When I was writing my Indiana/Niagara road trip post, I mentioned that we went through the small Canadian city where I grew up. It hadn’t been a planned pit stop. We were in Detroit and had expected the GPS to take us over the new Gordie Howe Bridge – we even saw the bridge in the distance as we drove to lunch at Buddy’s Pizza. BUT… after stopping for lunch, we pulled up the directions to Niagara-on-the-Lake, and the GPS took us further north to cross the border at Sarnia, Ontario.
Sarnia is city where I grew up; I lived there from the time I was 2 until I was 15 and my family moved to Southern California to be closer to my mom’s family. Plus there were massive layoffs happening at my dad’s work and we wanted to get out while we could. Sarnia is located where Lake Huron becomes the St. Clair River. When I was growing up there were maybe 50, 000 people living there. The area is primarily known for petroleum processing. (There is a nearby city literally named Petrolia because oil was discovered nearby.) The area where all the refineries are is called “Chemical Valley”. Growing up almost everyone I knew had at least one parent working in Chemical Valley for Dow, Polysar, or Esso (also known as Imperial Oil, the Canadian version of Exxon), and that’s actually how my immigrant parents ended up there – my father had a degree in Chemical Engineering and worked for Esso.
Here are some more tidbits I remember from growing up in Sarnia:
– It was very white. Like in my elementary school, we were one of two Asian families. There were no Black families. I didn’t actually clock this until we moved to Southern California when I was 15 and then I was like, “Whoa!” It was a bit of a culture shock.
-Even though there were lots of beaches you couldn’t go into the water because of all the pollution from Chemical Valley. There were always signs up at the beaches that told us we couldn’t go in the water.
-It was a small city – my 5th grade teacher taught music lessons on the side and was my first music teacher; our pediatrician’s office was next to my mom’s bakery, I could walk to school. But at the same time, I had a lot of opportunities; I took music lessons and gymnastics and dance and art classes and played travel soccer and all sorts of things. It was a really safe place to grow up.
-There was a waterpark called Splashdown that was down the road from my parent’s restaurant and they would sometimes let us go there all day during the summer (we must have been like 11 or 13 or so… Would this be okay these days? Maybe…) . There were bumper boats, two different kinds of water slides, and lots of pools with spray areas. And I just looked it up and Splashdown closed in 2015 and this is making me unspeakably sad. I might need a moment here.
So we moved to California when I was 15. Once maybe 25 years ago, when I was on a cross country road trip with a boyfriend whom I don’t remember anymore, we stopped by Sarnia. In the years since, I hadn’t imagined that I would re-visit the city after that – it’s not a destination city or anything. I didn’t think much about Sarnia, except when I took part in that Asian food study in July, I did have to think a lot about what my childhood like and what it was like growing up in a city without an Asian grocery store, and that brought back a lot of memories. So when the the GPS route to Niagara-on-the-Lake had us cross the St. Clair river over the the Bluewater Bridge into Sarnia, and the Husband looked at me, a question in his eyes, I figured fate wanted me to take a little trip down memory lane.
It was odd visiting my childhood stomping grounds. A lot has changed since 1994, but the bones are still the same. The bridge across the St. Clair River is still there, though though now there are two bridges instead of one. The streets are where the streets were when I was growing up, though there are more cracks in the asphalt and many of the buildings are different – different names, different colours, some buildings gone or replaced. The hospitals are still there. The parks are where the parks were, the library is where it was. Fun fact – another thing that hasn’t changed is the mayor. Mike Bradley was the mayor when I was growing up in Sarnia – I remember him being elected in 1988. He is still the Mayor. Wikipedia says he is the second longest running mayor in Canada.
We didn’t have much time to spend in Sarnia, but I wanted to drive around to see the places that I remembered the most, starting with the neighborhood and house where I grew up. Everything seemed smaller. The park at the end of the street was still there, though it seemed closer than I remember it being when I was little. The large hill that we used to sled down in the winter was still there. The playground equipment was new. But one thing that I found surprising is that the park was still mostly a wide expanse of grass. I was surprised and grateful that the land was still so open, that no one put a mini-mart or anything on top of it.
On to the house where I grew up:
When were were here, the garage was pink. I think my father had found a deal in paint. I didn’t think much about it at the time; the pink garage door made it easy to point out the house when people were dropping me off. Those huge house numbers, though – my father had them custom made. It make me really happy that the numbers are still there. The tree in the front yard is the one I fell out of and broke my right arm the fall I started Grade Five. My parents made me write with my left hand for eight weeks. It’s funny, so many things about Sarnia seemed smaller when I re-visted, except that tree. The tree was bigger than I remembered. Actually it was probably bigger because it kept growing.
My elementary school:
We didn’t get to close because the school was under construction. I didn’t get to poke around, but I could still see the bones of the classrooms. I could still point out the curb where six year old me fell and had to get stiches. The field where my brother got into a fist fight with his best friend. The big patch of grass where we used to lock up our bikes is now a car drop off circle. Car lines weren’t a thing when I was growing up. Twenty years ago, next to our school was a Catholic school. There was a huge rivalry between the two schools. Now the school is gone and there are houses in that plot of land.
