I’m not sure about my part in all this. I’m not sure why I felt the need to add my two cents, and I know by doing so I wasn’t being helpful.
“You were the witness,” said a friend of mine when I told him what had transpired.
“It’s important,” said my friend, “that when we are a witness, that we bear witness.”
Maybe.
Or maybe it’s important that we keep our counsel and remember that when people are rude or unpleasant, they are rude and unpleasant for a reason. They are teachers sent, of course, to teach us, over and over again, the big lessons of patience and forgiveness.
19 March 2006
GARBAGE
I was at my desk, working at something or other and totally absorbed by it, when a part of me that I wasn’t paying attention to noticed it was smelling something peculiar.
This wasn’t a pleasant smell. It was a solvent of some sort. The closest thing I could compare it to had I been conscious of it would be model airplane glue. But I couldn’t describe it because I was too preoccupied to notice this unpleasant smell, except, as I say, unconsciously. It tugged at my consciousness for the better part of an hour, until slowly I became aware not only that the smell was there, but that it was making me feel nauseous and then, all of a sudden, headachy, which is when it burst onto centre stage like an actor in a hurry. I stopped writing and went downstairs to ask Louise, who comes in three mornings a week and was working away herself.
“Louise,” I said, “Do you ...”
“... smell something funny?” she said, finishing my sentence for me.
At that moment, this peculiar smell became the only thing I was preoccupied with, and I began doing the useful sort of things a man does when these things happen. I began to sniff my way around the house. Pretty soon I had worked out that the solvent smell was stronger in the basement than anywhere else.
Now this is a new basement we are talking about. Well, actually, it is an old basement. But it was new to me. I had, only the week before, moved into this house, a modest Victorian in a row of Victorians, built, I am told, in 1899, and now smelling like there was a classroom of kids hidden away somewhere building model planes. Or worse. And this was giving me some concern, not to mention a headache. And doubts about my purchase.
Not knowing what to do next, I went next door and knocked on my neighbour’s door. We hadn’t met.
“I am your new neighbour,” I said. “And I was wondering if ...”
“I smell something funny?” she said, finishing my sentence for me.
Exactly, I nodded.
“It seems,” she said, “to be stronger in my basement.”
I decided to phone the fire department.
“It is not actually an emergency,” I explained. “I would rather you didn’t turn on the sirens.”
I was hoping for a couple of discreet guys with a meter of some description. Of course I got sirens vectoring in on my house from both the north and south. Three fire trucks, an ambulance and the fire chief in a red van. And a crowd of neighbours.
That was when I started wishing I had checked my basement a little more carefully—for that forgotten tube of model glue that had, no doubt, burst in the move.
That’s what I was thinking, in any case, as I stood on the sidewalk and watched the firefighters tramping into my basement. So I was delighted when other neighbours began to report the same smell.
“They have it in the house across the street,” said a man in a plaid shirt to the fire chief.
Pretty soon the firefighters were knocking on doors up and down the street, which meant they were treating my call seriously; and I don’t mind saying that was a relief.
After about half an hour, a consensus was beginning to emerge. The consensus was that a gas station about a block away had dumped solvent into the sewer system, and the smell was backing up through our drainpipes.
The guy across the street had apparently watched people at the garage do just this on numerous occasions. Mostly at night. He had, apparently, reported them before.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Who would do that sort of thing?”
“It happens,” said the assistant fire chief, whose name was Liam and who used to be a cop in Galway.
“There are,” he said, “legal proceedings outstanding against these guys.”
I know it happens. I know it is expensive, and difficult, and often disruptive to follow environmental codes. And I know there are people, when faced with a forty-five-gallon drum of solvent, who take the easy way out; but I couldn’t believe this was happening right under my nose.
“I can’t believe it,” I said to the firefighter. And to a couple of others standing around.
What I didn’t tell them, however, is what I had done myself, earlier in the week.
Like I said, I had just moved into the neighbourhood, and earlier in the week, as I unpacked, I was faced with a mountain of green garbage bags that I had filled with the newsprint that the movers had used to wrap my china and CDs and lamps and ... everything else that I owned that was remotely fragile.
So garbage day is Friday in my new neighbourhood. Or every second Friday actually: it is garbage one Friday and recycling the next. It was garbage day the first Friday after I moved in. And there I was, faced with a mountain of garbage bags filled with recyclable paper. By rights I should have held on to those bags for a week. But I didn’t have a place to store them for a week. I could have piled them on my deck, I guess, but I was taken up by the idea that I should settle into my new house as quickly as possible. And settling in meant getting rid of those garbage bags full of paper. Instead of letting them sit on the deck for a week, I hauled them out to the curb and let the garbage collectors take them away.
And what I want to know is this: what is the difference between me and those hoodlums in that garage?
We both had something that we wanted to get rid of. And we both turned to the easiest and least inconvenient solution. We both turned to the solution at hand.
And I know sending my bags of newsprint to the landfill instead of to the recycling plant is not the end of the world and is, on whatever scale you want to measure it, small potatoes compared to dumping a forty-five-gallon drum of solvent into the city’s sewer system.
