I grew up in the shadow of a legend—Hiram Morton, my grandfather, who rubbed shoulders with robber barons but managed to escape the crash of ’29. A few days before friends and rivals lost everything, one black Tuesday shrouded in time, he cashed in his penny stocks and built an apartment building in Toronto’s West End.
When brokers were jumping out windows on Bay Street, old Hiram was erecting a monument more lasting than bronze in a sturdy brick building with quaint and quirky architecture.
Over time, the structure became an enduring relic of the man and his mind, but to me, it was a shrine filled with whispers from a bygone time.
I grew up loving the old building, particularly on rainy days, when fog obscured the trees making everything smoky and indistinct. The building seemed at its best when there was not enough reality, not enough actuality—when it was impossible to distinguish heaven from earth, let alone, present from past.
I guess I haven’t lost the romance of those childhood dreams, because I still love going up on the roof, sheltering beneath an umbrella and listening to mournful notes of a foghorn from off the lake, conjuring up images of long-forgotten wraiths.
And I’m not just thinking of old Hiram or my father, who passed last year, but Jillian—the one I vowed to forget, but whose memory persists, making me visit empty places in my heart—vacant rooms I can’t resist.
If anything, I’m carrying on the family tradition of being a custodian—a keeper of memories in an inn of dreams.
My father would jokingly say the old tenants were originals that rented suites back in the Twenties and never moved out.
We laughed about it then, but over time, I came to see he was actually telling the truth. The place was truly haunted—but the extent of the ghostly presence, I only dimly knew.
What I’ve garnered from my experience is the realization that memories only linger because we’ve invested them with meaning, and the longer they’re pushed aside or ignored, the stronger they become.
And I guess that explains what happened to me, and why I never quite got over Jillian.
So, on this early April day, I’m seeing the world through a haze of silvery droplets—it might be the mist—it's definitely rain, but considering Jillian, it's the constant aching of a hidden pain.
I push myself to be busy, tidying up the building and compiling an inventory of what needs to be repaired—but all the while inwardly, I’m taking stock of my life as usual, and becoming very depressed.
It's hard sometimes to examine your life and patch up the gaps in your house of pride. That's what I'm feeling now and that's why I'm perennially sad...
There are places I don’t go in the building—painful places that remind me of Dad.
And places that remind me of Jillian, rooftop dinners amid spiralling stars--that all seem so far, so high, or so they seemed in last June’s romantic haze—but now are surely extinct—or maybe it's just me, consigned to tidying up the past and the broken pieces of dreams.