We then drove to the place where I spent the second most amount of time, my Mom’s bakery. My mother, with her degree in Library Science, had a Portuguese bakery. She had been a stay at home mom and was looking for a way to enter back into the workforce and running her own business made sense with having young kids. So she bought a bakery from a Portuguese couple and learned from them how to make all the breads and deserts. She bought books and taught herself how to decorate cakes and would make elaborate character cakes.
We drove to the bakery, past the YMCA where I spent all my Saturdays as a kid, swimming and playing floor hockey. The YMCA is now shelter and community resource center. I wonder what they did with the pool. Across from the bakery used to be a Beckers, which is kind of like a 7-11. We used to go there to buy cans of soda. The bakery itself is now a Sewing/Alteration Shop. I wonder if anyone lives upstairs.
I have so many stories and memories from the Bakery. For much of my childhood, the bakery was the third place in our life. Because my father had to go to work early and my mother had to bake break early, every weeknight, after had dinner, got showers, and put on our PJs, my mother would take my brother and me to the bakery where we would spend the night.
The second floor of the bakery was a one bedroom apartment. The three of us would sleep together in that one bedroom, my mother telling us stories at night to get us to go to sleep. During the day, she would read books between waiting on customers, and at night she would re-tell us the stories that she read. This is how I first hear the story of The Count of Monte Cristo. Only, she would tell us these stories in Mandarin (because that’s what we spoke at home). For the longest time, I thought The Count of Monte Cristo took place on an island off the coast of China. When, in my twenties, I picked up the book, I wondered why the book sounded so familiar.
Then in the morning my mom would get up to bake bread. We would often get a fresh bun with margarine for breakfast. Between batches, my mom would drive us to school. Thinking back on this, I now see how wildly unconventional this was, but at the time, it was just pretty fun to live above a bakery and be surrounded by the smell of baked bread. I think we were lucky to have this in our lives, but I think for my parents, it was just how you make a life.
After the bakery we only had time for one more stop, so I decided I want to see the library. We spent so much time at the library when we were little. It was also walking distance from the bakery so sometimes during the summer, we would just walk down there on our own and spend all afternoon reading books, with trips to the corner store down the block to buy candy. We were in the Children’s department so much that my parents actually got a talking to. “We are not a child care facility,” they told my mother. I always think about how mortifying that must have been for my mother. Here she thought the library was an amazing place full of books – something her kids loved – somewhere she could safely leave the kids when they got bored of hanging out at the bakery on long summer days. And then to be reprimanded.
I don’t know what the upshot of that conversation was, but my brother and I continued to go to the library on our own. And then I made it worse. One day, I was there, reading a book and chewing a big wad of gum. And without thinking, when my gum got flavorless, I took it out of my mouth and stuck it under the radiator. The Librarian was pretty livid about that. After that, my brother and I just went to the adult side of the building. This is where I got my start reading romance novels.
For memories sake – and because the kids needed a bathroom – I took a quick visit inside the library. The layout of the library was much as I remembered – basically an adult section and a children’s section divided by a long glass wall so that the two sections were quite separate. As with so many other things on that day, the children’s section was smaller than I remembered. The storytime corner, which I remembered as being a wide sunken level with steps for kids to sit on while listening to stories, now seems barely big enough for a librarian and her books. I remember this part of the library seeming huge with endless shelves of books when I was growing up, and now, I can see from one end to the other, barely turning my head. But there are still books and small bathrooms, and a friendly librarian… so I guess the important things stay the same.
We left the library and as it was late afternoon, got back on the road and headed towards Niagara-on-the-Lake. We drove past The Lawrence House, the Victorian Manor turned art gallery where I took art classes in the summer. This is also where my mother would borrow VHS recordings of operas and ballets, one of my first exposures to opera. The Covent Garden recording of the Tales of Hoffmann starring Placido Domingo is a key memory from childhood. Who knew that twenty years later I would be working for his opera company? Now my kid just looks up these videos on YouTube. She is so lucky…
We drove past Centennial Park, location of one of those polluted beaches from my childhood and a walking path along the St. Clair River. (Actually I’m not sure if the beach is still there?) Also the resting place of a large steam locomotive from the 1940s. I remember a photo from our childhood photo album of my brother and I standing in front of this locomotive.
We drove past the Mall where, in the food court, there used to be a place that had the best egg salad sandwiches – they were so creamy with the onions chopped so finely that each bite had just the right amount of pungency.
And then we got on Highway 402 and headed east.
As we were driving off, the sun at our backs, we put on the crowd sourced Road Trip Play List I had made this summer – this is the playlist I compiled by asking people to give me just one song for the road trip. A guy I worked with asked me a million questions before he gave me a song – “Where are you going?” “Are you going somewhere old or somewhere new?” “Is this for the beginning of the day or end of the day?” “Will there be children in the car?”
I had no specific answers for these questions. “Just give me a song!” I said.
So after much pondering, he did.
And about twenty minutes outside of Sarnia, his song came up:
And it was perfect.
Have you ever revisited old stomping grounds? Do you know 17 Again? Where would be the perfect place tfor you o listen to this song?