But I didn’t have a forty-five-gallon drum of chemicals at hand. I just had the bags of newsprint. And it seems to me in the grand scheme of things, I didn’t do any better than they did at all. And my question is, if I did have the chemicals, could I trust myself to do better?
19 February 2006
HAIRCUTS
BY CHILDREN
I was walking my bike down by the lake when I spotted my friend Ian walking toward me.
“Hey,” I said after we had said hello, “what the heck is up with your hair?”
Ian, who has a beard and tends to sit on the shaggy end of the scale, looked a bit, how do I describe this? He had a new ’do, which was dramatically short on the sides, yet, well, it didn’t look like it had been touched on top. It made him look...
“Like Lyle Lovett?” asked Ian hopefully.
“More like a mushroom,” I suggested.
“That’s what I thought,” said Ian morosely.
Then he told me he had just had it cut at an art installation. By an eleven-year-old.
The event was called Haircuts by Children.
The haircuts, explained Ian, were free. The point of the exercise was to make adults rethink their perceptions of kids.
“And have you rethought yours?” I asked.
“In a roundabout sort of way,” said Ian, running his hands through his hair, or what was left of it.
Then he explained something that had transpired while he was sitting in the barber chair and eleven-year-old Anthony circled him with clippers and scissors.
“The most interesting thing happened in the chair beside me,” said Ian.
There were, he explained, four barber chairs in the room. At the one beside him, an eleven
-year-old girl was standing on her tiptoes so she could work on an elderly woman with wavy grey hair.
“The two of them were chatting back and forth, just like in a real salon,” said Ian. “It was very charming. And then, in the middle of this, the old lady turned to the girl and apologized.
“‘I am sorry,’” she said, “‘that my hair is so greasy and tangled. I didn’t have time to wash it this morning.’”
That is the sort of thing you probably hear muttered every day in salons across the country.
“But that’s not the point,” said Ian, who was starting to perk up.
“The point,” he continued, “is what the little girl said in return. She said, ‘Yeah, your hair is greasier and more tangled than any hair I have ever seen.’”
The lady, apparently, smiled. And after a slight pause, the two of them were chatting as easily as before.
Ian was really excited now.
“Imagine if everyone was that honest,” he said.
“Imagine if you were trying on a pair of jeans, and you asked the salesperson how they made you look, and she said, ‘Actually, not very good. They make you look fat.’
“Or imagine if you called a lawyer, and he told you, ‘Sure, I’d be happy to do that, but it will cost you seven hundred dollars, and you’ll be totally confused when I’m finished.’”
As we move through this life, we hear many variations of the truth. We answer each other, more often than not, with attempts to please or influence, or at least not offend, instead of informing each other with sincerity.
“Exactly,” said Ian. “We are all too worried of offending. Imagine how great it would be if everyone was as honest as that little girl. All the time.”
Ian had obviously been inspired.
“It has really got me thinking,” he said.
We stood there for a while on the sidewalk and laughed about his haircut.
“I’m going to get it fixed this afternoon,” he said. “I’m going to the barber. It’ll be fine.”
“What did you tell the kid?” I wondered.
“Oh,” said Ian, smiling, “I told him it was the best haircut I ever had.”
“What?” I said.
“It’s the truth,” said Ian. “It was.”
23 July 2006
THE WORLD CUP
It has been a week now and World Cup celebrations are just about over in Toronto. All that’s left this morning is the odd flag flapping from the window of the odd car, a windy reminder that June 2002 was one of the most joyfully rambunctious months that has ever blown through this old city.
The games were a tutorial for students of urban geology. They learned, if they didn’t already know, that the tectonics of the city’s ethnic alliances run along east-west lines. Italians went to gnash their teeth in the cafés and bistros along either St. Clair Avenue or College Street. Shoehorned between them, along Bloor Street, deposited there during a different geological epoch, the astounded Koreans ran amok in their red T-shirts, with their whistles and chants. The Portuguese had Dundas to themselves until Portugal was eliminated, and then they tucked their pennants away, picked up the lighthearted green-and-blue Brazilian flag and moved up to College, bumping up on the eastern edge of all those dispirited Italians.
What a month it was.
If you lived in any of these neighbourhoods, you had two options. You could pull your drapes over your windows and your pillow over your head and try to sleep. That is to say that you could watch the games through your squinted and sleep-deprived eyes and cheer desperately for the team that would celebrate its victory farthest from your house, or you could let it rip. You could, if you lived near Bloor and Christie, do just as the Korean T-shirt of favour urged: you could Be the Reds. For ten bucks you could buy one of those Red Devil T-shirts and plunge right into this great and unexpected shift in the city’s social crust.
That’s what the cops eventually did. At first they showed up at the street parties and stood around on the corners in little blue clusters while whistle-blowing mobs brought traffic to a standstill. Their instincts told them they should keep the streets open, but, thankfully, someone along the chain of command figured out that clearing the streets would be a mistake, intuited that something more important than the flow of traffic was moving through the city.
