Decided that I would take a trip down memory lane today, and thanks to the miracle of Google Streetview, I can takeyou with me.

Let’s start with this :

There it is, the house I grew up in. The one place I felt safe in the whole universe for the first 20+ years of my life. A place I still miss, but know it will always exist in my heart.

Some things have changed. When I lived there, the house was white with blue trim. A particular blue that my Dad liked called Bristol Blue.

And the steps to the front door have been replaced,. which comes as no surprise to me as the ones my Dad built, as impressive as they were, were made of wood and even with the best of waterproofing, the Prince Edward Island winters took their toll and it was kind of wobbly and rumpled looking when I lived there.

That concrete step, although lacking in personality, makes WAY more sense.

Here it is at a different angle.

That small window above and between the two on the top floor was the window to the attic. I have never been in it. It’s the only part of the house I have never seen.

That’s because it’s where my childhood imagination decided all the monsters and ghosts and child kipnapping aliens who would interpret any sounds I made as the signal to come GET me (for reals) lived.

Plus I would have had to get a ladder and it would have been a whole thing.

But mostly it was the monsters.

Here’s the neighbour’s house.

See that deck? That’s the deck my father “helped” our neighbour Harley build. In other words, he mostly built the deck while Harley watched.

That’s because when Harley tried to do it himself, the result were kinda pathetic. And my father loves to make himself useful.

Harley paid us back through his job as an indisutrial sized snow blower operator for our town. When he was driving the snow plot through our neighborhood, he would make a little turn and clear out both our driveway and his.

I miss knowing my neighbours.

That’s also the house where one of my preschool besties Trish lived. We spent a lot of time together along with Janet from across the street.

Mostly we did girl stuff. Hopscotch, skipping rope, dolls. Feel free to connect that to my homosexuality however you wish.

Janet lived here, in the Votour residence.

 

The Votour’s and Harley’s brood were the closest thing our family had to friends of the family. In that we knew them enough to say hello.

We didn’t, like, do stuff with them or anything. We were not that kind of family. We didn’t even do stuff with any of the zillions of my mother’s relatives.

In fact, we rarely did stuff as a family, period.

It was a bright but cold way to live.

And here is the stretch of street where I played as a child.

It was safer than it might look because our little portion of Belmont Street betweeo Russell and Eustane was not a vital connection between two major streets and so it did not get a huge amount of traffic.

In my childhood, that stretch of pavement was a badminton court, a hopscotch board, a street hockey rink, a roller skating rink. a beginner’s bike riding space, and a great place to play catch or throw the frisbee around.

Around the corner we have this place :

Everyone in the neighborhood called this place the Minitel because there was always like ten people living there at any time and nobody stayed there for long.

Presumably, sharing a house with nine other people gets real old real fast.

That’s where one of the unfortunates who tried their hardest to befriend me only to get frozen out, Shiela Cormier (pronounced cor-me-ay) lived. She was a very sweet girl who collected things with cows on them and would have made a great friend.

But I was an alien child, and could not connect with Earthlings.

That, by the standards of my neighborhood, is quite a bold color scheme. We don’t normally do that level of contrast. Even the blue and white house I grew up in did not look like that.

I think the real problem is that they painted EVERYTHING blue and that’t just plain too much blue. It insists upon itself.

Across the street and down the block from that is :

That’s where my brother’s friend Barry Thomas lived. His whole family has a unique genetic legacy that gives all the males :

1. A glass nose. The slightest tap makes it bleed.
2. A superhuman pain threshold. Don’t ask them to demonstrate it. It’s not pleasant.
3. Superhumanly fast reflexes.

They are amazing. If I was creating an army of super-soldiers. I know where I would start. Barry’s brother Wally was a heck of a guy to get a ride from, because he drove like a professional stunt driver and liked freaking people out by demonstrating.

And next door to him :

There’s where my brother’s friend Bloyce Albert (pronounced al-bear) lived. He, Barry, and my brother were partners in crime for a lot of my childhood.

I was scared of Bloyce when I was little because he was a rough and tough working class guy with a very strong presence and an aura of power about him.

But he’s actually a great guy. One time I said something about being weird in his presence, and he gave me a sitcom-father quality speech about how you want to be yourself but you don’t want to be too weird or you won’t fit in.

Obviously, I didn’t heed the advice. But it made a very strong impression on me.

Well, that’s it for this little tour of my childhood neighborhood. Originally I wanted to base this around the route I took to school when I was a kid, but then I realized that there was too much I wanted to do from my home block, so that will have to wait.

But it will be coming. I really want to show people my schools. Especially my elementary school. A lot of what made me who I am today happened there.

Most of it was bad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.