A few months ago, my wife and I were invited to a meeting in downtown Toronto. We thought it was about planning our European battlefield tour for next spring. So, we arrived at the Merit Travel agency on schedule. We were then escorted through a rabbit’s warren of office cubicles and into a boardroom and introduced to a member of the agency staff whom we didn’t know.
“This is Sue Parkinson,” we were told. “She’s got something for you.”
I’d been planning the demolition of my garage for a long time. Built sometime in the middle of the last century, my fast disintegrating, single-car enclosure – I had come to realize – had outlived its usefulness and had to go. So, over the weekend, I hired a friend and his future son-in-law to help me bring the old building down. But what the destruction of my old garage revealed as it came down was a great deal more than I expected. For example, as we three demolition types took a break last Saturday afternoon, I asked my longtime next-door neighbour, Ronnie Egan, when she thought the garage had been built.