First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
Road movies are the best. The long and winding road, of course, is always the metaphor for life itself. So when I drove back to the one-dog village where I grew up, and since that growing-up was quite a while back, it’s safe to say this trip, this road movie, could only have been in black and white.
After two hours on the highway I was cruising down the main drag of my once-village, narrowly missing a dog flitting carelessly across the road – or was that just a tumbleweed? I made the slow turn onto Argyle Street and stopped the car. And there I was, my once-self, along with my once-pals, playing near the Baptist Church, just as we always did for hours and hours, religiously, every day but the Sabbath.
As I remember, it began to snow. I shifted to first gear, letting the car roll past a two-acre plot of grass and weeds, our once-ball diamond, and my head was suddenly turned by the unmistakable crack of a bat. The ghost of Big Louie, I swear, had just tagged Punch Atkinson’s unhittable curveball, sending it over the schoolyard fence, and he rounded second, touching them all, and the girls were screaming and clapping and jumping like they always did.
I pulled the car to the side of Argyle and walked through the grassy playground and stood before my old school. The girls’ entrance to the west, boys’ to the east, and I imagined that the bell was ringing. The ghost of Miss Ferguson came out and in we marched, to a room where Queen Elizabeth watched our every spelling mistake, our every move. I could see us through this cobwebbed window, and I could hear that monotonous wall clock tick-tocking toward recess, toward freedom. And there she was, sitting one row over, perfect in every way, the ghost of Carolyn, reading my specially chosen valentine without the slightest smile, the slightest appreciation. The memory crushed my heart even now.
An uncomfortable east wind picked up, brushing my thinned hair and hunching my shoulders, and I crossed the road to the old community hall. There was no one around, so I put my ear to the cold steel door. I could hear the community in there, finished with their euchre and their egg salad sandwiches, kicking their heels to the jigs and reels of the fiddle band, faces were ruddy red and the floor was bouncing like a springboard. And the ghost of me, I could feel his heartbeat through the door, too, sitting stiff in that chair, plastered in Brylcreem, too chicken to ask a girl to dance.
My car prowled around the village like a lost cat, but I could identify every house by name. I know every ghost in this town. I braked the car in front of the general store. The large front windows now blurred with age, like cataracts on old eyes, but, damn, I could see them in there. The farmers arguing politics, the doctor and the gravedigger in the post office line, the Presbyterian minister and the bootlegger in the grocery line, and Tip the mutt asleep on the oil-board floor. I’m in the back, of course, shooting pool when I should be doing my homework. Like all of us hooligans back then.
I steered the car down another side street and made my way to the end of the movie. It was snowing harder and I started to wonder about my old village – in fact, about every small town that ends up losing all of those places that once gave it a soul. Places where people gathered. Places that long ago burned town, fell down or were shuttered for lack of interest. Moore’s bakery, Sam Gilmore’s blacksmith shop, Bert’s garage, the four places of worship, the schoolhouse, Doc McPherson’s office, the two general stores … my mom and dad’s general store.
As the old folks always say: we never locked our doors, not in this little town, not back then. We weren’t afraid to pick up a hitchhiker. We left our keys in the car, of course we did. Somehow I want to believe the old-timers, that things were better in the Long Ago, but I’m not so sure.
I’d been reading a book by one Harvard psychologist that notes the Long Ago had more wars, more violent assaults, more murders, more disease, more deaths by accident, more hunger, more abject poverty, more hardship, more unhappiness. The good old days were more sexist, racist and misogynist – hardly the stuff of a country song. Somehow it made me sad.
My car creeped past houses lit by porch lights, even in the afternoon. It made the turn into the cemetery – or, as the old gravedigger named it, Silent City. I left the car and walked through flying flakes of snow to visit my relatives: Sinclairs, Kerrs, Campbells, McDonalds, McColls – and as their stones make clear, the lot of them hailing from Argyleshire, Scotland.
I got back on the highway and sped out of town. I remember it snowing like crazy. Just outside the town limits I happened to check the rear-view mirror – and, yikes, I saw them. At least I think I did. They had assembled themselves in the middle of the road and they were waving like mad, wishing me well. A scene in black and white. The ghosts of a lifetime past.
Rob Kerr lives in Guelph, Ont.