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HAVE I EVER LIVED NEAR YOU?


ONTARIO:

The year after I was born we moved from Pembroke to Fergus, Ontario.

On February 17, 1966, Mom left Len & Fergus and moved to Toronto.

On July 20, 1969, we were living at Queensway and Kipling above what is now a stained glass shop (it was a CB radio store then) and Mom woke me up for Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon.

Later that August we moved to 20 Yeager Street in Kitchener where I attended Grade 1 at Forest Hills Elementary school.

Then we moved to Third Street in Kitchener, living under my brother Bruce and his family where I attended Forest Hills Elementary school for most of Grade 2. It was here I met Heidi Jansen who templated my desire that anyone I loved was first and foremost my best friend. A small box has all the Birthday and Christmas cards I possess including the 7th birthday card I got from Heidi. After we moved out west and for the remainder of my childhood I pined to return to her without realizing that she merely represented Ontario to me.

BRITISH COLUMBIA:

At the end of May 1972, mom and I took a train from Kitchener to Toronto and then boarded the SuperChief for a cross country trip across Canada to Vancouver via Edmonton/Jasper. We arrived May 30th around 1pm on a sunny day.

We lived with my brother Bryan and his family on Bennett Road in Richmond, BC for only a few months. During this time I completed Grade 2 in the original multi-grade classroom at General Arthur Currie School. At the end of the road was BC's first McDonald’s, which was the size of an old Dairy Queen ice cream stand for the first couple of years. Down the road, at Blundell and Three Road sat my first 7-Eleven. What triggered my homesickness for Ontario was when I learned that when it rains in Richmond it often keeps raining for weeks. Our time on Bennett was the only time I'm aware of seeing my brother's father Len, when he dropped by so Bryan could drive him to the Ferries for his return to Vancouver Island. It was here that I witnessed the numerous times that Bryan's first wife's temper was taken out on their daughter, often through humiliation acts relating to food.

We moved into our first apartment in Richmond as part of the Murray Hill developments at Three Road and Williams. I say first because over the years I lived there my mom and I lived in a total of 6 units (5 together and 1 each on our own). First was Apt #172. A few months later we moved into the unit diagonally across from us #169. The reason for the move was that the hallways all opened up directly into the living rooms of the apartments, except for the unit behind the laundry room. Mom’s preference was the units with the long hallways as they provided more privacy, so whenever possible we gravitated to them.

In the spring of 1973 we moved for a few weeks to Langley, BC near White Rock where I was enrolled for school just before Easter. We lived with Peter Hilady, a mail delivery guy who had a huge old house along the major road leading toward White Rock. There was a junker of a car in his massive backyard that I played in. A neighbour next door had a horse that was as nervous around me as I was around it. We didn’t stay long and hadn’t given up the apartment back in Richmond. Two things I remember about this place was first, that music class at the school there tried to get me to learn to play the flute (waste of time) and my bike's breaks were so horrible that one time I took a wrong turn at the border of Langley and White Rock and found myself shooting down the hill toward White Rock beach. My memory is that I couldn't stop and somehow made it across the main drag along the beach front to end up on the sand but a visit to White Rock with my wife in 2001 appear to make that impossible because of the elevation at the boardwalk. Now I'm not so sure.

Just before the end of summer 1974 we moved to Sayward, BC which was the northern ferry terminus off Vancouver Island heading up to Prince Rupert. Sayward was a tiny remote community and the only place where I had to take a school bus to get to class. Winter came much earlier there than in Richmond so I caught a chill trick or treating in the snow because Mom had made me my first Batman suit, patterned after his very first appearance in Detective Comics 1938. Sadly an exploded battery ruined the outfit and all I have left is the cowl (I was 8 years old by the way).

We stayed in Sayward until the end of November and then Bryan and Don came up with trucks to move us back to Richmond. It was supernatural to be in a vehicle with someone I barely knew as we plodding through the darkess along a northern 2 lane highway during a snow storm. While we waited for a vacancy in our old complex we stayed with Don and Bryan and his family, who had a three bedroom apartment on the other side of Ryan Road from where we had been living before we went to Sayward.

