This must be the place

Home.

Home is where I want to be.

Home is where the heart is.

If this is true, then home is wherever you are. Which is how I’ve always felt. I’ve often been asked whether or not I miss home and I’ve always replied with where’s home or which one? I’m certainly not like Papa the rolling stone and calling wherever I laid my hat home, but home has to be something more than walls and a roof. It needs to have a warmth and that intangible quality that makes your heart and soul say ahhhhhh.

The  first place I called home was a small apartment called the Try lon on Adelaide St north in London. I haven’t seen it in decades and I don’t have any memory of it.

The next place I called home was on Woodrow crescent. It was a hideous grey brick suburban semi-detached. It was home for a long time. I had a large room that looked out onto the street. That I and all the other neighbourhood kids would play on. Snow forts in the winter, street hockey, football, hide and seek in the summer. There was trick or treating on Halloween and the kids would walk to school together. It was a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie.

When I was 14 we moved again. This was a nicer less hideous reddish brick suburban back split.

It was hideous on the inside.

My room, the smallest, had red carpet. The living room was golden. The lounge room had blue carpet. For a while, the main bath was carpeted as well.

I never liked that place, I never felt a sense of neighbourhood, it never felt like home.

I moved away after four years there to go to university, which is supposedly why I had the small bedroom, I moved into room 613 of Thompson residence at the University of Ottawa. It was a fantastic place. Twenty six people lived on the floor and only seven of us were guys.  I just call that a great ratio. My room mate was never there, he spent most of his time just off of campus at her place, so I effectively had a double room to  myself. I was able to bring up my stereo, such as it was at the time, as well as all my vinyl and cd’s. It was in residence that I first learnt to cook, more out of necessity than anything else. But I soon built a reputation for making great meals and other students from the twenty floors would come knocking to have me make special date meals. I did it on the condition that I got a portion. Which freed up more money for drinking.

Not everyone got along on the floor all of the time, but we all had more fun together than not. I’m not in contact with anyone from residence anymore, but I would like to think that everyone is doing as well as they would like to be. I was asked not to come back for my second year in residence, even though it was a lottery, I was told not to apply. Perhaps it was because of the gin still.

It’s not like it ever exploded.

I spent the summer back at the house on Renny, but I was just a guest now. When I came back to Ottawa, I lived in a wretched building on Clarence St. in Lowertown. It was one of those places that should be demolished not just physically but from memory as well. The litany of its woes:

It was surrounded by housing projects

There was a men’s mission around the corner, so you frequently stepped over passed out homeless people.

There was always a supply of empty sherry bottles lying around.

The neighbourhood kid’s favourite pastime was vandalizing abandoned cars.

The drug dealer across the street would come out and make deals in a ‘banana hammock’

The two security doors could be open with sharp tug.

The balcony would crumple if you stepped on the edges.

As we moved in, someone moving out, gave us his boric acid insecticide saying use it every week. “Oh, and good luck you’re going to need it”

The first week after we (Tim and I) moved in, we woke to police lights, as a dismembered prostitute was found in a hockey bag in the buildings dumpster.

Three nights later there was gunfire from the parking lot. Tim moved out the next day. I stuck around for the month of September.

It wasn’t all bad. It was bright and spacious and airy. It was quiet and as it was in the middle of the building there was plenty of hot water. And since it was in such an undesirable, I mean an unsafe area, no one would drop by unexpectedly.

I was rescued from that horrid place by my cousin Richard who found a place for me in the Glebe, it wasn’t available till the end of Octiober. So, I spent the next month living at my Aunt and Uncles place in Kanata. A special thankyou once again to Paul and Barb.

6 66 Fifth Ave. That was home. I lived there for the next ten years, almost to the day. It was small, only one bedroom. The kitchen was barely functional. You could hear the neighbours, I got broken into five times, the landlord raised the rent more than he was legally allowed to. But, it was a place in the Glebe and everyone was always welcome.

It was Home. No matter where I travelled too, it was a constant.

When I first moved to Australia and lived with Liv at her dad’s place for six months, it never felt like home.

Our first place on Bluefish never felt like home to me either.

East Gosford started to feel like home, but something was missing. It was large had a fantastic balcony with great water views and was cheap, but it just didn’t quite fit.

Then came Pembroke in Brisbane, it was small, hot, and had too much noise from the street. So,once again we packed up and moved five streets away.

Mansfield could have become home – it was close, but the constant intrusions from the real estate always reminded me I was a tenant.

Finally we settled in Sadlier’ s Crossing. It felt like home when we first viewed it. I remember Liv looking at me and saying she loved it. Maybe it was because Arwyn was already with us, although she wouldn’t grace us with her presence for another five months, but it was home right away. Even before we were able to put any of our own touches on it and scrub away the lonely spinster aroma, the house had welcomed us as its new caretakers. Which is what I hope our family will be, caretakers of a building that is currently 90 years old, I would be very happy if decades from now Arwyn is bringing her own children around for Christmas and feeling the warmth and love I feel surrounded by loved ones in a place that is truly our home.”