dawlish avenue

Last weekend I was in Toronto for a conference at Glendon College. Mom and Dad lent me their car and so on the way home I drove to the street on which I grew up, parked the car, and walked around the block. It was a strange and surreal experience. The afternoon was beautiful and sunny and I parked the car in front of 181, the huge old house in which my grandparents once lived and of which I have a black and white photo on my desk. Or rather, I have a photo of the "backyard" (if it can be called that)--trees and bushes and wild grasses and a rough two- track country road going off into the distance--and two people, uncharacteristically not identified by my grandmother in her distinctive fountain-pen handwriting on the back of the photo, who are my great-ancestors. The woman, stylishly dressed, sits in a hammock and the man, in a suit and tie, sits upright on the grass beside her. 181 was apparently the first house on the block but it is now just like any other house wedged between all the others. I walked down the street to where our house used to be. It is now gone, replaced by a much bigger (but to my mind, less beautiful) house. The entire street seemed wider and more spare than I remembered it. I remember more trees, the houses closer together, the street more boisterous and active. On this afternoon, it was quiet. There were no cars, no people. It didn't match-up with my interior image and that was unsettling. I think what was most surprising for me was the recognition that returning to this street where I spent the longest chunk of my childhood--from 9 to 18 years old--did not generate new memories the way that thinking about it does. In other words, my memory of the place is much more real to me than the place itself. And this recognition is only reinforced by the fact that now, a week later, my memories of Dawlish and the surrounding neighbourhood have already started to replace, as if moving in to repossess occupied territory, the "reality" that I saw so recently.