It was here that Don and Bryan thought teaching me to avoid being beaten up at school was best handled by punching me in the face. Something that upset me enough that I clutched their dining table with a grip they couldn't break despite their best efforts to pry me loose. They never tried that again.

This lasted just over 6 weeks and by January we had moved into Unit #178 (long hall) of the Murray Hill complex, this was on the Williams Road side of things.

Between then and 1977 Bryan and his wife split up and he moved into an apartment on our side of Ryan Road.

In 1977, right after Mom returned from a Las Vegas Tri-Chem convention we pulled a mid-night move from our Williams Road apartment into Bryan’s now vacated apartment across the complex in Unit #142. It did not have a long hallway but that end of the complex had different owners and was for some reason quite a bit cheaper to rent.

A year later, after the neighbour across the hall from us had an early morning intruder and moved out, we took the long hallway unit #139 which is where we remained until I graduated and moved out on my own. It was always entertaining to advise the school of my new address since we never really went very far.

In August 1982, after graduating high school, I leveraged my years of service locking and unlocking the outside doors of the complex into my own apartment, unit #175. It did not have a long hallway but I stayed there nearly 5 years and was, until Port Credit the longest I’d lived in any one spot.

ALBERTA:

After coworker Joe, my first new roommate in years had settled in my apartment I flew to Calgary to spend the Easter Weekend visiting Shelley. Why? Well, officially my high school sweetheart and first love had just spent 4 years in Toronto getting a journalism degree and Calgary was the closest to Vancouver that she could find a related job.

My best friend and I drove up to Calgary in my BMW Bavaria. Running up the Coquihalla Highway at speeds in excess of 110 km/h was nothing for a normal vehicle, but my car was both fully loaded with loose but heavy items I needed immediately (and some collectables I wouldn't trust leaving behind) and badly damaged after a black-ice incident cracked the front passenger side Macpherson's strut. The whole vehicle fought me as though I was trying to outrun police through the back roads of Kentucky with a broken shopping cart wheel and frankly it should've snapped somewhere up the mountain and killed both of us in a firey crash off the elevated highway.

Instead, the beast charged along, guzzling more gas per mile than my current car used in a day, stopping only for food, sleep, toilets and to shoot parts of a Super 8 movie of the two-day trip from evergreen to burnt grass. On a whim and because the name amused our tired selves we went to Charlie Chan's in Kensington for dinner after unloading the car. It turned out Charlie Chan's was the best chinese food I've ever eaten, by far and Alberta Ginger Beef is the most amazing tribute to meat there is on the planet.

At the end of the weekend Barry returned to Richmond by bus but shortly after I'd dropped him off I already realized I'd made a horrible mistake moving here. My friend Dorene, a coworker who had left my last company just before I did, called up to see how the drive was and this sparked a massive jealously fit in Shelley. By the end of the fight I stormed from the apartment and went around to the nearest payphone where I called Mom and asked her to investigate my options for return.

When I moved from there, in the spring of 1989, I was leaving both my job and the province I'd been in for 16 years. While I've visited BC, and for a time sought to return, I never have and likely now never will.

I leveraged goodwill with the Courier company I was leaving to get my stuff moved for free to Calgary where I was moving to. They were running trucks back and forth anyway and let me pack some skids with my things that they brought up as space provided. I'd moved to Calgary for something I would now never recommend anyone do, love.

We spent nearly five months in a one-room apartment on 13A Street in the NorthWest end of Calgary. I'd gone up hoping to have time to work on my first TV series idea but quickly realized that idea was unfeasible and quickly found work in the Data Entry department of Purolator. Fortune had favoured me on that timing. Purolator had just taken over a ground based transportation company based our of Vancouver that was heavily reliant on manual invoicing and they needed to quickly expand their Administration deparment to handle the near doubling of work.

Shelley and I moved into a 2-bedroom unit on 9A Street NW that she found that the City was renting out (it had been a building they purchased as part of their development of the C-Train light rail transit system). For almost 3 years we co-habitated, growing apart from our non-compatible work schedules (I was morning, she was evening) and the sudden transition from writing and calling each other regularly to barely communicating with each other. I filled my time working on my series concept, basically developing the entire Space Oddity Universe in the 2nd bedroom.

