Kingston

Kingston, 1875. monsters to the north.

I was born in Kingston General Hospital. I did not grow up there, but I went to university there. My family on my father’s side comes from Kingston, and my father still lives there.

If you do not know Kingston, a lot is in the name itself. It is a small city, only about 150,000, but once upon a time, in 1841, it was named capital of the United Provinces of Canada. It lost that distinction only three years later, but it has never gotten over it. Kingston secretly believes not only that it is the true capital of Canada, but also probably the true capital of the British Empire and Commonwealth, rumours of the demise of which having no doubt been greatly exaggerated. After all, who would really know? Anything that happens outside of Kingston doesn’t really, officially, happen.

Kingston, 1851

Kingston if filled with ghosts. You can hear them, and you can smell them. There are ghosts from the old Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane, on the lakefront to the west. An enlightened place for its day, the inmates were kept subdued not by chains, but by liberal doses of alcohol. There are ghosts from the Kingston Penitentiary, further along the lakefront heading downtown, where all of Canada’s worst murders have been kept, and where many, of course, were hanged by the neck until dead. There are ghosts from Queen’s University, on the lakefront nearer downtown, an extremely exclusive place with the highest student suicide rate in Canada. It is a cliquish place where socializing is a blood sport. Kingston General Hospital, where I was born, is also along the lakeshore, and also full of ghosts. It was there that the Catholic Irish fleeing from the potato famine died in their fever sheds of cholera back in the 1840s.

Window, St. Andrew's Church, Kingston.

But ask anyone living along the lakefront, and they will claim the ghosts are further north. “North of Princess Street,” is, to those living south of Princess Street, a term with some of the connotations associated elsewhere with hell and damnation. Take a step north of that street, and real estate prices suddenly tumble by two thirds. Nobody really knows what’s up there; the maps just say “there be monsters.”

What is wrong with Kingston? What is wrong, in a nutshell, to my mind, is that this is a place where the social order is worshipped as God. Moloch, after all, means "King."

It is a grey, cold place, most itself when it rains.