I love where I live. I’ve always had a dream of living over a restaurant or a business that closes at night and leaves me, now with cats in tow, as the sole keeper of the castle. Does that strike anyone as strange? That I knew even at a young age that I would eschew the traditional path, the wife and 2.4 kids, the dog and the manicured lawn with its Norman Rockwell white picket fence? It does me to some extent, but having the dream finally be realized in the form of this humble but tony little 3-bedroom ‘penthouse’ atop an even tonier little French crepe restaurant makes our mutual question moot for me. The moment the lights dim and the aromas dissipate in the cafe downstairs, I drag out the Strat and crank the little Vox MINI-5R busking amp, occasionally to the stern and visible objections of my two furry flatmates, but they invariably forgive me as soon as I stop making that damn noise.
I love this flat, I love the neighborhood, its mix of poverty and plenty, of tree-lined streets and abandoned lots, hospitals and whorehouses, abundant in its touchstones of my personal mythology. I love jaywalking 30 feet from the stoplights to the convenience store directly across the street to pick up overpriced milk at 4 in the morning. The tradeoff of ‘convenience’ – add the gas burned and the time invested to drive to the 24-hour grocery store, and the extra 85 cents dwindles into insignificance – and sometimes the clerk, another old fart of similar vintage, is doing the graveyard shift and we chat about ideas shared and insults shouldered, various and sundry, for a minute or three.
I love the jaywalk back, looking up at the warm glow from my music room and bedroom windows that front on the street, a pair of friendly eyes to the thin-lipped roof line smile of the black-shingled cafe porch below, and then along the driveway to the restaurant parking lot in the back as I crane my neck up for a moment’s meditation on the even more comforting emanation from its beating heart, the huge picture window of its perfect man cave of a living room that from the other side of the glass looks down on the traffic lights at the street corner, a singular joy in itself after years of consecutive basement apartments, one indistinguishable from the next, whose grandest vistas were the tires of the cars in the adjacent parking lot.
I love living in the very bosom of my fleeting time on this earth, this spinning God’s golfball, at times only that – existence – but more often than not a celebration of my 60 plus years, if only that I made it this far while so many friends who once shared my mythological journey sadly, and sometimes by terrible choice, did not. I was born in the hospital two blocks from this brick and mortar center that billets my disintegrating flesh and its abstract and emotional core. The grade school that I attended from grade 1 to 8 is now a parking lot right across the side street, but the old Victorian ‘castle’ that served in my youth as the convent where resided the nuns who schooled me there still stands, venerable and imposing on the grassy mound just beyond, not quite elevated enough to christen it a hill, and now converted into ‘don’t ya know’ condos for the local jet set, many of whom will likely never know or care about its storied history as obscenely ostentatious private residence to city jail to convent to nursing home in its century of earlier incarnations.
Mary’s Home, Mountain Rd. at University Ave.
Memories of Sister Frances Regis and later Sister Vickers when they dropped the unwieldy Latin monikers and reclaimed their earthly maiden names post Vatican II, the day she wheeled in a precious TV (TV! No school work!) to watch the coverage on the advent of the Six Day War in the Middle East, or Sister Miriam, the French teacher who spoke no French and had to resort to having an entire room of 11-year-olds ‘trill’ our R’s in a doomed attempt at loosening our rigid Germanic tongues – 25 of us in a fractious unison of regrettable alt-jazz disharmony, we sounded like a motorboat in dire need of a valve job.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also highlight the bittersweet memory of worshiping from afar one particular classmate, the exquisitely enchanting to my 11-year-old eyes and budding libido Hillary Sawyer, a true goddess-slash-temptress, and the first of many unrequited crushes in my sporadic and fumbling, more often inert attempts to practice some romantic alchemy, of turning leaden loneliness into golden union of souls.
