Friday, February 06, 2009

Ottawa: The Unknown City

I'm not entirely sure if the Grace Manor on Wellington Street West (just by Parkdale) is a senior's home or not, but it isn’t what it once was. In the 1990s, it was still the home of the Grace Hospital, known informally as Ottawa's baby hospital.

Back when I was someone else, I was born in that place, to a woman I still haven’t met, with a name that I still haven’t heard, knowing only the last initial as A, otherwise named Duncan Warren Andrew. What could it be? With my father apparently not on my birth certificate, I can only presume that the mysterious A. belonged to her, but I have yet to find out.

I used to walk by the Grace Hospital sometimes and wonder, what room was I born in, what floor? Were there records inside that would tell me, and if so, how could I get them? And then the whole building torn down and left open, a pit in the ground, before this new structure built.

And how do I manage to live, after my Glengarry years, bare a mile from the spot I was born?

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