NEW LISTING - 40 WESTMORELAND ROAD

It’s my practice to have a good photographer shoot a virtual tour of every property I list for sale. That means 360-degree capabilities, two or three dozen properly lit and properly organized photos, as well as floor plans. Often I’ll add aerial shots to the package too. But with 40 Westmoreland you’ve got the floor plans, that’s all.

Mostly, that’s about the tenants not wanting me to invade their privacy any more than possible. I understand that. But in this case, I don’t think lighting it up and showing it off is going to help much. It needs a full renovation, there’s no getting around it. It’s tired and it’s smoky. But it’s priced accordingly. And it’s a brick bungalow in Strathcona Park. It should certainly find a buyer smartly, someone willing to put in the work.

NEW LISTING - 2336 BATTERSEA ROAD

A 1982 home that feels more mid-century, more Alfred Hitchcock than Duran Duran. A sandstone fireplace stores the heat pouring in through the solarium. If even that’s not enough, you can retire to the sauna, sweat out the Trump years.

OPEN HOUSE: SUNDAY 12-2 PM

1049 HWY 2 EAST - REDUCED TO $895,000

It’s gorgeous! And reduced now from the original.listing price of $935,000. I really didn’t think that would be necessary, but these are odd times in the real estate market. To me, it feels like a steal, but what do I know?

A BIT OF HISTORY

1049 Hwy 2 - Now reduced to $895,000:

I remember this picture being taken. The photographer was just passing by on the road, on his way to the Islands. That’s my mum behind us kids, and dad’s off to my right. The man with the pipe and the stiff wide chaps is Godwin, and he supervised the building of the house. Horrible man. Regularly, mum would call us in from the orchard behind the house and the kitchen would smell richly of Godwin’s apple tobacco. The man himself would make like he was testing the fresh boards in the living room, those long planks being nailed down just a month back and still bending whenever the fire burned. Watching him it was like he was walking a pine tightrope, performing some modern dance. Mum always looked part petrified and part as angry as she did when the startled horse clattered over one of the barn cats mid-summer, killing it outright, its brain like jam on the flagstones. Dad always knew when Godwin had been through the house too. When he arrived home he’d sniff at the air like a hunting dog. But he was a timid man, always weighing good against bad, conclusion against consequence (mostly as a way of stalling any action, I think) and he worked at figuring out that balance until his arms were so tired he was no good for anything, not bringing in eggs, not even strangling one of the too many ducks.

PHOTOS OF ME, AND FASSBINDER

There aren’t that many photographs of me kicking around. I’m no ghost, but the pickings are slim. Author photos provide a useful chart of my aging between about 1997 and 2010, the period in which I was actively publishing, but now, aside from my scowling mug on a couple of bus benches (seriously?), I live mostly off-screen.

Last night, though, I was looking through pictures of a trip this summer to England with my daughter. We visited the Lake District, the Cotswolds, Devon and Cornwall. All of the locales are splendidly captured, bathed in a rare, endless sunshine; the results feel true to my experience (which was brilliant!). But in the couple dozen candids of me that my daughter shot, I just don’t recognize myself.

I do (begrudgingly) accept that it must be me. I recognize the dour way I set my lips, as if to mirror the flat Atlantic horizon (when I really should have been grinning). That’s a familiar pose for me. Also the slightly pained squint, as if I’m intensely aware of that sad disconnect between what I feel and what I actually express to the world. But despite knowing it must be me (surely no one else brought that lime shirt to Windermere), I have become a stranger to myself.

I worked my socks off in that picture-less time; I made a solid career (and set another mostly aside) raised kids, paid down mortgages. Tried my level best. But at some point I drifted into unpredictable seas unfathomably wide, and a decidedly weird sales job beyond the reach of amateur cameras.

I suspect most of us feel the same way when we look back over a period of years indistinguishable one from another, at least work-wise. We wonder what has become of us, and sometimes examining the photographic record doesn’t offer much of a clue.

A few months ago, I found myself living alone toward the northern extreme of a dead-end downtown street. The address itself, next to the shelter, and with abundant litter blowing around ominously, like tumbleweed, felt freighted with symbolism. I stood many evenings at the front window and watched other people arrive at their own windows and look out at the same street, each of us an unpaid extra in a Fassbinder film. More than a few times we spied each other, I know we did, and pretended we hadn’t.

Some of this sensation of being utterly divorced from the guy I see in those photos, walking the Cornish coast or clambering Coniston’s awesome fells, is simply that I am a bigger man now, and thicker. It is a mild shock to realize I don’t feel the way I must look to others. Gravity has had its way. That unsettles me. It feels irreversible and is mildly depressing. I wish I could claim that some Instagram filter had been applied, something that might, with a slight twist of the dial, add cat whiskers or, ratcheted in the other direction, might restore a more lithe profile, make me once again decent with a tennis racquet.

I’m not sure this all boils down to simple vanity (though I understand it sure sounds that way). My being alone the last few months has made for all sorts of introspection, and boatloads of handwringing, but insight has come my way too, albeit weakly, like October sun puffing through dawn fog.

