Back then, kids ran wild. It was the ‘70s. The only rule? Come inside once the streetlights flickered on. On a leafy street in the Annex, one front lawn became a thoroughfare for a dozen local children and dogs, the grass trampled dead from their traversing between houses. They beelined for the raspberry bush in the Spearins’ backyard where they would pluck the berries then leap onto the swing set, crimson-stained fingers gripping the rope, soaring.
Susannah Spearin (then Brady) was one of the little ones that criss-crossed this lawn often. She lived across the street and would stampede into the Spearin kitchen alongside their quiet little boy, Charles Spearin, waiting for Mrs. Spearin to serve up yogurt with a spoonful of jam in it.
She could never have guessed that 30 years later, she would marry that boy — right on this very street where they grew up. And they would settle in the same neighbourhood, and raise two daughters of their own (and one ginger kitty named “Africa” by Toto).
The meet-cute
So what did Charles remember about Susannah as a kid? Nothing at first, hilariously. But he does recall exactly how he felt the very first time he saw her again. They tell the story today, sitting at their kitchen table, a plate of plump watermelon on the table, “Africa” by Toto’s scratch mat tucked into a nearby corner. While Susannah once looked down on young Charles, the musician now towers over the diminutive actor by about a foot. Seated close together at the table, Charles often reaches out to touch his wife’s arm as he recounts their meet-cute redux. It was 2001, and he was due to play one of his first shows with his new band. They didn’t even have an official name yet, but one had been bandied about, a whimsical multi-word moniker, as was popular in the early 2000s. Broken Social Scene took the stage at Ted’s Wrecking Yard, playing to about 50 people.
Little did Charles know, but one of those few dozen was his future wife. Susannah had been living in San Francisco, then New York for the last 12 years and never planned to come back to Toronto — she just happened to be in town that summer to spend time with an ill family member. “The most beautiful person I’d ever seen in real life came up to me after the show and said, ‘you’re Charles Spearin!’” Charles was gobsmacked by the woman in front of him, proclaiming that she was Susie Brady from across the street. “Do you remember me?” she asked. “And I didn’t really remember her.” Charles says. “But I just wanted her to keep talking.”
The Annex forever
He pretended to remember their childhood together that first night, but over the following months, a few snippets came back to him: watching her rollerskate down the street, seeing her walk by his house with punk-rock red hair. Even funnier was the moment when the two were paging through Susannah’s old childhood photo albums and they realized she’d spent childhood summers at the Spearin family cottage; unbeknownst to Charles, her parents had borrowed it from his. (And Charles finally figured out how those “The Empire Strikes Back” stickers had mysteriously appeared in his bedroom.)
Soon, they fell in love and, not wanting to deal with Toronto rent, Susannah invited Charles to move into her parents’ basement with her, struggling musician status be damned. “Susie seemed to be game whether my career was going anywhere or not,” Charles says with another big grin. “It’s not like the career was taking off when we started dating!” When they’d saved up enough to get their own house, there was only one neighbourhood they wanted: right here. The bought a semi-detached house nearby, close to both childhood homes, and they have lived there ever since.
Wedded bliss
Picking the wedding venue was easy, too. “When we made the decision to get married,” Susannah says, “it seemed obvious that I would walk from my old house over to his (childhood) house, just walk down the street a couple doors and get married on his front porch.” There was another special guest at the wedding: their first daughter, now 22, was in utero underneath Susannah’s wedding dress that Charles had sewed himself. “Charles had also written a song (as a birth announcement),” Susannah remembers, “and then you sang it at the wedding.” Charles warbles a little snippet of it: “Me and my lady, we’re going to have a baby.” Afterwards, they all walked down to Mockingbird, and a few more of the whimsically named bands of the day played: Lullabye Arkestra, Do Make Say Think. And, of course, Broken Social Scene.
Ask Susannah for her side of the meet-cute at that early Broken Social Scene show, all those years ago, and her eyes well up a little. “It felt like an electrical impulse,” she says, touching her chest. They like to joke, she says, that meeting again was a bit of “Spearindipity.” Today, the two still laugh a lot, as free and easy as when they were kids, flying across the yellowed grass. Susannah glances at Charles. “I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight,” Susannah says. “It just felt really good.”
