musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Tis in my memory locked


For some time now, I’ve wondered what makes some places feel like they are a part of me -or more likely, that I am a part of them… And why are some things only superficially appealing, in spite of their evident attempts to mimic authenticity?

I suppose we all have different needs, so perhaps generic legitimacy is the best compromise. Or maybe we have no need to even bother about it anymore. I mean a store is a store, and even in a mall, it does what stores do. A house, in whatever location, still performs the function of a house; you move in and hopefully transform it into a place in which you feel comfortable: a home. Familiarity does that, I think.

And yet Time marches on, and sometimes revisiting places from the past destroys whatever enchantment had been associated with them. Some of course are gone, but some have been modified, or even adapted to serve different purposes; they are no longer special to me.

At first, I assumed that, like a home, authenticity is simply wedded to sensory experiences: the smell of floor wax, the creak of an old ceiling fan, the feeling of everything being in the right place, somehow. But there’s more than that, I think.

Is it my memories? Perhaps, and yet as the years drift past, very little stays the way we think we remember it. Then how about context? Like the little shop I used to pass each day as I walked home from school: the one with the little tinkling bell on the door to summon, or awaken, the owner dozing behind the counter just pretending to read; the store crowded with things people forgot to buy at the supermarket: things of which they needed only one, and so were not really a bargain if they had to buy three bundled together…

There was a corner store like that when I was a child in Winnipeg. After school used to go into it with my friends to buy bubble gum in little single packs; I remember it sold pink Fleers Dubble Bubble gum, some with a tiny comic paper included inside featuring a little tubby kid who always wore a red and white beanie; and of course there were the ridiculously bland Pez candies, that we only bought when the plastic dispensers finally became a fad.

I mean no matter how much stuff the 7-11 or the corner Mini-Marts carry, they’re only ‘convenience stores’ after all; they’re not into ambience any more than strip-malls or the items surrounding the cash register in most gas stations are. You’re not meant to linger, just buy something ordinary and leave. It’s hard to be wistful about them.

I do have fond memories about my time in Winnipeg in the late 1940ies and early 50ies, though. My father worked for the railroad and he was transferred from city to city every three or four years, so my life had been one of making friends and then losing touch with them when we moved. I was young, however, so my memories of place and people were evanescent and fragmentary. It was only when we finally had a prolonged sojourn in Winnipeg, that I became able to form lasting memories of it.

It was there that I remember our house the best, and the winter snowdrifts along the street that wandered past the three hospitals across from it; a little bus used to struggle past the house and we threw snowballs at the bus from the lane, or from the snow-forts we’d built in the drifts.

My first paper route was in Winnipeg, and I can remember having to deliver to one of those nearby hospitals during the polio epidemic of the time -its ‘iron lungs’ chugging just behind a large swinging door that occasionally let me see the scary long metal cylinders if I hesitated at the front desk long enough.

Oh, and of course there was the Flood and my father and older brother toiling on the crumbling dike of Red River just behind the hospital, piling sandbags along with the other worried men of the community. When it finally over-flowed its banks I can still remember my father rowing me up the street to safety somewhere. The water got so high it eventually flooded the main floor of our house, so my mother and I were evacuated by train (of course) to her parent’s house near Vancouver.

You can see why, after almost a lifetime, I felt compelled to go back to find out if anything of those days remained. I wanted to see my old house (whose phone number I still remembered: 422-486); see the hospital on whose front grounds we used to play pick-up soccer in the summer; see my old red-brick school, where I remember Charley used to take out his glass eye for money at recess; and the house where my father and I used to get fresh eggs from Mr. Garnet and where I got a cream puff for some reason…

I’m sure there were other memories -like visiting the graveyard at the top of the street after dark, or the little United Church where I had to go to Sunday school and become a Tyro (sorry, no idea); and of course, nearby was the pink house that stood out like a pimple in the middle of a street of otherwise normal houses and owned by the man who also owned the local movie theatre…

So many memories, so much to see. But so much disappointment, I’m afraid: the church was gone; the school was still there, but different somehow -it was smaller, and brought back no fond memories, even when a janitor let me tour some of the rooms as well as the ‘big’ gym where we’d had our assemblies and sock-hop dances. The hospitals near the house were newly refurbished -not at all like I thought they’d be- and although my old white stucco house across the street was still there, so much had been changed on it: no stucco facing, no weeds along the sidewalk, no laundry stand that my mother stood on to put the clothes on the line, and on which I used to lie in the prairie sun in obeisance  to a popular book of the time (Sight Without Glasses) in the sure and certain belief that sun on my eyelids would cure my eyes so I wouldn’t have to wear the lenses in my heavy butterscotch frames.

As I wandered around the neighbourhood, aimless and disappointed, I happened to walk along a heavily treed street that had sported old houses even when I was a child. I’m not sure how I ended up there, but suddenly I saw it: the old corner store. Like Brigadoon, it had appeared again after all these years. The old wooden step that led up to the door was new, but the large glass front window still stared at the street, and a little bell tinkled as I pushed open the old wooden door.

Inside, it was like being transported to another time -a time when I was still a child and enchanted by the crowded shelves and the creaky floorboards along the three short, dimly lit aisles. The shelves were not as high as I remembered, but they were still packed with cans and packages -modern replicas of what I dimly remembered of my forays along the aisles as a child. An older lady sitting behind the counter glanced at me, and then busied herself watching something on her smart phone again -I was a senior; I was no risk. But the counter still had the glass childproof case with its teasers out of harms way: chocolate bars, Jelly Babies and PEZ candies in their dispensers, black ball candies, and red and black licorice sticks, Tootsie Rolls, and even some faded packages of Dubble Bubble gum…

The woman put down her phone and smiled at me. “Can I help you, sir?” she said in a curiously cracked voice.

I shook my head and smiled back at her as I headed out the door; I’d already been helped: I’d come home at last…

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gozzter

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