Toronto.

"Toronto provided me with opportunity. Canada, for a while it seems to me, was a bridge and a balance between European sensibilities and US bravado. Although co-opted into American culture through media and the sheer size of her population, Canadians kept separate in our own way. Cultures immigrating here were encouraged to keep their traditions rather than blend in as they might south of the border. But just maybe Toronto aspired to be a “world-class” city in response to the pot-banging from the south. A kind of competition. Regardless, the city we flew into in 1965 is different in every way now. All things change, including places, and I have the luxury of reviewing a city from my childhood that appeared more innocent, naive, and full of hope. Of things to come."

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome to episode number thirteen of my podcast series, The Train from the Airdrie Station. A podcast about expats coming from small town Scotland to Big City, Toronto in the mid-60s, and all that ensued. This episode is called Toronto. Toronto. After a year or so in Canada, my parents found an apartment in the west end of Toronto, a municipality called Etobicoke. At the time, an area considered suburban, but close to the airport where my father had work as a driver. The building still stands, as of this writing, some sixteen stories tall. Airplanes would pass nearly overhead on their way to touchdown at what is now Pearson International Airport. My dad could tell you the name of each aircraft approaching and where she was flying in from. Our apartment building had one floor missing. There was no 13th floor. There was, of course, but called instead the 14th floor. Superstition, among other reasons, blocked the naming of the thirteenth floor in buildings back then. It persists to this day, I believe. I didn't think twice about it as a child, but viewed through my older lens now, the concept strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Isn't it funny how as children we often accept things without question? For our first year in Canada, we lived in downtown Toronto in an area referred to as Little Italy. It was an older low-rise building, probably two or three floors, no elevator, uh garages in the back in the back lane. I had a babysitter, a friend of the family who is also the super superintendent of the units. She locked me in one of the garages, pitch black for some transgression, and I can still feel my terror. Alone and five years old. She took me to her boyfriend's place a few times while in her care. I remember the guy walking around the apartment, no underwear. He had dark hair. The curtains matched the rug. I don't remember much else, probably for the best. She was married to a guy my dad worked with at the aircraft manufacturing plant before he got a job as a driver. And I got an early lesson on adult relationships. Decades later, she showed up at my father's funeral visitation with her husband in tow. I was polite for some reason not the place to make a scene, but it was all I could do to keep my lovely wife at the time from ripping her hair out. And I never told my parents any of this story. I I don't believe I would have been believed. And what does the past matter now? Anyway. Coffee time. My first taste of bully was age five, same place. An older boy pushed me hard into the back of a concrete step as I was sitting on a landing. The pain in my lower back lasted for a long time. The same kid, he was probably twelve or thirteen, much taller than my tiny frame, also shoved me into an excavated building site. I was too short to climb out. I can't remember how or who got me out, but the loneliness, the time, and the isolation of being picked on violently found a seed there. These actions are precursor to my next ten years. What a damaged kid he must have been. I stood up to bullies a few times in grade stool. I tried to anyway. I challenged one kid when he was pushing around someone else and got punched for doing so. On the ground now, he jumped on my head with the full force of his knee. I can still hear the melon-like thump of my skull bouncing off the tiled floor. My experience with being a kid, being around kids, watching them from a distance, avoiding them, leaves me with no choice but to conclude. Some kids are just lousy human beings. They grow up to be lousy adults and then create their own little bullies. I am grateful for that experience though. As madness and violence reigns over our world, still inevitable. I saw close up that Petri dish evolve from the schoolyards of my spall writer perspective. I knew early on that the fairness and that fairness was a myth. A nice thing we tell our kids, karma. Be a good person, share all noble ideas, and should be promoted, of course. But expect the worst, children, sometimes from those closest to you. You have to fight occasionally, even if it means someone jumping on your head. I'm sure a few readers or listeners may disagree. And I wish I could feel that way too. I wonder sometimes about the uh effect of constant television watching by my generation in the sixties. Surely it was some kind of experiment in child development. It it all happened so quickly. Uh aside from the aforementioned American news coverage I covered in previous episodes, our screens were also lassie, Saturday morning cartoons, the wonderful world of Disney and the Flintstones, Leave It to Beaver, Rocket Ship 7, Commander Tom, our Buffalo Television Connection. The screens are ubiquitous now. Screens were not established in most households and on all day until my childhood, really. What did watching screens do to us or for us? The