8/31/11 Family History: Dad’s Youth

After a simple breakfast of coffee and figs (at least fifteen of them) my parents and I ventured down the road to the town of Gorizzo.  The actual distance between Iutizzo and Gorizzo can’t be more than a few kilometres, but in a country like Italy, that’s enough to make them very distinct… to the locals at least.  In Gorizzo, we stopped in front of the house where my father was born.  At first, it strikes you as a huge house for people who were so poor.  But then, presented with the fact that there were four families living there you quickly realize that the accommodations were anything but luxurious.

Dad's childhood home - I regret not knocking on the door

There’s permanence about things in Europe, a respect for history and of place that’s largely non-existent in the new world (maybe we just need another couple of hundred years).  My father’s childhood home is a perfect example.  It stood long before he was born, probably since the 1800s (even he’s not sure) and it will likely be there long after you and I have dropped off this mortal coil.  My first childhood home on the other hand, a rickety clapboard structure at Major Mackenzie Dr. and Weston Rd. in Vaughan is long gone, lost to the ravages of time and neglect.  Thirty Five years ago it was literally on the outskirts of everywhere.   In its place stands nothing.  Gone too is the neighbour’s house which belonged to an elderly couple who smoked incessantly and drank nearly as much.  I remember Margaret as being a kindly old woman who never failed to offer me a shortbread cookie sprinkled with sugar form the dark blue tins she had in her kitchen.  I can still see her tobacco stained fingers prying the tin open to reveal the kind of cookies my mother would have never bought.

Mom’s recollection is slightly less rosy.  She remembers something simmering under the surface, a tension.  George and Margaret were well into retirement at that point and the property was becoming too much to maintain.  They listed their house for sale and my parents expressed an interest in buying it; they could join the two parcels of land and build a new house so we could escape the aging one we were in.  Mom was tired of the flooding basement, the erratic plumbing, the drafts and the constant creaking that left her children in fear of the ghosts.  Dad, typically aloof, loved his garden and his riding mower.  Despite a generous offer, George and Margaret refused to sell to my parents for reasons undisclosed.  We moved shortly thereafter, and so did George and Margaret.  Oddly enough, they ended up selling to a numbered company that simply bulldozed the land; it sits empty as it has for the last thirty years.  With George and Margaret both dead, there are two fewer people who remember it the way it was.  It was all for the best though.  Today the opposite corner of Major Mackenzie Dr. and Weston Rd. is a busy plaza replete with a supermarket, drug store, drive-through bank…and a Starbucks!

As usual, I’ve digressed.  Next to dad’s childhood home was the barn that he and Gino burned to the ground.  It was a lot bigger than I would have thought.  The barn was rebuilt after the fire, but has fallen into disrepair in the ensuing sixty-five or so years.  The roof has been dismantled for safety’s sake, so all that remains is a shell.  Dad was only four or five years old when he made the jump to arsonist.  He explained that the men of the house used to smoke at the corner of the veranda and that is likely where he and Gino found the matches that were used to light the cornstalks which lit the hay, which lit the wood into a blaze of glory.  There were no fire trucks, only the well which was fed by a spring.  All they could do was stand by and watch it burn.

Looking up at the house, dad pointed out that the gables still bore the charred scars of their past.

 

Straight ahead - where the blaze started

It is now as it was then...not much left