“Look, life is supposed to be a path, and you go along, and these things happen to you, and they’re supposed to change you, change your direction, but it turns out that’s not true. Turns out the experiences are nothing. They’re just some pennies you pick up off the floor, stick in your pocket, and you’re just going in a straight line to you-know-where.”

                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                   - Roger Sterling Mad Men

Quantum physics, apparently, states that placing an object under observation, changes the nature of the object. I have always thought that only applies to science. Lo and behold, it applies to a life as well. Ever since I decided to write this blog, I have been awash in memories triggered by the least little thing, coming out of nowhere, and lingering longer than just passing thoughts. Of course, it doesn't help living more or less in the same neighbourhood I grew up in or, for that matter, teaching the music of an era when I really discovered the power of music. I am too much a Jungian to believe it is all accident.

"Sherman, turn the Way-back Machine to 1965"

I grew up in Regent Park, a government-run, low-rent housing project in Downtown Toronto.Historically, it is one of the older parts of the city, originally settled by Irish immigrants.In fact, the very first school I attended in that area was the very first Cathoilc school built in Toronto, a city also know at that time as being very Orange and pretty much openly hostile to Catholics. It was a raggedly, crooked old two story building that housed - when I was there - grades one to three - made of red crumbling brick, with wooden floors worn almost thin by the thousands of shoes that trampled on them. Graduating from grade three, we were sent to a much larger school further up Sackville St. on Queen St, next to the church of St. Paul's. It was a formidable, imposing building.

 St.Paul's School in the 1930s 

But not much had changed when I went there!

St. Paul's Church

None the less imposing

Ironically, I entered the school in Grade Three but my mother and I had been to the school a few years earlier. As hard as it is to believe now in these days of restrictive school board budgets, but St. Paul's School actually housed a school board dentist. I must have been seven or eight and in Grade One at Holy Rosary School on St. Clair Ave. west of Bathurst, a decidedly better neighbourhood than Regent Park. The area was at the southern tip of Forest hills and most of the kids going there came from far richer families than mine. In fact, one of the girls in my class was Kathy Rosar whose family ran Rosars' Funeral Homes, a very successful chain of funeral parlours in Toronto. Kathy would be driven to school every morning in a long black limo and I always wondered why. I guess the family had a pile of them.

So my mother and I went on the streetcar and visited the dentist at St. Paul's. Cabbagetown has always been known as a rough district. Though it was one of the first areas of Toronto - home of Irish immigrants escaping the many potato famines - and the area was full of factories and slum housing. A bit of research would reveal that it was known even as far back as the 1860s as a part of the city where the rough and ready, the loud and violent, and the criminals and riff-raff lived. It still has that reputation

the Bleecker St. stabbing of last year

cover of Hugh Garner book from the 1940s

tough guys . . . 

the infamous Cross Gang

The Don Jail - home of the last execution in Canada

NW corner of Parliament and Winchester - presently my corner store

 

As i said, I live in basically the same neighbourhood. Where once I would never admit to living in Cabbagetown, it is now a badge of honour. In fact, when I went to high school - a Catholic boys' semi-private school - my friends and I would never tell people we were from Cabbagetown. If asked, we would say we lived in South Rosedale. When asked how far south, we would reply "Dundas Street." Now, of course, the situation is different. Cabbagetown was invaded by the sand-blasting gentrification of the late 1970s. Houses that were once run-down and owned by absentee landlords suddenly were selling for nearly half a million dollars. Most of my friends lived in Regent Park, but one boy - Kevin Whelan - lived on the street I live on now. I am positive his family didn't own their house and it is probably now the home of a young married upwardly mobile couple with two children and a mortgage the size of some Third World country's gross national product. Nonetheless, the neighbourhood still produces the trickle of memories.

I teach English at Humber College Lakeshore campus and those days when I got to school on the Queen streetcar, standing on the corner of Queen and Parliament, beneath the windows of the pool hall and the Cabbagetown Boys Boxing Club that were housed there, I can see underneath the stores and businesses, the ghosts of the past. They are echoes, not clear and sharp, but there, reverberating underneath the surface. I see the Diamond Restaurant that my mother and her friends - Kay Nichols and Marcella Crombie - would go to have tea and toast after Mass at St. Paul's. I see the Rubert Hotel, ragged and rough even in those days. I see the second hand store across the street run by an old Italian man whose name is lost to me now. He had three sons and they controlled the Toronto Star paper routes in the area, a massive route that covered most of Cabbagetown. I can see the Empire Theatre before it became the Good Shepard Refuge. Sometimes, if I peer long and deeply enough, I can see 11 year old me, eating chips wrapped in newspaper from Frank's Fish and Chips, on my way to Moss Park for house league basketball in the winter, the grease from the chips hardening on my fingers, but I have to look real hard.

