5 February 2000
FEBRUARY
February is the oddest of the months and not my favourite. And here, stuck in the middle of it, I am looking forward to the day when I can watch February fade into the rear-view mirror of the year.
I know February does have Valentine’s Day, which recommends it to some—to the glad spenders, and the hawkers of roses, and all the fancy dancers who know the right things to say to a girl or to a boy when they catch their eye—but I’m with Carl Sandburg on this: Valentine’s Day has taught me more about the taste of cabbage than the mystery of roses.
It is the month my mother was born, but apart from that, and the odd flutter from Sandburg’s little white bird of love, February has added up to just too much winter. The Fathers of Confederation, or the trickster Raven, or whoever it was who designed the month must have agreed. They did their best to whittle away at it, doling out twenty-eight meagre days in most years, grudgingly handing out a twenty-ninth from time to time. Why they didn’t just do away with the whole month while they were at it, and add the twenty-eight days to say, June, when love is really in the air, or September, a month I have always thought should be longer, is beyond me.
But they didn’t, and we are stuck with it, and this year, being one of the years when February has twenty-nine days instead of twenty-eight, we are stuck with it more than ever.
It is a curious construction, this notion that a month can accordion in and out every four years—I don’t know how they got that past the board of regents. You are commissioned to codify the year, to design a system that makes the year solid and reliable, and you do that eleven out of twelve months, but then it’s as if you shrug and say, “What the heck? I’m hungry. I’m going home.” You leave February to some maniac from the basement who has radical theories about child-rearing, and what you should eat for breakfast, and has been just waiting for a chance like this. He gets February in a thumb grip, and this is what we are left with: a month that can’t keep track of itself. A month that loses days willy-nilly. Days fluttering out the backpack of the month and vanishing into thin air like those school notices your kids never bring home.
It’s Leap Year, which any sensible person might conclude means we leap ahead, skip out of February a day early in our headlong lunge to spring, but this being February—a month, upon reflection, I am beginning to think of as more perverse than odd—it means our leap is a leap to nowhere, a leap to where we started, stuck in this month, sometimes a day short, sometimes with more days on our hands than we want. Perhaps the best idea this Leap Year is to embrace that other February holiday—Groundhog Day. I’m pretty sure I saw my shadow. I’m going back to bed. Wake me in March.
24 February 2008
SNOWMAN
My favourite moment of the winter past was the afternoon we stumbled upon the snowman on Howland Avenue. It was the biggest snowman I have ever seen. It had a base bigger than a Volkswagen and took up most of the front lawn where it stood.
Intrigued, I knocked on the front door and introduced myself to the man who answered. His name was John Keefer. John told me he had built his snowman on a Friday night in February. He says he was just “inspired by the moment.” The air was warm that night, he said, or as warm as it had been all winter, and the snow on his front lawn was piled as high as he’d ever seen it. And it was perfect packing snow. John started building his snowman before dinner. He went out after he finished eating to finish the job.
John said he worked in the dark, knowing that his two-yearold daughter, Elsie, would wake up Saturday morning to a snowman as big as a buffalo.
When he finished, John rooted through his recycling box and found a face for his snowman. He used a bright green cap from a detergent bottle as a nose and a yellow plastic peanut butter lid for the mouth. He fashioned red eyes with lids from two pickle jars.
He said the temperature dropped that night and turned the snow as hard and strong as cement, making his snowman a fixture in the neighbourhood. All through February, local kids came to play with it, adults brought their friends, teenagers dropped by just to hang out.
After a few days, a handful of pennies appeared in the trench that surrounded the snowman. By the end of the first week there was nearly a dollar of change in the trench.
John says he isn’t sure what the money was about. I like to think each penny came with a wish, maybe for an early spring, or for a warm summer.
I never know what to do with my pennies. But scattering them around a snowman and wishing for warm weather does not seem like such a foolish thing to do in the middle of February—seems like a particularly Canadian thing to, so this summer we’ll be saving as many as we can, and we will keep them for the dark days of next winter when we are really going need a wish or two.
22 March 2004
BOY, BIKE, CHAIR
I was on my way to the grocery store when I spotted him. A boy, about eleven years old I guessed, riding his bike up the middle of the street. He was riding awkwardly, weaving from side to side, as he was holding on to the handlebars with one hand and to an office chair with the other. The chair, which was black and was also on wheels, had clearly seen better days.
“That looks like hard work,” I said.
“Yup,” said the boy, not unhappy someone had noticed.
Then he stopped pedalling and stood, astride his bike, pleased, it occurred to me, to have an excuse to rest for the moment. Resting is not something eleven-year-old boys do intuitively. I was happy to provide the excuse.
“You taking that home?” I asked.
The boy nodded.
“Nice day for it,” I said.
I tried to keep my questions non-threatening. I was, after all, a stranger. I assumed he had been warned about talking to people like me.
