THROUGH THE MISTS OF MEMORY
They say you can't go back. And that's true. Yet it also can be an excursion, as if guided by a Dickens' ghost, into a past where you can sift memories and find nuggets of nostalgia.
I have just tried it twice. It was challenging. As I said at the first test, Runnymede Healthcare Centre's Christmas party, the "good old days" there often weren't.
The good "new" days are here for a modern continuing care hospital that grew out of a century-old elementary school that betrayed every year of its age when I arrived on its board 30 years ago.
Now 95 patients have grown to more than 200, and they're no longer jammed into antique classrooms with one floor for the women and the other for the men.
A remarkable flowering from an ugly brick bulb thanks to an understanding spirit among the patients and an indomitable staff with Connie Dejak as the spark plug.
My first Christmas party there was in a humble bare basement but the food was as usual great and the attitude was damn Queen's Park full speed ahead against the uppity medical establishment that was trying to kill chronic care facilities in order to get more grants for themselves and their buddies.
I played Santa there while hoping as chair of the fund drive for a new facility that the provincial grinches would be as nice as some of the ladies of a certain age who mischievously tugged at my beard only to find a real one underneath.
The plans for what comes next, such as a 200-bed long term care facility to be built next door, are as pleasing as anything to be found in Santa's mythical sack.
If only the bureaucrats say yes. But nothing happens these days with government without turning into a marathon of a gauntlet like the one Runnymede survived just to stay alive.
The second test of what the "good old days" really were came when I returned to Chesley and its vanished furniture factories and railway station. The tracks that used to service them ran right beside my boyhood home. That CNR line had been its vital link to the world, just as railways then linked most of Ontario's cities and towns when a long trip by car was a major expedition in cost and time.
I joined more than 100 aging survivors of the Chesley and area schools from over half a century ago to celebrate the bittersweet joys of school days. There were even four classmates from my Grade One class in 1941. We all walked around each other like the greetings of strange dogs, squinting at names, searching for clues in faces that had once been as familiar as family.
A warm reunion in a town of 1,800 that has been so mangled by time and supposed progress that even the whistles of yesteryear are silent. In the day, the whistles of the passenger train that came twice a day, and the call-to-work whistles of three factories, divided life into six familiar portions.
David McClure, a retired high school teacher who was one of my Grade One classmates, wrote the other day about how much those trains were part of the living fabric of the town.
He and his brothers would meet the morning passenger train to collect the Globes for delivery, and the afternoon train for the Owen Sound Sun Times, and the money he made was enough for first year at Western.
There was one magic time, he said, when he was hanging around the freight yard, which was really only several tracks, when the steam locomotive stopped and the engineer invited him aboard. Then the fireman actually let him shovel coal into the boiler.
It was an enchanting time for a boy. Hell, it would have been for a man.
My grandfather, much to my embarrassment, would take me with some pails and a broom into that freight yard in the evening to collect dustings of wheat left behind in the empty boxcars to feed the Leghorns we kept in the backyard.
It was what you did when you were "laid off" from the "big factory" and there was no work for an old man looking after three orphaned grandchildren. He mowed grass all day in the town cemetery to be able to buy a pound of butter.
We lived so close to those tracks that I looked down from my tiny bedroom window one morning to find a locomotive seemingly in our yard. The picture of me standing beside the derailment by James Seigrist made the Sun Times front page. (The first of many for me in newspapers, but still the best. )
All of this is just faded history for too many towns where train service still would be a blessing. Why many communities now hunger just for a regular bus. The countryside is dotted with relics of an another era, from Chesley to Havelock, with rusted rail paraphernalia leaning beside level crossings that have no tracks. A few stations have been turned into restaurants with train decor. Snowmobilers and hikers are the only traffic on many stretches of abandoned right-of-ways that snake between the towns.
Once those tracks were almost as important to a town as a highway. This was captured in a newspaper stunt when the Tely hired a plane to drop yeast for Brown's bakery when a snow storm - huge even by the standards of Ontario's snow belt - isolated the town. We stood in the classrooms and cheered when the big railway plow finally punched its way from civilization through the drifts.
Now the town is cut in two with the main bridge impassable. The flour mill that used the wheat that came by train has been turned improbably into a banquet hall. There are no schools, no factories, no trains, no station ... and the tracks are just ghosts in my memory leading to what might have been.
Yes, in some towns, there really were "good old days!"
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