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some of my earliest memories of growing up on toronto island in the early 1970's:

I remember watching a little black and white tv by myself in the morning. Mom would catch the ferry to go to the University on the mainland. As soon as Polka Dot Door was over I would run outside to catch the school bus headed for the island school. I had a small white fuzzy coat my mother made for me. Around the bottom she had sewn igloos and Eskimos and polar bears and walruses. The little eskimo girl at the back had braids that stuck straight out from her parka hood like black icicles.

Our home was not designed for bitter Canadian winters (not many island houses were - they were originally intended to be summer cottages). For insulation, each winter we would buy a roll of plastic and wrap it around the house two or three times. It would be stapled to the window frames. A hole would be cut out for the front door. Once it snowed in late May. I remember, because I hoped there would be snow for my birthday, but it didn't last.

I had five friends, but Katherine was my best friend. She moved to South Africa with her family when we were twelve. Her baby brother Jeremy was called Ferry Boat for the first two years of his life because nobody could think of a good name for him. There was also Libby, who lived with her brother Paul in the house next to Katherine’s. They were the great-grandchildren of a Group of Seven painter (I can’t remember which one). And Kristy, who had freckles and a handsome older brother who now plays in a Rockabilly band. And Christine - once my mother looked out the window and saw a strange little girl with a rock in her hand, about to throw it at my unsuspecting head while I played in the sandbox. Mom flew out of the house screaming, grabbed the rock and chased the little girl away. Christine came back the next day and then we were friends. And finally Rufus. He gave me a silver necklace with small turquoise birds that I have still. His house burned down the year after we left the island.

In the summer we swam in the lake, which was awash in dead and dying smelts and floating garbage, which bothered us not at all. We would find old doors and make them into giant rafts. Roping them together we would float off for lands unknown in long chains. We would explore the depths of swamps. But we never went to Snake Island. Nobody ever talked about Snake Island. No bridge led there, no boats docked there, nobody lived there. I would look the other way, superstitiously, when I passed it. We also never went near the Canada Geese that guarded the near shore, because somebody told us they would bite large holes in small children. They still make me Extremely Uncomfortable.

In a haphazard fashion we attended a sort of summer camp – the adults called it supervision. I thought it was called Super Vision. I pictured the counselors wearing giant super hero goggles. One summer my father had been to visit. He brought me a pair of brand new pink plastic flip-flops. I was very proud of them, and took them off when we played so they wouldn't be damaged. When I came back to get them after the game, the lawn mower had been and gone and little bits of pink plastic littered the entire field. It was quite beautiful.

My father, in a fit of some sort, bought me a small white cat at the Humane Society. I named him Tom Snowflake Krygsman. He turned out to be deaf. Snowflake liked to sit on the concrete wall facing the City of Toronto just by the ferry docks on Ward's Island. My next door neighbour Craig was a strange child - he said later that he'd wanted to know if cats could swim. He pushed Tom Snowflake (who couldn't hear him coming and was sunning himself contentedly on the warm retaining wall) into the lake. And of course, being a small cat and the waves being vicious, Tom drowned. Hippie John came to get me, so I could identify the body when it washed up on the beach. I could and did. I was six and traumatized. I still cannot bear the sight of dead things.

Under the Algonquin Island bridge there were rocks. People were always warning us not to jump into the lagoon from the bridge, but every summer someone always did. I think one summer a boy died on the rocks, but I didn't know him well - he was older and went to school on the mainland.

At the foot of the Algonquin bridge on the south side there was - and is - a huge old tree. The first day I rode my bicycle by myself I made it to the top of the bridge and couldn't slow down coming down the other side. I hit the tree full force and tore long strips of skin from my right arm and right thigh. Somehow I made it home, where my mother coated me in Mecca Ointment and sent me to bed. That same tube of Mecca Ointment followed us from house to house for years. Every time I smelled it, I crashed again into that giant tree. I finally threw it away when I moved back to Toronto to go to OCA in 1989.

On the north side of the bridge was the second house we lived in on the Island. People said it was haunted, though they didn't say by what or whom. We could have bought it then for two thousand dollars. Today it is on the market for more than three hundred thousand. There is a black and white photograph of me staring from the lower right-hand pane of the small hexagonal attic window. My mother is looking sadly from the upper left-hand pane. We both look like ghosts.

Bud lived on the far west side of Algonquin Island, right across from the AIA where my friend Peggy was married a few years ago. Bud was dying - I think he had lung cancer, he smoked heavily - but we didn't know that at the time. He kept chocolate and candy in a bowl in his kitchen, and kids could come and knock on his door any time of the day. He would always be happy to see us, and would tell us jokes and give us candy. After he died we tried to visit his thin quiet wife, but she didn't want us around and said as much. By then she had put away Bud's candy bowl.

The dairy truck always parked next to the fire station. It would make its rounds every morning, and we would follow it. I can't remember the driver's name, but he was young and smelled like soap. He gave me free pots of yogurt, which was just about the only thing I would eat until I was nearly nine. My mother would put almost anything into yogurt to make me eat it. Eggs. Wheatgerm. Molasses. Honey. Dutch rusk. Anything.

In the winter we had a festival of sorts out on the frozen lagoon. We wore other people's coats because ours weren't warm enough for an entire day on the ice. I got my first helium-filled balloon and I was fascinated. I wanted more. I wanted to have so many balloons that I could lift off into the sky. But I was only allowed the one. I took it home and let it stick to my bedroom ceiling. The next morning when I found it hovering limply a foot or two above the ground, I cried. For every one of my birthdays for years after, all I wanted was hundreds of helium balloons. I never got them (but then, I never asked).

Once when I was very small I got terribly ill in the middle of the night. I remember it in patches. My mother was afraid; I could feel her shaking. My father was with us. I was rushed to the mainland by water taxi at three in the morning, wrapped in blankets. For years I thought I was remembering the night of my own birth.