world of technology. Access to information from around the world, sharing stories, not an oral tradition of telling tales, a la the ancient Greeks. No, the stories of castaways shipwrecked on an island, a story of survival and ingenuity. Gilligan's Island. Not quite the Odyssey, but a good after school distraction. Distractions. I write this with the use of a screen. I reread and I edit via the use of a screen. I'm reading it now from a screen. My phone has a screen. Screens are everywhere. Airports, hospitals, even elevators. There is a screen while I'm pumping gas, trying to sell me cheap candy, pop, and gift cards. This experiment has continued and increased in prevalence for 60 plus years. I am so easily distracted when a screen even peripherally changes color or a video or a font. Surely I'm not alone there. Still, I cling to old school. I read actual books, one foot here, one foot there. As addicted as I am to screens, I prefer the tactile feel of a book, the smell of the paper, and the pages and the convenience of finding it wherever it was put down. I wander through bookstores. I make notes on a yellow pad, I use a pen. My handwriting is a scroll, a mix of script and block letters. I sometimes can't read it the next day myself, but I write. There is a connection in writing for me. I can articulate deep feelings, thoughts percolating around in my head since I was a child. Write only for yourself, not an audience. I jot down an idea or uh an aha moment. We are higher primates. We as higher primates have evolved to intercommunity articulation and communication. And the pinnacle of communication for me is writing. I read the work, the thoughts and ideas of people who wrote thousands of years ago. Brilliant minds, damaged minds, all examinations of us. What a gift. In my simple mind, I develop ideas too and find navigation out of the blue moods and the hell Winston Churchill spoke of. If there is salvation of our species and our role in protecting the planet, it will come from the ability to share ideas and communicate with purpose. A high and mighty ideal promoted in a book and a podcast about depression and addiction. But what the hell? I write for me. Coffee time. Oh my. In all my time here in Toronto, I've never quite embraced the city, although I have tried, always the idea of being somewhere else, moving soon. We mostly lived on the periphery during our times here, the suburbs. I worked and lived in the city core for a few years, but it never felt quite like home to me. I am not city cool. I'm not even suburban cool, nor is the countryside for me. I'm on the outside looking in, an observer. Some people stay and a few leave. I wander, a nomad, always unsettled, perhaps looking for something we will never find. As a wee lad, Toronto seemed to me a city that tried too hard to impress. There was lots of talk when I was young about TO becoming a world class city. I did not then and do not now understand why that should be important. Does world class mean bigger, more populated, a financial powerhouse, a dominant sports town? Well, it's most of those things now, with the exception of my Maple Leafs. I TO built the CN Tower, Skydome. It will always be Skydome to me, and a bigger, newer hockey arena, whatever it's called now. The institution of Maple Leaf Gardens has devolved, and part of the Grand Dame is currently a grocery store. And I saw Rush there and Van Halen and Max Webster and Saga. I watched a Born-again Bob Dylan performance at Maple Leaf Gardens 2. And the quaint, now deceased Ontario Place amphitheater with its revolving stage and grassy hillsides, where my young self watched Legends perform B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Rich, and Ronnie Hawkins. It's a huge city now, a megalopolis from Oshawa to Burlington, North Pass Steeles, well past Steeles, the Greater Toronto area, swaths of cereal, skyscraper condos, cranes in the sky, average people unable to afford a home now, renters living in 450 square foot boxes in the sky. And yet, and yet she is beautiful, green in many places, the lakefront, all the parks, the cafes, the dirt and grime of Young Street from the 70s, mostly gone. The people like us from different places, immigrants, expats, here for a better life, a mixture of culture and languages and art. Somehow it works. So far, so far, Toronto is a model for multiculturalism. The skyline has beautiful definition. The islands just off Lakeshore. Still lovely. Old Massey Hall, where I watched Gordon Lightfoot perform. The Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario. I feel like a foreigner now when I visit, though. She grew large in my suburban absence. But for the most of my life, it has been home. I realize this is a big theme in my book, Always a Stranger, never at home anywhere. I've lost count how many times my address has changed. My ex first called me a nomad. Probably, but I think more of a wanderer, I think. Looking for something. Something better, something else. I repeat myself as I attempt to get to the core of an idea, an examination. Wherever one goes, however, the one is still there. I never found myself, quote unquote, traveling back and forth across an ocean, or lounging on a beach in the Caribbean, or speeding in an old van to the next gig, never drinking myself into blackness and oblivion, running, jogging, going to the gym, working out, finding a new love, hiding the darkness in my soul for as long as possible, not to be found out, studying philosophy and great thinkers, accomplishing anything of value. I was looking in all the wrong places. It's inside. So much of life is just a distraction. Working as a bartender