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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 2, 2006
Port Credit
Last week, I returned to my grandfather’s house. It is still standing, on Front Street in Port Credit, Ont. (long since merged into Mississauga). It looks over the river as it always did. It is a law office now. It is not well-kept. I spotted a crack in the bricks; a chimney was precarious; the front entry porch was sagging. But by a miracle it was still standing, in a location where economy dictates it should have been replaced by an apartment building, or expensive shops.It was after office hours, and no one was guarding. So I snuck around the back: up the drive, now paved, and no longer hedged. Behind, in the yard, I found grass uncut for many years, instead of a beloved lawn and garden. The grass was so deep I could not be sure whether certain sacred objects might still be lurking in it -- the concrete birdbath, for instance, or the magic steps. I tramped in: all were gone. The patio had been scraped up; and it was as if the shed with a hundred empty tobacco tins had never existed. I peered in the back window, through the reflection of a setting sun. Some of grandma’s kitchen was still in there: the sink, two cabinets. The room is now a coffee station of some sort. But no big humming refrigerator by the side door, and therefore, on top of it, no big jar where there had always been fresh cookies. The garage was still standing, decayed, weathered. It had become very beautiful. I looked closely: there were fragments of the rust-red paint I remembered from my childhood. And here: the white trim. The doors were bolted shut. I felt sure, if they would only open, Uncle Joe’s canoe would still be resting on the rafters. That if they would only open, and I could walk in, the calendar would still be on the wall, from Centennial Year. That I could then walk out, and it might still be 1967. That the view across the river would be restored, and all the little houses would return, now lost beneath a highrise sleeper-suburb. My last glimpse of this scene had been about thirty years ago. And even that, just a glimpse in passing. Grandpa died in 1978, but my grandma nearly a decade before him, and in his last years grandpa took a new wife. She was smart, somewhat younger, an ebullient little bird -- the widow of one of his closest friends. She took good care of my grandfather, and tried so hard to please all his numerous progeny. Yet I didn’t want to know her. She had replaced grandma, and grandma wasn’t replaceable. It was therefore, now, nearly forty years of time that I was bridging. The Christians teach that at the Day of Judgement, we will be presented with total recall. I believe them, for I have had hints of it in my own life. There are some moments -- often quite unlikely -- sealed in the memory with every particular of scent and feeling. Opened, they immediately re-seal. Everything else may have faded. But the record of one moment does not fade. My family had returned from years abroad. The ship docked in Montreal. We took the night train to Toronto Union. My grandpa was waiting on the platform -- in a brown homburg, brown shoes, brown suit. (He never showed tears; but he was biting his lip.) An uncle was waiting outside with a car, we would be driving to Port Credit. It was about this time of year: the sun shone hot. And now, I am looking up at all the adults, for I am still just a small person. That is not my memory, but the prelude to my memory. I hardly remember the drive, until we cross over the old, round truss bridge, by the mouth of the Credit. It is in that moment I see my grandmother, standing by the riverbank. She is wearing a long dark blue silken dress, her hair has turned grey. And she does not see us, yet. That, more precisely, is the picture in my mind, that will never be effaced. My grandmother has picked a bouquet of flowers. She is looking at the river; she is holding the bouquet up to her breast. In another moment, she will give it to my mother. This is the weekend on which we ask what is Canada, and I have just told you what it is to me. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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