May 2001

In May 2001, Reggie left Prince Edward Island and returned to Toronto.

It was another attempt to start over.

The timing was significant. Only a short time earlier, Reggie had been kidnapped and held over a drug debt. The incident had been frightening and humiliating, and his life on Prince Edward Island had once again become deeply entangled with drugs and the consequences that followed them.

I don’t know exactly what was going through Reggie’s mind when he decided to leave.

But looking back, I have always wondered whether returning to Toronto offered him an opportunity to put some distance between himself and what had just happened—to get away from the people who knew about it, escape some of the humiliation, and try once again to rebuild his life somewhere else.

Whatever his reasons, Reggie headed west.

Back to a Familiar City

Toronto wasn’t new to Reggie.

He had lived there years earlier, when he was much younger. He had worked, studied technical writing and recording engineering, married and begun a family while living in Ontario.

But the Reggie returning in 2001 was a very different person.

He was now in his mid-thirties. He had lived through years of addiction, treatment, relapse, criminal charges and incarceration. His marriage had ended, and his relationship with his children had been affected by everything that had happened.

Yet he still had something important going for him.

Reggie was a trained avionics technician.

Years earlier, he had graduated with honours from the Avionics program at NBCC Moncton, finishing near the top of his class. For much of the decade that followed, his criminal record had made it difficult for him to turn that education into the career he had trained for.

Back in Toronto, that finally began to change.

Working at Toronto Island Airport

According to our father’s notes and the family chronology, Reggie obtained work at Toronto Island Airport.

We don’t yet know the exact date he started working there. However, he was employed at the airport before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, so the job appears to have come relatively soon after his return to Toronto.

For Reggie, this was significant.

More than a decade after graduating in avionics, he was finally working in the aviation industry.

It must have seemed as though at least one part of his life was beginning to move in the right direction.

For someone who had repeatedly tried to start again, Toronto offered another chance.

Another New Beginning

There is a pattern that runs throughout Reggie’s adult life.

Things would fall apart.

He would leave.

And somewhere else, he would try to begin again.

Sometimes the new beginning lasted for a while. Sometimes the problems he was trying to leave behind followed him.

His return to Toronto in 2001 appears to have been another one of those moments.

He had survived the kidnapping.

He had left Prince Edward Island.

He had found work in the field for which he had trained.

But his circumstances were still far from secure.

At some point during this period, Reggie was living in a Toronto boarding house. And after September 11, changes in aviation security would create another problem—one that went directly back to decisions Reggie had made many years earlier.

His criminal record was about to matter again.