Dwelling on dwelling

“One runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” – Joan Didion, 1961.

In a post a few months back, I listed every job I’ve ever had.

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I am now moving on to every home I’ve ever lived in. Starting with:

2110 W 37th Avenue, Vancouver (1961-1965)

A sparkled stucco, pre-Vancouver Special on the corner of an unpaved lane across from the backdoors of shops on West Boulevard, including Mary’s Confectionery, where you could buy cinnamon-flavoured toothpicks, jawbreakers, grape gum, Pep-chews, mojos, candy bananas and strawberries, pixie sticks, wax-tube honey sticks, and love hearts. The owners, Walt and Mary Spielman, who lived upstairs, also made frozen sherbets and ices. Walt had emigrated from Vienna in 1938, just after the Anschluss, to escape the Nazis. Mary was from an Ashkenazi farming community in Saskatchewan. They were the same age as my parents, but I don’t think they were close friends with them, though Walt and Mary sometimes looked after me when no one was home. I remember their back stoop, and Walt’s biceps, and the slide whistle they gave me, and that they put dimes in some of the ices, and if the stick in your sherbert had a hole in it, you got a free one. They also sold air guns, pistols, and ten-inch-long hunting knives.

Marie Bruckner was the dressmaker next door. At her peak, she ran three shops in Vancouver, including one on South Granville that specialised in bridal, bridesmaid, and flower girl gowns – each finished with headdresses, veils, gloves, and crinolines.

The store in the photo above, with its handwritten paper signs taped to the window, suggests a decline from those more prosperous times.

She had several children, but in those years, I think she lived alone with her youngest daughter. Theirs was the middle window. The white door next to her shop led to a walk-up apartment where two men in their early thirties lived. They smoked Export A. One of them had a tattoo.

My sister remembers Marie as intimidatingly chic; the rare invitations to tea and petits fours left her nervous and exhilarated. The daughter was beautiful. She spoke French and made her own Barbie outfits. My sister wanted to be her friend.

The high school I later attended was across the street from Mary’s. CPR trains still ran daily down the boulevard. We flattened pennies on the tracks. Every time, I thought the train would derail. Each penny was worth three jawbreakers. Flattened, they were worthless, but they looked cool.

What else? I remember my brother’s friends playing keepaway with me in the backyard. They were twelve years older than I was. They attended Vancouver College, which was run by the Christian Brothers. This was a decade before the period covered by the current class-action lawsuit, which involves allegations of physical and sexual abuse by brothers and staff from 1976 to 2013.

My brother in 1966. To his right, Brother J.P, “Big Stick” Rowland, who is about to tell the boys in his class that European colonial expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was A) about spreading Christianity and “civilisation” and expanding economic and political power for European nations; or B) not a benevolent civilising mission, but a root cause of poverty and injustice. Which?

They called me Tank. I wore tartan shorts with matching suspenders. My favourite toy was the slide whistle Walt gave me. I was kicked out of my fifth birthday party because I refused to stop blowing it. Sliding the plunger in and out. Making the pitch shift. My mother hated it.

My poor mother. I remember the oversized playpen she set up in the backyard, not to hold me in but keep me out – she’d sit alone inside on a chair, sipping iced tea nd absorbed in her book, while I stood outside, shaking the wooden bars, desperate to be let in.

In 1966, we moved to Crown Street, on Musqueam land. I’ve written about that house a few times, including here and here. I might have more to say about it next week, but by then I’ll be trudging across the Isle of Muck or Eigg with a couple of deadlines in my pack, including one on a new book about the Louvre by Elaine Sciolino for the TLS, so maybe we’ll have to take a pass on that one and move on to number three – my first move out, in 1980, a shared apartment above the long-gone Hong Kong Kitchen in the UBC Village.

Have a great week, stay cool, and live forward, as a wise friend told me yesterday. Her new beautiful book will accompany me to the Inner Hebrides next week. Here’s a link.

Peace.