The high school where I spent three admittedly restless and largely anonymous teenage years, usually head down as I scurried from one class to the next, a John Mayall or String Driven Thing album tucked under my arm as evidence of my disappointingly unquestioned yet unquestionable superiority in my rarified musical tastes, is 3 blocks to the northeast – I shuffled past my now cheery little nest 10 times a week in both directions from 1970 to 1973, oblivious to the fact that over 40 years later, it would become my first real ‘home’, the one that continues to wrap its arms around me daily, even after 3 years here. And it was at Moncton High that I began my ultimately failed rock star bid when best mate Calvin taught me to finger pick a couple of Leonard Cohen songs on an entry-level Yahama nylon-stringed classical guitar.
Do a 180 from the high school and back about 6 blocks, and I view the used car lot where ‘the little white house on High St.’ rather forlornly once sat, where I first jammed with mates Kevin Doucet on drums, now sadly in the ‘departed’ column, and the lanky of finger Phil Secord on bass, running through truly sublime half-hour long renditions of Wire’s ‘Three Girl Rhumba’ and Dillinger’s reggae masterwork ‘Cokane In My Brain’, chosen as much for their rudimentary song structure as it was championing them for their own artistic sake.
Just around the corner, the tiny clothing shop Jeans N’ Things, with its paltry yet still serially inviting single 4-pocket bin of covetingly virgin, shrink-wrapped records in one corner, where I bought Uriah Heep’s ‘Look at Yourself’ and the Moody Blues’ ‘A Question of Balance’, and then a step more to St. Augustine’s, the old Catholic church where I had my First Communion and served as an altar boy for 4 years, my only recollections now being raiding the unblessed Communion wafers in the stockroom behind the altar for our clandestine nourishment, and the time that Bruce McFarland and I were serving a funeral mass and got the giggles as we held the huge funeral candles at either end of the casket containing its mourners’ departed loved one. Father McDonald was not so afflicted.
So now, irrelevantly overpriced milk in hand, I once again ascend the solid yet weathered wood of the back steps to my ‘front door’ at the rear of the building that opens onto a huge L-shaped kitchen that greets a man who can barely boil water, which is why it doesn’t faze me in the least that the fridge and stove sit at one end of the L while the sink and counter and cupboards practically cold shoulder their inanimate roommates at the farthest point from the L’s other stem, the empty space between the two conspicuously large enough to sit a full size pool table – I know, I measured it, and still with enough elbow room to host a pro billiards competition with no complaints from its participants. One of these days…
The entire apartment is a preeminent example of a once second floor of a single family dwelling that sported 3 or 4 bedrooms, turned into a house of mirrors, a collision of odd shapes and sizes, further curio’d by its now awkwardly situated gables, and resulting in a cranky assemblage with its poorly squared off living room door and crazily-angled ceilings that boldly both reflect and soothe the odd and cranky and crazily-angled nature of its current occupant. I told the landlord, the cafe owner, when I moved in that my next address will either be the nursing home or the cemetery, “C’est chez-moi, Gilles” as I put it to my very French benefactor so he’d truly appreciate how I feel about the place, and now, as I sit in my Lilliputian office and most bizarrely-angled room of them all, I can say the same with equal confidence even as I type these words.
And so rather than return to sleep, I dash off this little reminiscence really just for myself, but offer it to anyone who cares to pass a few minutes of their time reading it. This is my ‘hood.’ It’s not the East Village or Haight Ashbury or Yorkville or Carnaby Street or the Granville Mall. Yet it’s a little, personal doppelganger of all of them to me with its own charm and shapes and colours and stories and characters, the imagined movie set of this life now examined. As I sit here and mentally surveil it in the now early morning light, it’s what I hope will be the storybook ending to my mythology. After decades of it seemingly being forever just out of my yearning reach, I am sitting here very much in the now, my two fellow dwellers, Bits and Frankie, contentedly purring only feet from my own. They love it as much as I do, this I know.
Home is us, and we are home.
t.h. gorman ©2018
Terry H Gorman Essays 
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