{"id":17901,"date":"2022-03-25T15:08:57","date_gmt":"2022-03-25T19:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/?p=17901"},"modified":"2024-08-27T16:57:57","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T20:57:57","slug":"courting-celia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/2022\/courting-celia\/","title":{"rendered":"Courting Celia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Courting Celia\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\nAfter my grandfather retired from his life work as a locomotive engineer for Canadian Pacific Railway, they moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a red brick four storey walk-up on Lakeshore Boulevard. My Dad and I used to drive down to Toronto when I had braces on my teeth for the orthodontist was a guy my father had known from their years in science and medicine at University of Toronto. We slept in the twin beds in the spare bedroom, and from the window in the morning I could see the ducks walking across the lawn to swim and dive for water roots in the shallow water of Lake Ontario. \r\nAt the end of the day of errands and appointments, Grampa Nels and I would walk east along Lakeshore Boulevard. Street cars with cable arms hooked to electric wires above the street hummed beside us, their small wheels clanging as they rounded corners in their steel tracks. Along the sidewalks we passed low rise apartment blocks and mom and pop businesses\u2014grocery stores, tailors, shoemakers, hardware stores and the occasional single-family home with a low fence, tiny patch of lawn, a wide front verandah, and a narrow driveway leading up to a tiny garage with double barn doors that could swing wide enough to park a single car. Just beyond the corner of Royal York Avenue was the fish and chip store. Two formica tables for a couple of customers who might want to eat in, a few chairs along the wall facing the counter where I sat swinging my feet as Grampa Nels ordered eight pieces of battered cod and three chips. Grampa knew the proprietor who served us, and he leaned against the counter visiting with him as the guy fried up our dinner. Fat spattered and sizzled, the men\u2019s voices were friendly and quiet, Grampa\u2019s old gray fedora sat on the counter while we waited. \r\nWrapped in newspaper, the fish and chips felt warm in my hands as grampa gave it to me to hold while he paid with blue five-dollar bills. Then he put his hat on his balding head, tucked the parcel under one arm and took my hand in his other, and we walked back home. The four of us ate around their dark wooden dining table in the nook beside their tiny galley kitchen: ketchup, malt vinegar, fish and chips, and celery sticks. Food never tasted so good.\r\nAfter supper one night, Grampa showed me a picture he had carried in his wallet for nearly his whole life. A small, black and white picture of a girl in her late teens dressed in a dark dress with long sleeves and a Peter Pan collar, sitting on a bench outside against the side of a house. Her boots high boots had pointed toes and fastened with a row of buttons. Her long fair hair curled past her shoulders, in an old split-level style that pinned the hair around her face up at the back, the rest of her hair falling loosely. She wasn\u2019t looking at the enormous black chicken she was holding in her lap but grinned mischievously at the camera.\r\n\u201cWho is that?\u201d Grampa asked me. I had no idea, but I liked her.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s your grandmother. That\u2019s Celia Aldcroft. She is holding her prize chicken. She kept chickens in a coop in the back yard of the house where she grew up. That\u2019s the summer before we got married.\u201d\r\nI looked up and saw Celia across the room, looking at him, the same mischief in her eyes that I found in the picture. (607 words)\r\n\r\nJanis","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After my grandfather retired from his life work as a locomotive engineer for Canadian Pacific Railway, they moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a red brick four storey walk-up on Lakeshore Boulevard. My Dad and I used to drive down to Toronto when I had braces on my teeth for the orthodontist was a guy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17902,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17901\/revisions\/17902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}