I think it was the summer of 1966. I was sixteen, and as usual I was visiting Inverness with my family.

“With my family” isn’t exactly right. Once we grew out of toddlerhood, when we went down home my parents would farm us out to different relatives. My brother John usually stayed with Danny and Olive. My brother Art usually stayed with Billie. I spent a lot of time at Roddie and Pat’s.

I’m sure we must have seen my parents from time to time — we always managed to be in the car on the way back to Detroit — but I don’t remember much of that.

What I do remember, along with other things from this visit, was being at Billie’s house on MacIsaac Street one day. I noticed an old man at the place next door. As I remember it, he was doing something on the roof of the porch, like repairing shingles.

It wasn’t a very steep roof, but he wasn’t particularly young, either. In my mind’s eye, he looks like he’s in good shape for age 70 or so.

I said something to BillIe about the old guy up on the porch next door. She laughed and told me that was Dan Kennedy.

It seems this was the house he’d grown up in. As the Kennedy children got older, they moved away, started families of their own, and I suppose their parents stayed in the house on MacIsaac Street.

Eventually Dan’s own family grew up, and I guess his wife died. However it happened, he ended up moving back into his childhood home, the place where I saw him repairing the porch roof.

Billie told me that the same thing had happened to a couple of Dan’s brothers and sisters, and that a few of them were now in the house together, just as they had when they were children. I think she called the place “the pensionage.”

And I was right, she told me. Dan Kennedy was in good shape for his age. I was just wrong about the age.

Dan had been born in 1864. The man fixing the porch was 102 years old–or, to put it another way, he was three years older than Canada.

David is the son of Greet Macdonald and Hughie Ferguson.
Billie: Billie Macdonald, Greet’s sister
Danny and Olive: Danny Ferguson (Hughie’s brother) and his wife, Olive Duffitt
Roddie and Pat: Roddie Ferguson (Hughie’s brother) and his wife, Patricia Dunn