pretty sure that it got all frosted, one very cold winter morning. I am pretty sure that I thought it would be nice, popsicle-like maybe, to give the pole a lick. Then, the whirlwind.

This is my kindergarten, or at least the Methodist Church where my kindergarten was conducted:

Yes, I remember taking nice naps there. I remember a cool craft where you weaved colourful pieces of construction paper together. I would soon come to dislike this kind of thing a lot. It was the advent of glue, I think, and the messes that came with it. Also, the realization that things don't turn out really nicely without a ton of effort. And even with a ton of effort! Laziness? Maybe, but not at all completely. At the time I think I was actually worrying about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

I also actually do remember my imaginary friend, Johnny Bathtub. He and I actually attended this kindergarten together.

Confirmed! Nana remembers that she did sometimes send me out the back door of our Meadowlark House, through the gate and into the back alley. From there I walked to kindergarten, all by myself. And survived! I still remember, still feel the elation when I discovered this secret passage:

Maybe it wasn't so secret after all. But it did introduce me to the concept of short-cuts, which I have earnestly sought ever since.

Meadowlark, II

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin once made a 52 minute film about one photograph of Jane Fonda. Let's see that picture of my first house again.

Back of the living room there's a dining room. This sounds more tragic than it is. I remember sitting at the table all alone, maybe with the lights dimmed. Maybe it was all the way dark. I wasn't quite finished with my food yet. Once again. A medieval punishment? I'm not remembering it that way. In fact, is there a delicious taste of mashed potato in my mouth?

Kitchen, alongside. Learning a life-lesson, or starting to grapple with it on the way to finally figuring it out. My Mum, on the phone. Me, having need of her. Or maybe just wanting her. And just having to wait my turn.

Revenge! An infant recollection of my burrowing into the pots-and-pans cupboard. I'll show her! Counter-revenge! Turns out she didn't worry, or come looking even. Just kept talking on the phone. What do you do when they call your bluff? How do you face the fact that Copernicus was right, though you prefer Ptolemy?

See those lower two windows? The rumpus room! Travel posters. Christmas trees! And Christmas decorations, and enough presents that once, when I was really little, I actually got lost in the midst of them. Cried and everything. Forts made out of furniture and blankets. That amazing curved electric race track that Dad got us, and set up, and maintained. Also, Good Enough Isn't Good Enough. (Let it be noted that that one never really bothered me, maybe even at the time. He probably explained what he really meant by it, and I more or less understood what he said.)

The Saskatchewan Roughriders winning the Grey Cup, tragically just short of my being able to appreciate and remember the fact. When I came of age, at least in a sports-fan sense, I rooted for them every year. This, all the way though the Edmonton Eskimos' preposterous, Habs-like 5 year run between 1978 and 1982.

Sports, generally. Russ Jackson. Gordie Howe, going offside during a game played in his last (first) NHL season. He went right off the ice. I thought they'd given him a penalty! I felt bad for him. He probably didn't really need my sympathy.

Isn't media powerful? And ubiquitous? The Batman series. The moon shot! Laugh-In, for crying-out-loud. A lot of crazy sounds and images in fact, from south of the border. Now it's 1970. FLQ! Frightening sounds and images, this side of the border. Which is now, now that I think of it, that side of the border ...

Meadowlark, I

Dad here. This is the house we were living in when I was born, in October of 1963. It's on 161 St. and 87A Avenue. Edmonton, of course.

The house is just to the west of the Meadowlark Shopping Centre, or about a half a mile this side of where the West Edmonton Mall now stands, if you want to look at it that way. This street is actually kind of hidden. 87th is an artery, but you slip over as you go westbound, onto a kind of auxiliary street. You take a quick right off of that auxiliary street and go down the alley that opens up there. It gives onto this quiet street. Turn to the left. We're just down on the right side, just before the end.

Here's another photo:

Doesn't give a very complete impression, does it? Should I bother saying that it's smaller than I remember it? There's the living room on the left. This is a split level home, by the way, or as you can see. It's very much of its time, though it's an architectural approach that's now fallen pretty far out of favour.

Kids don't know about that stuff. I remember thinking that the stairs and the various levels were pretty cool. Really cool, actually. So many things going on, so much to do, in so many ways! For instance, I'm remembering that living room for the way Scott, or our Uncle Robbie, on a couple of occasions, gave me bucking bronco rides there. You'd try to hang on, and you'd get flipped off. I was little, mind. These rides were just a little bit scary, in a safe sort of way.  They were a challenge, physically and strategically. How do you stay on this thing?!

As these things go, it was as much of a pleasure to get unseated. There's probably something profound in that. It's the aspiring as much as the attaining.

This too. How many times did Rob do that for me? Three or four visits? Nine or ten times? And yet, to remember it so vividly, and so fondly! Of course Scott did me the same favour an infinite number of times. Well, sort of. At some point I'd make the request, and he'd get down on all fours, and I'd get on, and then he'd just turn turtle. The most supportive brother in history, but even perfection has its limits.

This isn't the aspiring/attaining thing anymore. Maybe it's Garden and Fall, or infant plenitude and then the advent of language and the law. Maybe it's that you need something from people. Want something, rather. People do their best. But at some point they can't! So we have precious moments and mighty lines. So resonant! So glancing and impermanent. After that it's echoes and ripples, and at least a measure of aridity ...

I need to break this up! Let's repeat that first photo.

Piggy-backs or bucking broncs in that living room. (So much verbiage, and from such a little thing!) Or the way that Uncle Robbie and Auntie Carol laughed, so readily and joyfully. Music! That amazing piece of furniture, that console stereo, with inlaid speakers and hidden turntable. Mum and Dad's selective but still eclectic, evocative, kind of electrifying record collection.

The living room. Learning to mix your ice cream until it attains malt consistency—Scott again. Why were we eating ice cream in the living room? Ah. Grandma Duncan was babysitting. That's where Scott and I would tumble out and pretend to fight. "Boys! Boys!" We'd giggle, break it up, withdraw until it was time for the next attack.

The top left window, on the house's right side. More music up there, on that great little record player with the built-in speakers. Danny Kaye X 3. Shari Lewis. Marvin Miller doing Dr. Seuss. Lots of, too much of Walt Disney. Help! Revolver. Bill Cosby and the Smothers Brothers. 

The top left window. I think that's where I got my head stuck in the bars of the crib. I think that might be my first memory. I think I remember Sister Susan looking at me, as I sat there stuck. Sympathetic? Thinking that it served me right? What do you make of people? What do you know of people? 

Do I remember feeling considerable pain in that same room? That was the mysterious ailment that landed me in the hospital for two weeks when I was about three years old, wasn't it? "Don't worry, Mum. I'll be alright," he said, parpingly. That's causing a physical reaction in a few of you, isn't it?

...

Chips 'n gravy

Sharon and Claire attend a couple of FIFA Women's World Cup games at Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium

On the way in:

Cool shots!

Milieu; green n' gold; hangin' out ...