Is it just me or has technology blurred the lines between the past, the present and the future? I had occasion to venture into the cyberweird the other night and my experience inspired this blog post... and believe me, it's truly random!
I think I've mentioned before that I'm an amateur family historian. I've been formally and actively following the tendrils of my family tree since 1998. This exercise has been by turns frustrating, funny or fruitful, but always fascinating. Having access to digitised records from around the world has opened so many doors... Census records can be the most intriguing and informative of those records. (I promise not to go off on a tangent about the Canadian government's idiotic and short-sighted decision to make the long form voluntary. I promise.) So what does this have to do with anything, you wonder? The 1911 British census forms were filled out by the head of the household in their own hand, not by the enumerator, they give information about how long a couple has been married, how many children they've borne and how many are still alive. (Another tangent... not important right now because it's created a brick wall I never expected to have to scale...) There is also information about the family's home: the actual street address and the number of rooms in the home. (Bored yet?) This is where the cyberweird aspect comes in.
Someone sent me a link to a website called vPike. It's a companion site to Google's street view and gives one a peek into communities around the world. I've looked up our house and figured out when the photo was taken, looked at my parents' home and some old friends' homes (addresses from my Christmas card list). Then the other night, I had one of those freak jolts of brilliance - I might be able to see the actual homes where my great-great-grandparents lived!! Why did it take me so long?? There were a few problems with the search - some of the street names have been changed, or the census addresses were what the locals called the area, not the actual civic registration. But I did have some success, finding some of the addresses on my list and seeing homes that could well be more than 100 years old. It was COOL!!!! So from there I looked at the address given for Rick's great-great-grandparents in Fall River, Massachusetts (home of the infamous Lizzy Borden!) in 1880. The building I found at that address was a very old one, so it probably is the same one. These glimpses into the past were so gratifying, almost as good as chocolate.
Of course, there is nothing in this post that is a reminiscence... yet.
After a while I began to wonder whether my Grandma Curry's old duplex on Daniel St in Brockville was still standing. Grandma died in 1989 and hadn't lived there for several years by then. Sharon and I used to go there for lunch on school days because it was only a block and a bit from the old St Francis Xavier School on Church St. Mom worked the early shift at the New Wave Chinese Restaurant on King St and Dad delivered milk for Smith's Dairy so Grandma fed us every day, along with Clovis, her slightly-slow boarder. Her house was a bit different from what I was used to. There was a veranda with three steps up to the front door; a lilac hedge divided the sidewalk from that of the other half of the duplex. (I have always loved that scent!) The main floor was compactly arranged with the stairs to the second floor just inside the front door along the common wall. To the left of the entrance was her living room where she'd sit with tiny pin curls in her ever-thinning hair, on her black leather couch with the earphone of her transistor radio in one ear, tuned to a baseball game, while she watched boxing on TV, vigourously chewing Chiclets. The dining room extended across the middle of the house with stairs to the dirt-floored cellar underneath the staircase to the second floor and the door to the kitchen opposite. The kitchen was small with a counter, sink and cabinets along the left wall, her stove on the back wall and the fridge across from the sink. Her budgie Petey lived in a tall cage just inside the kitchen door. The kitchen opened out into what she called the back kitchen, where her washing machine lived, along with a treasure trove of bottles she'd collect for us to return for the deposit - ah, penny candy! The back door was on the same wall as the cabinets and led to a postage-stamp sized backyard with a clothesline, a back lane and little else. It smelled back there.
At the top of the stairs a hairpin left down a narrow hall took one to the bathroom. She had no sink in there, just a toilet and a huge, really old clawfooted tub. Next to the bathroom was Clovis' room; he lived there for as long as I could remember. Right across from the top of the landing was Grandma's room. There was a closet on the left side of the landing and a couple of steps down led into the third bedroom at the back of the house. I never thought much about it before but it must have been built over the back kitchen. That room was my favourite place in the house next to the veranda. It was a narrowish room with a sloped ceiling on both sides. The most beautiful (at least to me!) antique dressing table stood against the side where the common wall would have been. I would have given almost anything to be the owner of that!! A solitary window looked out over the back lane. I spent a lot of time in that house in 1965 and '66.
A really quick search on vPike showed me Grandma's old home... not as I remembered it but obviously unloved and heading toward dilapidation. Oddly, it's flanked by a spanking new oversized single garage where the ancient and always-locked old one once stood. The lilac hedge is gone and an unpainted picket fence is there in its place.
My curiosity fully aroused, I had to then take a look at the places where we had lived while we were in Brockville. Our first home there was a 3 bedroom apartment over a Thom McAn shoe store at 79 King St W. The building still stands, not looking a whole lot different than I remember. The shoe store has been replaced by a sales office for a luxury housing development called the Mooring (the St Lawrence River being only steps away). My memories of living there are not very detailed; we didn't live there for too long and I was only 8 when we left. I remember it being on the third floor, a long hallway, playing train with a bunch of old pasteboard luggage, the kitchen with its fire escape at the back. I remember starting a fire (a pyro from a very young age) on the stove because we'd always had a gas stove before and I couldn't figure out how the electric one worked. I remember going swimming at the boat launch near Hardy Park and pulling Bruce out of the water by his hair as he went floating by, clearly well over his head. And the time we went to swim off the dock without a grownup, scaring Mom half to death when a thunderstorm blew in and her not knowing where we were. I remember the day I came down with chicken pox; it was a warm summer Sunday and Dad had borrowed Uncle Mickey's Volkswagen to take us to the laundromat. I had the worst headache and was sent to take a nap in the Beetle. Then the rash erupted... But I don't remember much about the apartment itself.
That led to an exploration for our duplex at 61 George St. It seems to be gone, but there's another building a block further up the street that looks exactly as I remember our house, right down to the baby-turd yellow stucco. We had a huge back yard at that house that had hollyhocks growing all along the fence. The neighbours had three kids, the oldest a boy about 12 who built an incredible system of tunnels and stalags for his army men in their yard with which he recreated World War II. His name was Frank but we all called him Chubby. (He wasn't, don't know where the name came from...) I can't remember his sisters' names, but I remember a girl named Terry Mitton. I don't remember much about the interior of that house either, I suspect because I've suppressed those memories. (I will NOT remiminisce about why here.) I do remember a huge grate in the dining room floor that fed fresh air to the furnace but that's about it.
Imagine my shock and awe to discover that the New Wave not only is still right where it always was at 202 King St W, but it's still open and unchanged after more than 40 years. I had to share that discovery with Mom, who professed not to be surprised at all. Naturally, that led to me looking for the source of many beloved Friday night dinners, Manoll's Fish and Chips... still doing land-office business at 11 Buell St. I can almost smell the newsprint and vinegar!
After visiting the favourite and familiar, I had a quick jaunt over to my Aunt Betty's and Uncle Duke's house on Ferguson Dr... a place I'd only visited perhaps twice but much as my mind recalled it. Aunt Betty passed in 2000 from early-onset Alzheimers. Then I traipsed over to my Aunt Marian's former house at 34 Centre St... also only visited twice or three times, but it too is not really changed. Aunt Marian and Uncle Roy live in Killaloe now, not far from the old Golka family farm.
My trip down memory lane was cut short by the late hour and my need for sleep. So many memories were fired by looking at these places from the distant past, leaving me a little unsettled, but happy to have been there.
