The Vinyl Café Notebooks (10 page)

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 ahead 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.

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.