“My name’s Stuart,” I said
“My name’s Matt,” he said.
Then he said, “When I get home I am going to tie a rope to this chair and pull it behind my bike, and my friend is going to ride in it. Then we are going to switch.”
He smiled proudly.
I smiled back, imagining all sorts of horrible things: the chair careening around in traffic, the rope breaking, cuts, bruises, broken bones.
I almost said, “Be careful.” I restrained the impulse. He presumably had parents to tell him that. And to warn him about talking to people like me.
“Sounds great,” I said. Then because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I shrugged, and said, “I gotta go.”
“Me too,” he said.
I stood there for a moment and watched him pedal up the street, part of me wishing he had said those magic words of boyhood. Wanna come? Remembering with great fondness, those days when a broken chair, a piece of rope and a bicycle were all you needed to make the world perfect.
1 October 2006
TORONTO
The celebrated Canadian geographer Cole Harris once described the inhabited part of Canada as an island archipelago spread over four thousand east-west miles.
Professor Harris’s archipelago spreads farther if you factor in all the islands of the great north, and is as thoughtful and encompassing a description of Canada as any, and better than most. It accommodates both the distances and differences that make Canada so surprisingly watertight. And, as an analogy, it holds up well when measured against the rocky shores of our many cultures, against the still waters of our tolerance, and against all the other tidal surges that both pull us apart and push us back together, endlessly and relentlessly.
I like how it makes me think about Canada, but also, I should say, I like how it allows me to think about myself. Because if we are a chain of islands, stretched along the border, well, that makes me the island-hopper. And, I have to say, I like the sound of that.
I spend a good part of my life, these days, hopping around the country. But when I am not—hopping, that is—Toronto is the place I return to. Toronto is my home, and when I come home, I always feel a little like I am leaving the islands an
d returning to the mainland—which is, I suppose, how you should feel about coming home, wherever your home is, whether it be a city home, a country home, in a big town or small one, or even on an island. Home should feel like solid ground.
This city hasn’t always been my home. I was born and raised on the island of Montreal. I know Montreal the way you know the town of your boyhood. I know it intuitively.
Toronto is a city I had to learn.
I came, some thirty years ago, because CBC Radio asked me to. I came for my work. I didn’t give my coming, or, more importantly, my leaving, a moment’s thought. I departed Montreal on the waves of my youthful enthusiasm. Although, like so many others who leave their hometowns, I left believing it would only be a year or two before I returned.
But those years add up, and now, all these years later, I find that I have lived in Toronto longer than I lived in the city where I was born.
Toronto is my home now. And whether I admit it or not, it is my home by choice.
When I travel across the country and talk turns to hometowns, people often look at me with compassion when they learn where I live. Oh, I wouldn’t want to live there, they say. Often they don’t say it quite that directly, but I can see it in their eyes and hear it in the things they choose to tell me about their hometowns.
I wouldn’t want to live in a place where you don’t know your neighbours. Where people are in such a hurry. Where the driving is so impossible. I counted sixteen lanes on that highway near the airport.
Well, yes. It is heavy lifting living in a big city. No doubt about that. But not in the way those who don’t live in one might think.
This city asks a lot of those of us who live here. But there is much to love too.
Like all of the other islands in the Canadian archipelago, Toronto has a romance with water. It is built on the shore of a lake and organized around the banks of two rivers—the Don and the Humber still wander pleasantly through the city, and if you wander along their banks or through any of the many ravines that bisect the city, you can run into deer, coyote, rabbits, fox and skunk right in the heart of town.
More than the gentle slope of the hills leading down from the old lakeshore to the shore of the lake; more than the streets, or the streetcars, or the swoop of the Don Valley Parkway at night, all soft and yellow and winding; more than the gracious parks or the grinding parking lots; more than the corner stores, or the late-night stores; more than the stock market, or the St. Lawrence Market, or the meat markets; more than the low-rises or the high-rises, the theatres on King, and the galleries on Queen; more than the one, two, three, four! newspapers; more than the Blue Jays or the Maple Leafs, the Stanley Cup or the World Series; more than the restaurants and the cafés; more than these things, or any number of other things any of us could name, Toronto is a conversation.
It is a conversation that began before any of us were born. Back when the Don River ran clean and clear. A conversation that began before us, and continues with and without us every hour of the day.
And this is what this city asks of us. This is the heavy lifting. It asks that we participate in the conversation. More than ask, it demands that of us. And it is through this great civic conversation that the city lives.
Those of us concerned with the natural world talk about the parks and the rivers and the quiet places: the street corners and the canopy of trees; others of us, taken up by the world of commerce, concern ourselves with buildings and building, and the getting and the spending of time and money.
And no matter, because whichever one I am, what my neighbours want to know is where do I stand on the idea of an island airport? An expanded subway? Swimming pools in the schools? Green bins? And blue bins?
