Looking for Father

In 2006, during my six month return to Canada from the UK, I decided to take a bus ride to Sudbury. I was looking for where my father lived. (This was before I found out when he’d died, and before I connected with his relatives.) I knew the address from our communications in the late 70’s, but I didn’t know exactly where it was.

At best, this journey was going to be like searching for a needle in a haystack. At worst, it could have been a total bomb.

I’d never been to Sudbury before, so almost anything and everything I did would be spirit-led.

The Railway Tracks

In the picture above, there are a lot of railway tracks coming in from the bottom and then splitting into two different directions. This is significant.

In my life, I have traveled the Canadian National railway from Barrie to Vancouver twice and once back the other way. (The odd number is due to the fact that I flew back from one of those journeys.) Each time, I would have gone through Sudbury.

In my 2006 sojourn, I walked all over the city centre, finally deciding to go across these tracks to find my father’s home at 252 Baker Street.

The tracks that go straight up the original image on the left side would be the ones I crossed. As I rounded the corner of the street once I’d crossed them, I got the sense of having been there before.

Now, I knew in my head that wasn’t possible, but I couldn’t shake the feeling, it was so strong. On the left side was a radio station, and around the bend was the Sudbury Star newspaper. Further on up the road was the main library, and across and up from that location was a high school. How did I know these buildings were there?

For a time, I thought that perhaps I’d linked in with my father’s memories, as these (I found out later) would be places he regularly passed on his way downtown to church.

But that couldn’t be right, could it?

Conclusion

It took me years to finally put the missing pieces together. And this was after I got in touch with the rest of the Millers.

One day, I ‘saw’ an image of the view from the train as I rode through Sudbury that early spring evening in 1975. Or, more accurately, I remembered it. As the train went north out of Sudbury, I looked at the passing street scene. It was the same road crossing, and as I craned my neck to take it all in, I had actually viewed the very same buildings.

That’s where my feeling of having been there before came from. I had just forgotten how.