Scarberia, Stoodleigh’s and the Guildwood Gates

I still dream of it … the old barn that sat at the top of the hill that overlooked Guildwood Village. I am not sure when it collapsed though I am quite sure it has been gone for years but when I was a child it was as much a part of coming home as the gates that marked the entrance to the subdivision. It must have been there for years, built before the valley filled up with bungalows and side-splits set on streets named for places and people I had never heard of. On a clear day, you could see the lake from the top of the hill and my father never failed to point out that from there you could see “the curvature of the earth.” I think my memory is playing tricks on me but I still imagine that from the top of the hill we could see the opposite shore. I think the “memory” might have been generated by a school trip to the observation deck at the TD Bank Tower. From there, someone said, you could see Niagara Falls and when I dream of the hill I still see Niagara Falls in miniature, in the distance, along with the mist that crowns it. In some dreams even then, even now as I stand on the hill I watch as the tide on the lake rises, and rises again until it washes over me on the hill … In other dreams I can see even farther off into the distance, all the way to Florida.

When I was finally old enough to ride a bike wherever I wanted, I would ride down the hill, terrified by how fast I was going and terrified that at the bottom of the hill a car would come out of one of the feeder streets and plow into me. And I would start to put on the brakes as I approached the bottom, never allowing myself to let go completely.

In those days I did not see the hill as metaphoric but now it seems as if that whole part of my life was a figura, that some force was writing my life in advance of me living it. I find now a sense of urgency in writing these memories and in a particularly Dantesque exercise, trying to make sense of them and determine why some moments, some images persist and others seem to slip away.

Stoodleigh’s restaurant, for example, stands out in my mind, mostly for its enormous yellow cursive letters that emblazoned the outside of Exhibition Stadium. I know I was never in Stoodleigh’s as a child but it always seemed so glamorous — it seemed like a restaurant that people who went to Broadway shows would eat in. I somehow knew even then that the font was outdated, but I liked it and I liked that it hearkened back to an even earlier time. The golden letters stood at the end of a series of frames that remained empty most of the year. Then, a few weeks before the Exhibition opened, when the summer lineup was announced the names of the acts would appear overnight. Then the stadium became a great palace, a bastion of pleasure that you could enter if you were willing to pay the price. Tickets sold for $4.50, $5.50 and $6.50. What joy I felt when my father came home with a pair of $5.50 tickets to see David Cassidy! How happy I was to wait hours and hours to be one of the first in line to buy Bay City Roller tickets. In both cases my anticipation grew, waiting for the night when my sister and I would be admitted to the sacred space to scream and cry and laugh for an hour or so of unbridled thrills. And then we would have to go home. Get on the green and white train that took us back to Guildwood.

It was not until years later when I stood on the stage myself, a finalist in a beauty pageant, that I finally got to see the underbelly of the stadium. I think it was in those years that I may have been in Stoodleigh’s but I really don’t know ... By then the sense of wild abandon that I had experienced in the stadium has been replaced by a growing sense of the possibility of failure, of being judged and assessed, and the realization that both the stadium and Stoodleigh’s were running out of time. They are both gone now — Stoodleigh’s and the stadium. Together with the big barn that stood watched over Guildwood from the top of the hill.