"Getting Myself Worked Up"

This February, I turned 63. I am not happy about it. Notice how I didn't write "celebrate turning 63." I feel like I am am being dragged into this kicking and screaming. One moment I'm 19 and listening to the Jefferson Airplane, and the next, I am noticing how I am rapidly turning into my father with bags under my eyes and the beginning of liver spots on my hands.

They used to be considered freckles.

Nonetheless, over the past year or so, I have been very conscious of my age and the approach of all "the forlorn rags of growing old," as Kerouac says in the moving last paragraph of "On the Road." These rags may be coming fast or they may arrive slowly and in stages, but I know they are out there, lurking around the lamp posts, laying in puddles, waiting in the clouds ready to pounce, sneaking in my closet and
changing my clothes to cardigan sweaters and track pants. They want to soften my bones and harden my head, to make teeth and nouns and verbs fall out, bouncing on the bathroom tiles, the same bathroom where bright red blood drains down the sink hole when I brush my teeth.

I remember, in my late teenage years, reading Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and thinking how sad and pathetic it must be to grow old. I formulated a plan - I would put a gun to my head when I turned 50. Simple, eh? After all, it would be a whole new millennium and who would want to live that long? At the time, it seemed so far away and foreign, a slow-moving freight headed my way but so far off in the distance, it was meaningless. Needless to say, I have changed my mind around that very stupid idea.

Time back then felt so limitless. I was invincible. I was part of the "youth culture," the pampered baby boomers, taking risks and dancing with the music in the air. Those were indeed heady days. In spite of never quite surrendering myself completely to the times, I thought I was a hippie, a part of "the counter-culture" we arrogantly called it. We were "clean, immaculate" - masters of our own destiny. Everything seemed like a new  discovery as if we were psycho-nauts, pioneers in the wilderness, headed off in directions few had been before - innerspace, the final frontier. Donning bell-bottom pants and love-beads and using drugs and sitting around shabby rooms listening to music while incense sticks smoulder away on tables made from giant cable spools and - voila - we were young and alive and nothing could touch us.

I was 13 when John F. Kennedy was shot and 14 when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show. I had always been what was then called a "non-conformist." I had always felt like an alien. Growing up in Regent Park, I was a fat kid who didn't like to play sports, read poetry, wore glasses, was unbearably shy around girls. It was as if I had a tattoo of the word "different" across my forehead. I never felt like I was connecting with things around me. I remember reading Ray Bradbury's novel,  Fahrenheit 451 that year and the front of the book had an epigram from Juan Ramon Jimenez - "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." These words struck deep into me. Jimenez's words gave me a mandate. Instead of feeling different, I made it a life-calling to be different. The other kids I hung out with liked rock 'n roll music - I went to hootenannies, wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, smoking a pipe. Folk music was hippier than Lesley Gore. Fabian or Bob Dylan? Beach movies or Bergman? American Bandstand or Playhouse 90? What choice did I have? I regaled in being considered odd. It was my identity and I don't begrudge it for one moment. I was such a pretentious little shit, but the feeling of superiority helped me survive and gave me a currency, an edge, being different as a way to be normal.

Lately, the memories of those days are washing against the shores of my "deep" maturity. Teaching a History of Pop Music class at George Brown College places me in the position of  presenting my memories as history. There is an odd oscillation in that. I move between a space that is apart from me to a space that is a part of me and then back again.This week in class, for instance, we looked at the early 60s - Motown, Beatles, British Invasion, Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk boom, the Memphis Sound, even Patsy Cline. I felt this eerie feeling come over me. It was as if I was watching myself give a lecture and underneath that image was me sitting in Riverdale Park listening to The Dirty Shames or sitting on our living room couch and turning on The Lloyd Thaxton Show or my heart thumping seeing Kathy Taggart in an Empire dress, her hair in a beehive. I became very animated and, after class, one of the students came up to me and thanked me for being so passionate about the music. How could I not be? I felt so young. On the flip side, in another class, one young woman student asked who Frank Sinatra was and if he was famous. I felt so old.

My intention for this blog is to delve into these very mixed feelings I have about getting older, about bouncing off memory, about struggling with the Brad that inside me and the way Brad must look like from the outside.
Doing this examination in the blogosphere is, perhaps, a way of finding out if these feelings are common to other old farts or just mine alone.

More shall be revealed. . .

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