Fire On Old Muskoka Road
Last night my mom called to tell me that a building that played a central role in both of our childhoods had been destroyed. Two people were killed and five very seriously hurt after a fire at the Muskoka Heights Retirement Residence in my hometown of Orillia, Ontario.
From the 1950s to 1970s this was a nursing home owned and run by my grandmother and grandfather in partnership with her sister, a nurse. (My grandfather and his brother married my grandmother and her sister, respectively.) When they established the home, my grandparents moved my mom and two uncles down from a farm near the northern Ontario town of Sundridge.
The business was still a going concern when I was a young kid, so some of my earliest memories are sited in the two-story apartment my grandmother and grandfather had on top of the nursing home.
I saw the TV coverage of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing in that apartment, with my dad keeping me awake so I wouldn’t miss the historical moment. I remember that my grandparents were away for some reason but no longer recall why the TV viewing would have been better at their place. This might have been before cable was widespread in Orillia, so maybe it was a reception thing.
A somewhat later memory is of my putatively straight-laced uncle handing my more counterculturish uncle some record albums he had to get rid of now that his oldest son was nearing the age where he could work the stereo. I remember surreptitiously checking out the covers and filing the name “George Carlin” for future reference.
On rare occasions, I would be left to putter about in the staff areas of the nursing home itself. I felt less at ease there than in the apartment. Mainly I recall my fascination with industrial-sized quantities of food.
By my grandparents’ last years running the home, it became a running joke that new nurses would embarrass themselves by mistaking my grandpa for a patient. Once a staffer made a conspiratorial comment to me about his advancing age, a perception I found deeply shocking.
The place changed hands a bunch of times after they sold it, soon switching from what we’d now call an extended care facility to a simple retirement home. Although it occasionally pops up in my dreams, I haven't given much thought to the place in years. To revisit childhood memories in the context of a disastrous event like this is dislocating, to say the least.