A June 1992 business trip to Toronto had led to a dinner with a friend I'd kept in touch all along reunited me with someone from high school I'd spent months chasing before dating Shelley. It was a surreal evening. The three of us met for dinner nearly Yonge & Eglinton and I immediately fell under the spell of this person again who had blossomed from the shy awkward girl next door into a sophisticated woman of passion.

We spent the night talking and she laid out her entire journey, which had included just walking away from an abusive marriage and starting over at the other end of the country. I'd been unhappy in my situation for a while, but had continued to work at in hopes of getting it to move forward, even saving up and giving my girlfriend a wedding band to try and open the discussion, to no avail.

It simply wasn't going to be with us, but having given up a promising and well paying job track to be with her I was still very financially dependent on her. I returned to Calgary determined that I wasn't going to waste any more time, put the pieces in play for a rough but viable exit and then sat my girlfriend down for the talk. It went about as well as one could've hoped considering a ten year relationship was ending and then I triggered the plans and moved myself out that weekend.

For the next two years I lived elsewhere in Calgary. First attempting to be in the freezing basement of my recently married best friend's house and then when the tensions from that grew too much to handle, in the slightly warmer basement of a friend of his. While there I made friends with his other roommate and that person's fiance, who were both recent Star Trek fans.

NEW BRUNSWICK:

I didn't leave Calgary so much as was pushed out. On February 2nd 1994 Purolator announced they were phasing out five of the regional Administrative centers, consolidating everything that wasn't in Quebec to a new Moncton facility. I simply couldn't afford to become unemployed so I tried to use this opportunity for a transfer to either the head office in Toronto (hopeful that I could then pursue the woman who inspired me to act on my life) or a promotion with the new centre. I got the promotion and found myself in Moncton, New Brunswick the day after my birthday with my stuff to follow once we'd got the centre running and I found an apartment.

For 8 weeks I lived out of a suitcase at the Hotel Beausejour, which at the time was a Delta hotel property. Then I found a massive three bedroom place on the second floor of 413 Main Street, in what had once been an office building. I didn't have enough stuff for this place, and ran up an massive electric bill trying to heat it for the few hours each day I was there. The hardest part was that the building wasn't quiet and I worked regularly until around 1 am, then tried to sleep while the two young party women above me played their music way too loud. Looking back on it, I really should've gone up and joined them but in reality I was exhausted each night from participating in the most chaotically set-up consoliation that any administrative office had ever conceived.

Before that first year was over the entire management team was actively engaged in communicating as a single front to the head office the incompetence and irresponsibility of the Senior Manager, who presumably because the budget was a million dollars off base, was immediately investigated and eventually sacked.

While I had taken a week off in July to return to Calgary for my car (which allowed me to give a Klingon Toast at the wedding of my former roommate and his new wife, and then solo drive trans-America in 48 hours of intermitten sleep and speeding, before hanging out alone in the apartment of the only woman I actively pursued but would never bed - there haven't been that many woman in my life so that sounds far more boastful than it is) the only actual vacation I'd had came just after the end of year rush. To give you an idea of just how bad the Senior Manager was, while I was visiting my Mom in Kitchener she was sacked and upon getting that call I couldn't stop singing, "ding, dong the witch is dead".

WESTERN ONTARIO:

Mom ran into some health problems. We eventually found out her spleen was failing but until we had she was frequently being rushed to hospital coughing up white bile and hospitalized for weeks at a time in recovery while they ran tests trying to isolate what the problem was. We'd been living in different provinces for 6 years by this point and it was evident her mind was starting to addle, but I noted during my visit that it was from lack of stimuli because a few hours after kitbitzing and talking she was as sharp as ever. While I felt I needed to finally start my life a little voice said she needed help she wasn't getting. Add to that the reality I couldn't keep up the pace of what I was doing much longer, didn't have a life because of it, and my heart really wanted to be in Toronto led to a discussion with the Managing Director that took over the Senior Manager, who found a placement for me at head office in Mississauga.

I flew up for testing, met with the Manager I'd be reporting to, and after the interview returned to Moncton not realizing it was already a done deal thanks to the Managing Director all of us were working for. So a few weeks later I packed my stuff up in a U-Haul truck and drove to Guelph, moving into a wonderful apartment that I could only afford by having Mom move in with me.


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