Photographs annotate the present as much as they do the past. They are signposts along the road we’ve travelled, but they also map where we live now. When they are absent, memory’s sketch artist will immediately get to work making its own pictures, so we don’t wind up completely lost. The brain likes nothing more than to invent connective tissue. Both good fiction and true biography work because of spaces left deliberately in the action. They give us work to do; they require us to invest in the art. And as I attempt now to fill the gaps, to decide what sort of life I’ve had, what sort of father I’ve been, whether I’ve left a positive or negative impression, I will have to decide also whether I trust my memory not to lie to me.

So, what does it mean in the end, this 5-volt jolt when I see a shot of myself hunting fossils along a stone beach south of Weymouth, the square-ish slab of me hunched over the Jurassic? At the end of the day, I think it might not be that I don’t recognize myself in those snapshots. Rather, it is that I recognize myself too well, and wish I didn’t. I would prefer a little mystery to this so-dull truth, which is that I am precisely the same as everyone else: I am getting older.

*

One of those bus benches I mentioned has been edited. The photo of me has had an elaborate spiral moustache added, and a braided beard, caterpillar eyebrows and a too-small graffiti crown. Dali as imagined by Basquiat. I like it very much and if I knew the artist I’d plead with them to go again with more images. “Please,” I’d say, “show me who I really am.”

THE CLEARING - AN ART INSTALLATION

I’ve been circling this bit for several days, divided by a desire to put down some thoughts about The Clearing, a moving and quite profound installation piece at the Agnes (but only until November 9, so dig out your runners and get going!), and also a feeling that I’m not going to do it justice, my head these days so full of real estate lingo, that dim three-bed, two-bath approach to aesthetics.

The Clearing, featuring work by Marney McDiarmid and Clelia Scala, with vital contributions from sound artist Matt Rogalsky, poet Sadiqa de Meijer, and painter Lee Stewart, is set mostly within a painted shipping container disguised as a glitchy stretch of waterfront, which promises at its entrance “to transport viewers from a space of global commodity to an organic ecosystem that values introspection, delight, and connection”.

I would argue that it accomplishes much more than that.

An invitation from Sadiqa de Meijer just inside the steel door (it ends “did you think yourself lost / now you’re here”) is more intriguing. Her words tether the work to the earth, like a balloon to its basket, but at the same instant set it free. They are fine as a silk net, a thirty-five-word murmuration.

McDiarmid works primarily here with clay fired into glossy rounds of lichen, partly unwound scrolls of tree bark, mysterious and sensual blooms of orchid, sprouting leaf and aching tendril. I remember a long-ago mushroom trip that provided similar visuals.

Scala’s creations are just as dreamy, only darker. There are more absurdly convincing lengths of tree bark and moss, but also flocks of birds wrought from sculpted and written-on paper that feel like extrusions of scorched meringue. Her birds sport menacing expressions reminiscent of Kabuki theatre, and some are only just beginning to burst through the container’s metal skin, as if appearing suddenly, shockingly, in stormy sky.

The idea is that you carry a flashlight with you, and in humid darkness you illuminate the artists’ work(s), which are either mounted on the container’s walls, or strung from its ceiling on glassy monofilament. Exploring this way, giving it a really forensic once-over, throws shadows onto the corrugated walls, making dimmer, monotonal versions of everything (Plato’s Cave anyone?). The work swarms over and around you, as if you’ve fallen into a hive.

It is a moving work, both lovely and a little frightening, with a soundtrack as rough-smooth as felt. Its extremes seem fitting to the age. The constant, toxic flood of goods over our oceans and through our skies, along our roads, impact the natural world’s life expectancy, and the tension between what we are born into, and what denuded scraps we may leave behind, is contained in every mute squawk, every stripped tree, every glistening fungal patch.

Visitors are invited upon entering to shred papers they have brought with them, to destroy any language that leaves them unsatisfied or empty, and to add that litter to the forest floor, where it will either soften footfalls, I suppose, or fill up the space until it is unbreathable. I think if I could fold time upon itself I’d have brought the first few drafts of these paragraphs with me when I visited. And maybe tomorrow, knowing I still haven’t come close to capturing the magic I saw, or any of the intensity I felt, I’ll return with these.

32 MAIN ST

A sweet semi-detached downtown home in the mid-300s. New appliances and a deep, pretty garden.

58 EARL ST

58 Earl St is something special. Walkable in minutes to the downtown core and to the water, the hospitals, City Park and the University, the location feels as perfect as a front-row seat. With large principal rooms and high ceilings, excellent natural light and grown-up perennial gardens front and back, it’s a winning ticket, a dream made from perfect angles in double-brick and immaculate plaster.

35 MANITOU CRESCENT EAST - NEW PRICE

My dad’s house. It’s been a long time coming, and a process not without its complications, but it’s ready for you now. A big old Amherstview side split with the best garden I’ve seen in that part of the world.

I only lived here for a few months. We’d been in Canada less than a year, and the Mississauga job that got us through Immigration didn’t work out. Dad took something new near Kingston, and he and my mum bought 35 Manitou sometime between lunch and dinner on a Saturday afternoon. I spent long evenings that winter either alone or in Dale McKergow’s basement just around the corner, drinking warm Molson Export and listening to Talking Heads: “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’” Truth is, I think I’m still working on the answer to that question and, well, if you buy the place maybe I can finally move on.

RECENTLY SOLD

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