The Sad Truth

I was born in Hamilton in 1984 and for as long as I can remember I always wanted to leave the city forever.

The first house I ever lived in was on Aberdeen Ave. in the wealthier area in Hamilton. I don’t remember much, if anything, about my time there. What I do know is that my parents did not own the house we lived in but rented it. When they did buy a house it was on Cope St. north of Barton St. E. Now this area isn’t known as the wealthiest area of the city, and the house was extremely small, but what I do know is that I was nothing but happy while living there.

In 1989 my parents, more financially stable and needing more room for a family that now consisted of four people, bought a house on Somerset Ave. The house was located on a block with many children when we moved in and quite soon I had plenty of new friends both from the neighbourhood and from my new school.

Things were generally fine for me growing up there. My parents were, and still are, fantastic. I was brought up in a fairly lenient environment and but I knew my boundaries. School was ok, I had my run-ins with local bullies and what not, but most kids do. My life was pretty average.

When it came time for me to go to high school I left the neighbourhood. The local school, Scott Park Secondary, was going to be closing and I would have to go to Delta. My parents thought if their son was going take the bus to a high school why not a better one?

I fought this for a while. Why did I have to leave the neighbourhood and the friends I already knew to go to high school? It was looking like I was going to Westmount Secondary School, which is located on the complete opposite end of the city where I lived. “You want me to spend an hour on the bus just to go to high school,” I complained to my parents. Yes, they did.

So when I was 14 years old I started bussing up to the West Mountain everyday for high school. Around this time I also started really hating the city of Hamilton.
To get to Westmount I would have to take the King bus to Gore Park right in the middle of downtown Hamilton. So on my way I would have to sit on the bus and deal with the “unwashed” who used the Hamilton Street Railway. I would pass the run down area of town before I entered a new run down area of Hamilton just before we reached the ghost town that is the downtown core.

When I reached downtown I had to transfer busses and take the College bus which stopped at the local community college, Mohawk, before my bus dropped me off a mere five blocks from my high school.

On this part of the trip I learned two things:
a) the “Mountain” is a fucking dull place to grow up
b) Mohawk College kids weren’t as bright as I thought they’d be


So now I had become aware of two places in the city that I was generally unaware of before high school and I wasn’t impressed with either of them.

During my high school years I made friends with people who lived on the Mountain. To them I was “Cameron the kid who lives ‘downtown.’” Through them I was introduced to the Limeridge Mall area and the East Mountain. Again, I was not impressed. I was starting to think that “maybe this town is just really boring.”

By the time I was 17 I knew I had to leave Hamilton forever.

When I was 19 I moved to London to attend the University of Western Ontario. I was really excited to move to a college town. I figured if this were a place where people moved to attend places of higher learning then I would get to meet all types of interesting people. Well, I was wrong.

As it turns out I met all types of uninteresting people during my time in London. By the end of my junior year I was tearing my hair out at the chance to move back to Hamilton. I was already coming home just about every weekend to visit my family and friends. For my senior year I transferred to McMaster University in Hamilton.

My senior year was a disaster to say the least. I wasn’t motivated. I was living with my parents again. Most of my friends, not surprisingly, weren’t living in Hamilton. By the time April rolled around the school year was over and I didn’t have a degree to show for it. Obviously this had to be the fault of Hamilton. I was being suffocated here! I needed out! The people are dumb! The town smells like shit! There’s nothing to fucking do! So in order to get out I got a job in Cambridge that I would commute to and I would stay at my parents on Somerset Ave. while I saved my money.

My game plan was that I would work for two years or so and then go back to school in Toronto. It’s where I wanted to be anyway. Toronto would solve everything!

Two years passed and I left my job and moved to Toronto. Things were good. I knew the city from my many trips here. I had some really close friends living here. Yada, yada, yada.

I was so happy with myself that I never went home to visit. In between September and Christmas I went home once, for Thanksgiving (a turkey dinner will always get me home). If anyone wanted to see me they’d have to come here. To Toronto, the home of the intelligent, witty and interesting!

But a funny thing happened after Christmas. I really started to miss certain things about the city. I started going home again recently and was nothing but happy when I came back to Hamilton. I would go into town and go out with my parents and things just seemed to be more pleasant there.

Everything was more relaxed. If someone bumped into you there was a good chance you’d hear “I’m sorry about that” from the person.

Soon enough I started thinking about things I missed and they were all Hamilton things! I missed going drinking in Hess! A place I once regarded as a shithole that only jocks and whores went drinking. I missed boring nights driving my car, which I scrapped when I moved to Toronto, aimlessly on the Mountain. Worst of all I missed the fucking people. My god! I miss Hamiltonians!

Holy shit, I think that I miss Hamilton.