And when I am sure of my opinion, when I have thought about it, and talked about it, when I have figured it all out, and I am standing at the finish line, all huffing and puffing and proud, that’s when the city tells me to tie up my shoes and keep running: I am not close to the finish line.
Because once I know where I stand on these and any number of other things, this city requires something more of me. It requires me to accommodate where others stand.
Where they stand on this, and on that, and also on music played late at night, and when sidewalks should be shovelled, and where and how one parks one’s car.
This is what the city asks of us. It asks us to participate in the grand conversation and then, when we do, to be mindful of the others who are talking too—to accommodate them and their different ways and their voices of many languages.
This may be an urban jungle, but the ecology here is more swamp than forest. It is rich, and fetid, and varied, and different, and you have to look a little harder to see the beauty here, away from the mountains and the forests and the pristine lakes. But if you can catch the light just right, the beauty can be just as dazzling.
I don’t think there is a nicer thing in the world than a morning walk in a Toronto neighbourhood. Any neighbourhood will do—the city is full of them. A walk in Toronto is especially lovely if it is late in the summer, and there are trees arcing over the sidewalk, and the odd corner store, and boxes of grapes, and circles of unshaven Italian men in their dress pants and vests getting ready to make wine.
I had to leave town soon after I moved into the house where I live today. I moved in, stayed for a couple of weeks, and then I had to go away. I had been gone maybe a week when I received a phone call from one of my new neighbours.
“You left the window of your car open,” she said. “It is going to rain. Can I get a key and close it?”
There was no way she could do that.
“The car will just have to get wet,” I said. “It will be okay. Things that get wet, dry.”
When I got home, I found my car covered with a tarpaulin. But not by the neighbour who had called, by another one, who had also taken stock of my predicament.
The thing is, I do know my neighbours. The thing is, when it comes down to it, we all live in small towns. Mine happens to be in the heart of a big city. I follow my own footsteps back and forth to Peter’s little butcher shop, to Potts’s grocery store, over to Herman’s hardware, and Sal’s, where I get produce, to the place I go to get my hair cut, and the coffee shop up the street.
They know me in these places. And I know them.
This is my home. And, yes, sometimes living here is hard work, but maybe the best thing about the city is that it asks so much of me, because the thing it asks is for me to be my best self. To be a citizen.
We are blessed to be here. To have so much when so many have so little. To live, by God’s grace, in a wonderful country. And by great good luck, to be part of the conversation that is Toronto.
28 February 2010
THE PARKING SPOT
I had driven my car to Kensington Market, and I was looking for a place to park on the street, which made me either an optimist or a fool—more the fool, I knew, because I was also in a hurry.
Kensington Market, in the heart of Toronto’s Chinatown, is not a place in which you can be in a hurry, especially in a car. The streets are narrow, and the stores are small and crowded. People and piles of garbage spill off the sidewalk. The driving is difficult. The parking, impossible. I should have known better.
But there I was, inching along in my foolish optimism. And then, miracles of miracles, I spotted a parking space just a car’s length in front of me.
It was immediately clear, however, that I wasn’t going to get the spot. There was a car inching along ahead of me. The driver had seen the same thing I had. He was now slowing, stopping, twisting in his seat, preparing to back in.
This is what happened next.
The parking spot turned out to be only hypothetically free. A group of people (a family, it seemed to me) was standing in the spot, attempting, I could only guess, to reserve it for someone who was, I assume, somewhere in the line of cars behind me. A woman, who looked like the mother of this family, was standing in the spot, waving at the guy ah
ead of me. She was telling him not to back into the spot. She was indicating the spot was already hers.
The guy in the car clearly didn’t want to listen to her. He sat there, half in, half out of the spot, and I realized we had a situation on our hands.
Nobody moved for a couple of minutes. Not the mother, not the man, and not me. I couldn’t leave until this was resolved. The woman was blocking the parking spot. The man was blocking the street.
So I sat there trying to work out whose side I was on, until the man in the car got impatient and began to back up right into the woman. Or almost into the woman. She gave way. The man scooped the spot. The road ahead of me was clear. I could proceed.
Suddenly it seemed important for me to say something before I left. I slowed down and I glared at the man in the car, and then I gestured at him, not obscenely, but in a way that communicated to him that I disapproved of what he had just done. Then I drove away.
On reflection, it occurred to me that in some ways the man in the car had done the right thing. Given the dynamics of the crowded market, that woman shouldn’t have been trying to hold on to the parking spot. It wasn’t good manners. But given that she was, given her bad manners, the man in the car hadn’t helped the greater good by picking a fight.
Even if right is on your side, when someone yells at you, it is not often helpful to yell back—especially if you’re using two tons of steel to do your yelling.
The Vinyl Café Notebooks Page 7