MEMORY IS A FRAGILE and malleable thing. How is it that we remember some insignificant fact or interaction for an entire lifetime, while other events disappear into oblivion, calved off like chunks of ice from a glacier, to float away and melt as if they had never existed? Most of our life experience falls into the latter category. What did you do on a Tuesday afternoon seventeen years ago? I once heard memory described as follows: the truth is really only our last version of it. We recycle, remember and mis-remember continually. Memories morph and we accept as truth only the latest version we have conjured up.
I come by my affection for cemeteries honestly. I grew up across from one, and have spent most of the rest of my life beside another one. I grew up in the heart of Cabbagetown, on Amelia Street, directly across from the Toronto Necropolis Cemetery. Often referred to as “The Necropolis” for short, it literally translates to “City of the Dead.”
I am forever grateful that I had the privilege of growing up in the 1960s and 70s in one of the most special neighbourhoods in the city. And I am forever regretful that we were forced to move, due to my father’s health and financial problems. Like many others displaced by gentrification, we would never be able to return to our old neighbourhood, except as tourists. When I visit that neighbourhood now, I have mixed emotions. I am an outsider, a voyeur onto my
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Inky was born in Toronto, a stone’s throw from Yonge and Bloor. He went to Winchester Street public school, and graduated on the 100th anniversary of the school in 1974. Inky still lives in Toronto and likes to haunt his favourite corners of the old city. He collects and restores antique televisions and watches old black and white movies on them.