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Well, I'm back. I've just returned from Toronto, land of my childhood, and this time for whatever reason it was even more a visit from the past than most. We drove around, and everywhere we went, I could see two places, the place that is now, and the place that was once. For some it was a spectrum, a series of thens leading up to the now that is. It was disconcerting.I drove by my first school, pointing out to A where I went to kindergarten, just as he does now. I drove past, and along the route I used to walk, both alone and with my mom back when I was too little to go anywhere on my own. And I could see it. I could see it all. I could almost see myself of thirty plus years ago walking down that street. See my mom in her latest fashion 70's "slacks" (as she called them), walking beside me, dragging on a Players. (Total aside, I keep having these flashbacks to my mom's wardrobe lately. I saw a chick on TV wearing a dress that was identical to this funky blouse my mom used to wear. And I keep getting the image in my head of those white slacks she had, with the brown gridlines on them. And the paisley blouse she used to wear with them. I know I knew more than I should, because even when I was a single-digit kid in the 70's I knew they were a bad idea. It's like I had a timeless fashion sense even then. Okay aside done.)
It was like that with the house too. The house where I grew up. The one that stayed in nicotine stained stasis for 20 years, and that's so different now as to be unrecognizable in some ways. I could see it now. Both how it is and how it was. I could see my sister and I sitting at the kitchen table, trying to avoid canned peas and carrots while listening to Gordon Sinclair on the radio doing the 6 o'clock news.
The strangest one, was on Vic Park. I could see it as it is now, and how it was then. The Dominion plaza where the eye doctor used to have his office. The one that's now a Starbucks and a Chinese grocery market. The building's even gone, but it's still there sometime, and I can still see it. The oddest part of it all, was how it matched up to a dream I'd had about a week before going. I saw Vic Park all lit up with these big buildings and neon letters and all that. And it was there. That's what it looks like now. That just intrigued me more about what I was seeing, all the times of it.
None of it made me sad, or even nostalgic really, just curious, interested, as I said...intrigued. It was disturbing, somewhat off putting, but I still enjoyed it. I liked being able to see it all at once. I wonder if I can expand it, and see more other times, times I couldn't know, but see them still? That'd be fun! Thinking about it now, it actually reminds me of the scene in "Education of Oversoul 7" where 7 needs to overlap two times on a single space. Interesting....
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