By the quarter-finals, even the police understood that these were fun-loving crowds, and in a remarkable act of civic trust and good spirit, the police stopped showing up. They handed the streets over to the whistle-blowers, and the taxi drivers and delivery people did what the rest of us did, the only sensible thing anyone could do—whenever they were gridlocked by joy, they started honking their horns and hanging out their windows and high-fiving the kids with the flags.
It was, unquestionably, the Koreans who led the way. It was the Koreans who really got the city going. When the Turks wanted to celebrate their victories, they found themselves without a neighbourhood of their own. They solved that problem by gathering in joyful Koreatown, where they were welcomed with open arms. For most of June, the Turks and Koreans celebrated their victories together.
This sense of communal joy, which was as much a celebration of ethnic viability and community as it was a celebration of any particular game, a great bursting of national and neighbourhood pride, was captured one last time at the corner of Ossington and College last Saturday morning, an hour after Brazil defeated Germany in the final match.
Eric Timm, a forty-six-year-old schoolteacher of German descent, watched that last game in an Italian café. All month Timm had been driving around Toronto on his motorcycle— flying a giant German flag on an eight-foot-tall flagpole. When Saturday’s game was over, Timm wanted to give his flag one last whirl. At first he didn’t know where to go, and then he felt a responsibility well up in him. The German team he had been cheering for, that had come so far in the tournament, had to be represented at the victory celebrations. And Timm knew it had fallen to him to make that happen.
Timm climbed onto his yellow 1974 Honda 750 and headed for the heart of the Brazilian street party. He only intended to drive by, but when he got there and saw he was the only German around, he was seized by the need to make a statement. He parked his bike at the corner of Ossington and College, at the epicentre of the celebrations, and he climbed up onto his seat. And he stood there like a sentry for three hours.
He cut an imposing figure. He was wearing an Indonesian shirt knotted under his navel, black jeans, motorcycle boots and Ray-Bans. He hadn’t shaved for five days.
“I guess I was a bit of an item,” he said.
You could see him from a quarter-mile away, the black, red and gold flag of Germany sticking twelve feet up in the air beside him.
“I didn’t go without trepidation,” said Timm. “It was a bit of an experiment. I wanted to know how I would be received. I wanted to know if this really was what it seemed to be.”
The answer, as it was all month, was a resounding Yes.
“Brazilians high-fived me and bought me drinks,” he said. “Brazilians came over to me to talk about the game. Brazilians asked me to pose for pictures with their wives. They commiserated with me. And they consoled me. They told me the German team was still young. They told me Germany would have another crack in four years.”
That night the moon hung over Toronto like a big white soccer ball. On Monday one of the city’s newspapers said June was a glorious celebration of multiculturalism. They were almost right. But it wasn’t a celebration of multiculturalism. It was the real thing. It was multiculturalism. There has been a lot of talk over the last twenty years about the richness of Toronto’s diverse communities. From time to time those of us lucky enough to live here get to see that first-hand.
7 July 2002
THE FRONT LAWN
The idea of the suburbs in the United States, I have read, can be traced to the journalist and father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted, who designed Central Park among many others
, became suspicious of downtown neighbourhoods, like mine, and went in search of what he called “a holy green environment,” neighbourhoods that he believed would be better for the health of the family. Olmsted’s idea was to create housing developments with the look of a park—and thus the front lawn was born, and the notion that families who believed in the greater good would “keep up their lawn.”
At the heart of Olmsted’s philosophy was his belief that “landscape has an effect on the unconscious” and his assumption that the best effect is achieved by “a gently rolling landscape of green.”
It was an assumption that made so much intuitive good sense that no one thought to question it. Or no one where I grew up, or lived, ever questioned it. So pretty soon everyone had a front lawn. And pretty soon the competitive spirit raised its head, and the quest for the perfect lawn became so obsessive that grass was so vigorously weed-whacked, sprayed and rolled that it lost its connection with holiness, and lawns began to look worryingly more like living room rugs than any holy thing.
I can mark exactly where and when the rebellion began in my neighbourhood. The Dunker family down the street— Europeans—plowed up their front yard and let it lie fallow for a season. They wanted to see what would come if they let nature take its course. What came was goldenrod, of course, and Queen Anne’s lace, blue chicory, buttercup, dandelions, and bunches of other wild and native plants, until eventually what came were the weed police. The weed police told the Dunkers they couldn’t do what they were doing. They had to have a front lawn.
That was ten years ago.
One night this week, I realized that the Dunkers were, like most rebels, just slightly ahead of their time. The seller of lightning rods, as Ray Bradbury wrote, arrives just before the storm. Over the last decade there has been a slow but steady shift in the front yards that I walk by. Flowerbeds have been creeping over their borders, overflowing their boundaries and spilling out over the grass. There are no longer lawns in front of a good 50 percent of the houses I pass—all through my neighbourhood the front lawn has been shrinking to the point of disappearing.
The Vinyl Café Notebooks Page 8