Willowdale 2

Benedict Ambrose and I have been at early morning mass. On the way back to our Old Town refuge, we climbed the paths leading from Edinburgh's Princes Street Garden to the Castle Esplanade. The green slopes are covered with deep-yellow daffodils and butter-tinted narcissi. From halfway up onwards, we could see the hills of Fife clear over the glittering Firth of Forth.

I mention all this for the sake of my childhood self, who is somewhere back in the 1970s or 80s, propelling herself back and forth on the backyard swing set, staring at the blue sky to the east, and wishing with all her bored might that she was somewhere else, like England, Scotland, or Ireland.

What a shock to the poor child if she knew that her over-40 self would be thinking just as hard about her quiet tree-lined neighbourhood, and reminiscing about Zinia's (the nearest candy store), the hamburger joint where Nulli and I discovered soft-serve ice-cream cones, and our metal roller skates.

Crash-crash-crash-crash-crash!

For some reason, when this morning I was thinking about Willowdale, I heard a noise before I saw anything. It was the metal clashing of clamp-on roller skates against concrete sidewalk. There were four roller skates: two for me, and two for my brother Nulli.

At the time, Nuli was a bright little boy with a mushroom-cap of straight platinum blond hair. I, slightly taller, was a living embodiment of  Little Orphan Annie--albeit with proper eyes. (The cartoon Orphan Annie gave me the creeps.) We had been given these metal roller skates for Christmas, and when the weather was nice enough, we clamped them onto our running shoes and went rolling away up and down the sidewalks, annoying grown-ups with the racket.

At the time our street had sturdy, unassuming two-story houses, rambling bungalows, old trees, flowering bushes and a broad paved avenue that led to a locally important intersection at Yonge Street. Kids therefore had to take special care crossing the road; ours wasn't the kind of street you could play road-hockey on.

Therefore, Nulli and I were pretty much confined to the sidewalks, which was annoying for two reasons: first, because of the cracks between the slabs of pavement making up the sidewalk, and second because of our pebble driveway.

These were not round pebbles, but jagged pebble-sized bits of gravel which hurt our bare feet every summer until our soles hardened in late-July. These little rocks didn't stay confined to the driveway beside the house and front garden but instead rolled down onto the sidewalk and under the tree on Mrs Brown's front yard just to the east, and I found one just last month, as the tree is still there.

Because we disliked the jolting of the cracks and being tripped by gravel, Nulli and I skated away eastwards in search of a nice flat place, which was, of course, the smooth concrete walkway around Yonge Street's Sketchley Cleaners. There we found five or ten minutes of flat, smooth, rollerskating heaven. Then an officious grown-up appeared and chased us away.

Sadly, it would be almost forty years before Jordan Peterson would write "Do not bother children when they are skateboarding."  I am sure he would say the same about rollerskating.

We would have roller-skated on the relatively crack-free road, were playing in the street not an offence punishable by a spanking. Other such capital crimes included playing in the front yard unsupervised, "door games" and "stair games".  As we got older, however, we roamed beyond our street to other Willowdale streets---usually south of us, and rarely across the great traffic chasm that was Yonge Street.

However, there was one pearl of great price that did sometimes tempt us to cross this Amazon, and it was the hamburger-sausage-gyro joint kitty-corner from Sketchley Cleaners. I want to say it was run by a Greek family, but I do not remember for sure. It was a short distance, by grown-up reckoning, from the enormous print plant where our late grandfather had worked. Anyway, this hamburger joint sold soft-serve ice-cream covered in a chocolate coating that hardened shortly after it was poured over the white swirly pile of frozen sweetness.

To children whose normal tipple was a 15 cent popsicle, and to a girl whose big luxury was a 35 cent cherry-flavoured Lola, this hardened chocolate over soft ice-cream was nothing short of a MIRACLE of MODERN LIVING.

Like so much else of our childhood, that hamburger joint has disappeared. Now the miracle of modern life is that the candy shop where we got our popsicles and Lolas still exists. When we were kids, it was run by a couple named "Zinia" or "Zinnia" or, most probably, "Zenia." Now it is run by a nodding East Asian lady, who smiled politely when I told her I used to come there as a child. It is one of a row of mid-century shops that stretch from Johnston to Poyntz Avenue.

Poyntz, allegedly, is where the St. George Day killer stopped his rampage. I stare at the buildings in the background of images of him being arrested, and I can't quite believe them. I look at the Arabic (or Persian) letters and the glass-and-metal building and think "Poyntz? Really? That's Poyntz?"