I was telling my boss, Larry, about my plans for today. "We're going to visit my old hometown of Bramalea", I informed him. He asked when I'd left; I told him 1980, and the first thing he said was "You'll probably find it's not as, umm, white as you remember."
Well, I knew that--friends of Eva's parents moved out of neighbouring Brampton a few years back and they had told us they were pretty sure there were now no Caucasians allowed within city limits. The city is now widely known as "Bramladesh".
Anyway, a little colour in the current denizens of the city wasn't going to faze me. I wanted to see my first home and check out Bramalea City Centre, the mall I visited weekly as a child.
We journeyed up the 410 towards what used to be Highway 7. (I'm pretty sure, incidentally, that the 410 wasn't even there when I was.) The sign flashes by on the right: BRAMPTON POPULATION 302,000
Yike. That's damn near doubled in 25 years!
From there, a few blocks east brought us into territory both comfortingly familiar and almost entirely alien to me.
Yes, the 'ethnic experience' (as Eva called it) is in full bloom here, but I feel like the foreigner, a stranger in a strange homeland. There are a lot of Orientals here and I am very disoriented.
The cross streets float by as if in a dream. At Dixie Road I spy a familiar brown buiding whose function I couldn't recall until I approached and read the sign out front: PEEL MEDICAL AND DENTAL CENTRE. Ah, yes, that's what that was...is. More cross streets: Central Park Drive, Bramalea Rd--the street names are about all that I remember!---there it is, Finchgate Rd on the right--quick glimpse of Georges Vanier, my first school--Glenvale Rd on the left.
Odd. I lived on Glenvale, but it was a boulevard. So was Finchgate. I knew even before I moved off Glenvale that it wasn't a proper boulevard; that is, it didn't have a strip of grass/trees/gardens separating the lanes.Nevertheless, it was called Glenvale Blvd. and now it's Glenvale Rd.
Weird feeling.
My street also looked nothing like I remember it. Oh, the townhouses still lined the east side and the boulevard--road--still curved gently, but..
Where are the trees?
Were there trees?
I think I remember trees.
Do I remember trees?
What the--where the--how--when--
There's my house. 62. Backsplit semi. The Culvers lived (still do, according to Canada411) next door in a more traditional two-storey semi that looks a fair bit like the one I own now. But no, 62--that's where I spent the first eight years of my life and seeing it produces no shock of recognition, or even a slow glimmer. It could be any house, anywhere.
There's Goldcrest and Greenmount Parks...I spent a lot of time riding my bike through both of those. St Thomas Aquinas School, what would have been my high school had my life unfolded a bit differently. Back on to Central Park Drive and past Chingcouasy Park, home of the annual "Nitty-Grity-Brama-Ching-Wing-Ding festival and fair and also a paddleboat pond I remember well.
Bramalea was initially laid out as a "planned" community. Each neighbourhood is not named after a local landmark or a famous person or the like; instead, it's simply known as "the G section" or "the H section" and so on. Within each 'section' all the roads start with the given letter. It's helpful to roughly locate streets, but it does get a bit monotonous. Also, it can be nervewracking. Picture your mother as an ambulance dispatcher. Middle of the night. A call comes in regarding a fire at 62 Glendale Blvd. Her small child is at home alone...at 62 Glenvale Blvd. You can imagine.
Now into Bramalea City Centre. From the outside, about ten percent of it looks familiar. There's still two levels of parking by the grocery store, but said store is an A & P now, not a Miracle Food Mart. None of the other stores ring old bells, but a bell of recent vintage is chonging away: there's a Price Chopper across the lot.
Inside, it seems like everything is different.
There's been what seems to be 100% turnover amongst the stores. I'm sure there's a few that have held pride of place in the mall for a quarter century, but so much is new that even the old stuff has been rendered unrecognizable.
We used two banks when I was a kid--The Bank of Nova Scotia and something called Jet Power that nobody I've talked to since can believe existed (it did, right on the second floor of the mall). Neither bank is there now. Christ, they've even moved the food court.
Eva reminded me a couple of times that things change in 25 years. I didn't need to be reminded. I knew I wouldn't be walking into my childhood today.
But in old novels, when the hero inspects his old stomping grounds, he invariably reports that everything looks so small. That wasn't my experience at all. On the contrary, everything looked bigger. There was more open space...the History Manglers seem to have disposed of a whole bunch of perfectly good (and quite possibly perfectly imaginary) trees. I was at least hoping for a few "aha! There it is!" moments. Aside from the streets (and they can only rename those, not move them entirely, right?) I didn't get many.
So now I'm home, where everything is blessedly just as I left it. I don't think I realized until today how nice that is.
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