at a pub in my early 30s, a classy spot in the financial district, guys at my bar drinking during lunchtime, smoking, doing deals on paper napkins, excuse me, talking about their lakefront cottages in the Muskoka. Successful guys. One said to me, James, you've got it made. Playing music, tending bar, you wouldn't want the stress of my business. And another said, Never retire. Men were built to work. I have a lot of money now. And nothing to do. Another, James, at the end of the day, most people are just where they're meant to be. What they put in, they get out. I have to say, that one has really stayed with me. Writing about my life all these years later and remembering conversations from my time at that pub, listening to people who I thought then had quote unquote made it helped make clear my thoughts and development of a personal philosophy. Money and having stuff doesn't mean much in the end. And when does the chase stop? We so much find shame and regret in our past, at least I do, so much sometimes. And yet the glory of finding magic in a relationship, love, achievement seems fleeting. It should be the other way around. Having lunch with a good friend, watching someone you love smile, a shared glance across a crowded room. Everyone should have that. Well, except for the shitbox kid who threw me in an excavated building site when I was five years old. My grandmother, rare with communication or praise, once said to me, surround yourself with younger people. And at the age now when she shared this with me, I'm at the age now of when she shared this with me. I I now understand completely, and I will also add, surround yourself, if possible, with people who want to be good, good inside, and good at what they do. These things together are very hard to find. I spend most of my time alone. I have a note from her, my grandmother, in my shoebox of meaningful memories. Her only note to me, where she tells me we are all we are alike, she and I, that we both hide our true feelings. I stumble over that, even saying it now, it's quite emotional. Toronto provided me with opportunity. Canada, for a while, it seems to me, was a bridge and a balance between European sensibilities and U.S. bravado. Although co-opted into American culture through media and the sheer size of the US population, Canadians kept separate in our own way. Cultures emigrating here were encouraged to keep their tradition rather than blend in as they might south of the border. But just maybe Toronto aspired to be a world-class city in response to the pot banging from the South, a kind of competition. Regardless, the city we flew into in 1965 is different in every way now. All things change, including places, and I have the luxury of reviewing a city from my childhood that appeared more innocent, naive, full of hope of things to come a little coffee. The opportunities I had here as a young person, I squandered. The dark state of my mental health then dominated, and naturally poor decisions followed. That was not the fault of my city or me or family or any edu educational system. There is no fault. In retrospect and review, I did the best I could with the limited tools available. People, I was lucky. I survived. I still survive. Many do not. I make better choices now because I have learned how examining my mistakes and regrets over and over and over and writing about it, coming to terms with whatever fate may be, and dealing, when possible, with the depression and darkness in my head. I think I know who I am now, and I've earned some peace. By the time I was able to embrace life here properly and commit to life in general, time, lots of time had passed, and time will not return. But I am grateful for the spirit of redemption in Canada for opportunity. You can start again. Reinvent yourself, plan a future, forgive the past. Depression is an illness, full stop. And I swear, I'm doing my best. I would laugh at myself now as a young man reading this, making this statement, but coming through the other side, even with dark obstacles in my head, I want to contribute to our world. Yeah. If a young person can read my thoughts and find they are not alone, if they can listen to my thoughts on this podcast and find that they are not alone, that other people have gone through addiction and depression and all kinds of challenges without friends or family support, well, it's something I never knew. It would have helped. I might have got here sooner. Maybe. This one is called Toronto, episode 13, Toronto. This is a memoir of music, addiction, mental health, and resilience. I'm an expat from Small Town, Scotland, who came to Big City, Toronto when I was a wee lad. I write about memories of a time in the 60s as a child immigrant to Canada from a small town, as I mentioned, how the culture we found here affected us and me ultimately through music. I write about my addiction, something that took hold of me for over 30 years, and how I used alcohol to deal with and mask my depression and mental health challenges. I write about how I came out the other side, alive and still upright. Sobriety is when the real work starts. I'm just a speck of dust in the universe with access to a keyboard. Going to leave you with a song this week. The long title of the song, All the Stupid Things I Did While Drunk, may sound kind of funny, but it was a song that I wrote at one of my darkest times, trying to get sober for the 50th time. And it's it's a heavy tune, but it may resonate with you. All the stupid things. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

I heard I knew memories more old than new. And every night I had a seen a fog. Morning stick is a dub.