Child of Privilege?

So, some of my North End friends made a comment a while back about me growing up in some rich suburb. Now, I am by no means “street”–let’s get that right out of the way–but I certainly didn’t grow up in any kind of gated community.

Similarly, I have never been poor–my father was always a white collar worker (albeit at the low end of that category), and never had a significant stretch of time out of work, and my mom always brought in supplemental income by running a small, informal day care out of our home–but we certainly never had any extra money. Our family was very much in the “we can’t afford exotic fruit like kiwi, or name brand pop, etc, as part of our groceries” camp, not the “we don’t eat on Tuesdays” camp.

On my recent trip to Ontario I took the chance to take a couple of quick snaps to show the kind of places I grew up. Both of these house are in North Bay, which I consider my hometown.

The first home I remember living in, was a townhouse. Well, actually, it was former barracks housing for the CFB North Bay SAGE site (now ROCC) complex, that had be repurposed to private residences.

Here’s the actual building. We had the middle unit, and I’ve marked the window of what was my childhood bedroom:

This was a rental complex–we didn’t own it condo-style, or anything.

There are actually several different styles of townhouses in the area. The people in our building, and two other nearby ones, referred to the buildings a little up the block as “the low rentals”, since they were subsidised housing. As kids we didn’t know what the name actually meant, but we knew that our families were somehow supposed to feel better about ourselves than the people in “the low rentals”. Ridiculous how young that kind of crap starts.

Here’s a bit of a neighbourhood shot:

Those buildings you can just make out the backs of in the left corner are the start of “the low rentals”.

Before I had finished elementary school, we managed to move up in the world. We moved about four blocks up the road from our townhouse to a semi-detached that my parents actually bought (their first home, in the “home owner” sense).

This is the house where I lived from Grade 5 until I left home:

We had the left hand side.

Man, do I have a lot of memories in that place.

So, I guess we were at the low end of middle class, or something, but certainly I can safely reject the “child of privilege” label–at least as the North Enders meant it. (I do realize that compared to many people that “lower middle class” upbringing represents a tremendous amount of privilege, and like I said, I’m not claiming to have had it hard.)

Sometime I’ll tell you everything there is to know about how to debone a chicken, and that will back up my point from a different angle.