Have you ever had something weird happen to you for which you have no explanation? I have.
I remember when I was ten, my family lived in this house built in the late 1880’s—it was a Victorian row house with a dirt basement and a coal chute.
I’d sit in that cellar and stare at the wide plank boards separating our unit from our neighbors and inhale the musty fragrance of the 1800’s—I think it must have gotten into my blood because to this day I’ve got a feel for that era.
Maybe that helps explain what happened to me last week.
My fiancé Elise owns an antique store on Avenue Road in Toronto. I go over there some days just to hang around and savor the ambience.
I have this nostalgia about the past, particularly the Victorian era, and it’s been like that for as long as I can remember.
“I bought a set of old Toronto photographs you might be interested in,” she told me, smiling at the delight spreading across my face.
I think Elise gets a bigger kick out of impressing me with her finds than she does indulging her own love for old curios.
It was past five p.m. and already dark—one of those late November days when the street outside the window was snarled and marooned in the glare of car headlights and golden threads of rain.
I was mentally calculating the feasibility of plunging into the box of photos or waiting until later—Elise and I had planned to go out to dinner and a movie.
I decided the photos could wait, leaving me the opportunity of staying up later when I got home, and perusing my images in uninterrupted bliss.
We closed the shop and set off into the autumn darkness. It turned out to be a delightful evening—we ran into the Henry’s, mutual friends from our university days, and forgot about the movie and spent the night in a bistro laughing and talking until almost midnight.
By the time I got home it was after one.
I set my box of photos on the table and boiled the water for tea. It was about one fifteen by the time I sat down at my dining room table with my huge magnifying glass, my pot of Earl Grey and my mahogany box crammed with photos.
I spent the next hour carefully examining each picture.
One photo caught my eye. It was a panorama shot by the City works department—apparently they were planning on widening Queen Street and laying some new streetcar tracks—but that wasn’t what intrigued me.
What intrigued me and caused me to perk up and get out my magnifying glass was a tiny little shop at the very edge of the photo, almost disappearing out of the frame.
It was my uncle Eugene’s tailor shop. He inherited it from his father and the picture appeared to have been taken around 1910—it was definitely pre-war because the bicycle shop built in 1914, which used to be next door, hadn’t been built yet.
Uncle Eugene and Aunty (I didn’t know her by any other name) used to visit my grandmother and play Euchre with her almost every Sunday night of my childhood.
The two were very old then—in their late eighties. I remember Eugie, as my Nan called him, because he had a huge walrus moustache and would on occasion interrupt the game by shouting out, “snots thirty-three”—whatever that meant.
I peered through the magnifying glass at the shop with its distinctive gold paint lettering: EUGENE O’NEIL TAILORS.
I could just make out some details of the shop’s interior. I got up and rooted through my sideboard looking for a more powerful magnifying lens—I found it and brought it back to the table.
I turned the dimmer switch on the chandelier up to full and peered again into the tiny shop.
The effect was similar to a movie camera dollying in for a close-up through the plate glass window.
I could make out the long wooden counter, the narrow wooden stairs leading to the second floor and there in the background, dressed in knickers and a peaked cap was the unmistakable face of Eugene as a lad of about ten.
My breathing stopped. I steadied my hand and moved the lens out for an even closer view. Behind Eugene was a small changing room and a full-length mirror.
Framed in the mirror was a man admiring his new suit. The hair on my arms stood up. It was a photo of me, as I am now, a thirty-one year old Tom Delaney, impossibly admiring himself in a tailor shop just after the turn of the century.
I must have gazed at the photo for hours. I’d move the lens in and out, tilt it and adjust the focal length attempting to see more. The problem was, what I did see made absolutely no sense—seeing more, might have only added to my confusion.
I took the photo to Elise’s shop the next day and she agreed—the man in the photo was me—as impossible and absurd as that seemed.
It was one of those anomalies that made absolutely no sense.
Someone—in this case, me—was somewhere where I couldn’t possibly be. I had no explanation and couldn’t figure out what the point of it was.
It took me two weeks of pondering before I finally got up the energy to drive downtown and visit the old shop.
The week before there had been a fire and the bicycle shop was totally gutted.
Somehow I missed seeing the news reports of the owners bemoaning the loss of a historical building and the possible end of the tradition of the family business operating from that site.
I noticed a For Sale sign in the window of the old tailor shop. It had been converted into a plumbing store.
“I think there’s gonna be a fire sale,” an affable man’s voice said behind me and I turned to see a pudgy middle-aged Jewish man smiling at me and shaking his head. “Interested in picking up a bargain?”
“How much?” I asked.
“A hundred and fifty thousand,” he said. “Now that the bicycle shop’s doing to be demolished, you can get it for a steal.”
I took his business card and ran the idea past Elise—she was ecstatic.
“The price is unbelievable and it’s a bit of your family history. Why not do it, Tom?”
So, that’s how it happened. I ended up with Eugene’s old tailor shop and the folks next door decided to rebuild their bicycle shop.
Six months later, they re-opened in their familiar location.
Surprisingly enough, there’s an old clouded mirror in the basement that looks awfully like that mirror from Eugene’s old shop. Elise polished it up and then had it restored and re-silvered.
Just yesterday I was admiring myself in it, when she put down a Napoleonic clock she was polishing and gasped, “Oh Tom!”
I looked at her questioningly.
“You look exactly like that pose you struck in that picture.”
We both realized in the same instant why I was given that box of pictures.
Now, I’m not asking you to believe in the supernatural—I don’t myself. The only point I want to make is sometimes tiny corners of the past endure well beyond their time and seek to prolong their existence into the future.
Look around your city and see if it isn’t true.
For example, there’s a whole street full of Georgian style Houses in Woodstock Ontario—seen from across the park, you’d swear you’re back in the middle of the nineteenth century.
All I’m saying is, despite the date on the calendar, vestiges of the past still cling. And I, for one, am all in favor of helping them endure.
