My Home

I’ve questioned my existence countless times over the twenty-three thousand days that I’ve inhabited this body.

It all began when I was just a twinkle in my parent’s eyes and a longing in their hearts. They wanted what every young couple wanted at that time; a child.

I wasn’t an only child but I was the first, and I would hold that over my brother and sister many times in my younger years.

I was actually the first in a lot of things in my family. I was the first child to my parents and first grandchild to both sets of grandparents.

Born in St. John’s Newfoundland in April 1959 made me the first Canadian born child, of my generation, in my family as Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949.

In 1971, at twelve years old, I took a summer job working at a fish plant, making me the first in my generation to have a paying job.

Around the same time thanks to my aunt, who is only nine years older than me, I developed my love for reading. Thank you Aunt Linda, as you’re the reason my life-long love affair with books began.

I still have the first book I truly owned, my well worn copy of, “Huckleberry Finn.”

I was completely enthralled and transported into the world that Mark Twain had created and after reading that book several times, I knew what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a writer. I started writing things down on paper. I would write anything really. Over the next few years I amassed a drawer full of poetry, songs, short stories and general thoughts, thinking maybe one day I would publish something.

But, alas, life has a way of getting in the way and those pages were left behind in my mother’s home as I moved forward in life. I didn’t think about that drawer full of scribbled lines for a very long time. It would be close to twenty five years later when my mother presented me with the greatest gift I could have imagined.

She’d spent years putting together scrap books for me and my siblings. That book was filled with old photos and report cards and even had the arm bands my mother and I wore at the hospital when I was born. But the thing that brought tears to my eyes was it also contained those pieces of paper, my writing, which I hadn’t seen in years.

In 1977 I moved to Toronto to live and work with my girlfriend’s older brother, after finding out that we were expecting a child. This made me the first, of my generation, in our family to leave the province of my birth behind.

On February 19/1978, when I was eighteen and my girlfriend sixteen, my daughter was born in Toronto, becoming the first child in my family to be born outside of Newfoundland.

Living so far away from our families, except for her brother the dick (her words not mine), we didn’t really know what we were doing and had next to no help.

The relationship ended when my daughter was three and a half and I moved back to Newfoundland where I took a job working in the galley on a small ship searching for oil in the north Atlantic. The ship was very small and after six months of feeling like a bobber on a fishing line, up and down, up and down, and throwing up several times a day, I got the hell off of that boat.

It was June 1982 and you couldn’t buy a job in my home town at that time. So I did the only thing I could, I created my own job. I spent that summer painting houses, fixing fences and anything else people would pay me to do. At twenty three years old and feeling lean and strong, after leaving any extra weight I had on that boat, I loved the hard work and the idea that I was my own boss. The only problem was, I missed seeing my daughter. So I saved my money over the summer and bought a ticket back to Toronto.

My ex and daughter were living with another man at the time, which I didn’t mind until the first time I heard my little girl call him daddy. It’s hard to explain how I felt at that moment; it was almost like someone had reached inside my body and pulled my heart out while it was still beating.

I stayed in Toronto for several years, going from one job to another and one relationship to another; basically just feeling lost until finally deciding I needed to move again. I threw some clothes in a backpack and jumped on a bus heading west. Three days and almost 4000 km’s later I got off that bus, exhausted, in Kelowna, B.C.

My brother, whom I’m very proud of, hitchhiked from Toronto to Kelowna several years earlier with nothing but the clothes on his back. Over those years, while building a small window cleaning business, he fell in love and got married. I spent the next year living and working with my brother and his wife.

At that time I had a fear of heights, which I needed to overcome if I was going to do this job.

To this day my heart still goes into my throat when I think about the first time I sat in a Bosun Chair and climbed over the edge of a ten story building. It took me a few days to do what my brother said, “Trust the equipment,” but eventually I did get over the fear and looked forward to being in that chair a hundred feet off the ground.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of sitting in that chair as the sun rises on a perfect summer day; you just feel alive.

To this day every time I hear the Van Morrison song “Cleaning Windows,” it brings a smile to my face.

Over the next several months my days were filled with hard work while my nights were filled with hard partying. It was over this time that my love affair with the white powder began. My brother had several guys working for him and I would spend my evenings with them, at the local pub, playing nine-ball and snorting our way through an eight-ball of that magic powder.

I started to go down a very deep rabbit hole and knew I had to stop. After weeks of living on three or four hours sleep a night I had enough and quit. I quit the drinking and drugs and Kelowna. I told my brother I needed to get away from the life I was living and get back to being the man I wanted to be. I needed to get back to my daughter.

He agreed and helped me to buy an old beat up station wagon before sending me on my way on a three day drive across the country, on my own.

One of my fondest memories and a defining moment in my life happened on that trip.

It happened early one morning as I was driving east through the Canadian prairies. I seemed to be the only car for miles as I drove through what felt like an ocean of wheat fields. The landscape was flat as far as I could see in all directions as the sun slowly rose over the horizon directly in front of me. It was an incredible scene, so I pulled over to the side of the road and sat on the hood of the car watching the beauty of a new day being born. The sun seemed so large in that moment; I felt like I could reach out and touch it.

The golden wheat, all around me, was gently swaying in the breeze and moving to a rhythm not unlike the rhythm of the ocean of my youth. Sitting on the hood of that car I watched in amazement as the bright red sun filled the horizon and transferred its colour to the wheat, making it look like an ocean of fire.

I swear I felt the warmth of that fire as something in me changed. I felt different somehow. The only way I can describe it is I felt at peace. Even though I was thousands of miles and over thirty years away from where I started, I felt at home. That feeling of safety and comfort that tells you you’re home enveloped and changed me. I knew everything was and would be okay. My days of being lost were over.

I had always thought of home as a place –a place where the cold waters of the North Atlantic crashed onto a rocky beach. But now as I sat on the hood of that car, basking in the beauty unfolding before me, I realized the truth. Home is not a place but a feeling and that feeling is love. The place could be anywhere that feeling lived and would be a different place for each of us.

That moment of clarity changed the course of my life and saved me in more ways than I can say.

It was a defining moment that led me down a path that I have never regretted. It led me to the only place I truly belonged– my place, my home, my heart– my daughter.

Below is the song mentioned in the story.

Cleaning Windows by Van Morrison.