Nighttime rain makes even Yonge Street pretty as you're driving off in the distance, or rather, making a slow exit in sluggish Toronto traffic after piles of goodbyes and erratic tears (who cries at their mechanic's?) and days and days of not sleeping enough OR packing enough because you are in total, total denial about the magnitude of all you are leaving.
I've focused so much on who am going away from rather than where, but there was no denying that, even though it is the right thing for me to leave, it felt totally absurd and strange to be walking home from College Street (so easy, so close!) for the last last time, to be bending off of Eastern Avenue to Richmond Street tonight, getting gas at a station I have never been to ever, and creeping up on the Gardiner just after deflecting a window-tapping panhandler. (Aw, Toronto — in some ways you're just like the day I met you.)
I have seen my city (it will always be a place that is mine) change so much in the last nine years, in ways I can barely enumerate and in any case would bore most people who aren't also in love with it. But what I can point to the most is a way of looking at Toronto, a way of looking at anyone's city, that has shifted. Rather than seeing a city as a structure in which people live and work and party, I think so many Torontonians (and it's not just a function of getting older, it's not just a function of me knowing particular people) have realized their city is theirs to claim, chart, explore, play in, create, mythologize, and boast about. When I moved to the city in 1998 everyone was totally weird about it. "But you could live in the US!" they'd say. "You moved...here?"
I don't doubt that almost all of those people feel differently right now. From nine years ago to now, it became cool to like Toronto. It didn't used to be, back when everyone raised outside the city resented it for its (even still modest Canadian) national dominance, and everyone who grew up there just whined that they were sick of it. I felt it immediately to be a great North American city — one I moved to with only a handful of visits under my belt — and tons of my friends from the States did too, telling me over and over again what a great place it was I had chosen to to live. Yet it was eleven months before I met an actual Canadian in Toronto who understood why I would have chosen to abandon my Yankee rights to live in this place. He too loved Toronto and got it like no one else I had, or indeed, would ever meet. I ended up marrying him.
It is important for me to call out some specific people who shaped my experience in and affection for an amazing city that it pains me to leave tonight.
Don Pyle, who adopted me as a pen pal sometime after I started sending letters, cookies, to Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet in 1992, was the first of them. I arrived in Toronto to a legacy of his stories and anecdotes and snippets of people he'd known forever — driving around in his Volvo was like getting the inside scoop on every musician and storefront and charming thing in the city. He knows four million thousand people and when I first moved to town he even took me to his mother's for Easter dinner in the Junction, marshmallow bunnies standing up on top of pineapple upside-down cake and all. I can point very clearly to a conversation in Ann Arbor when I was living there at the end of my school career and hosted Phono Comb for the night: Don, Beverley and Reid talked me though my fantasy of wanting to move to their city, and during explanations of everything from the weird behaviour of grocery stores to the magic of the Toronto Islands, I realized I was pretty much convinced. It was a pivotal moment and one that was echoed and affirmed in every inspiring and awesome conversation with him I have ever had. (This sounds like we are no longer going to have brunches where he points out things like how EMBASSY cleaners was turned into KEMBASS with a K and a black plastic square and some chutzpah, but they'll just be less frequent and when he tells me incredible things about Toronto I'll just be more sad that we don't share it in quite the same way anymore.)
Jeff Chapman, aka Ninjalicious, who I married and to whom my understanding of to what depths one can truly love a city is credited, came along just as I was finding my own footing. And suddenly I was over top and underneath an amazing city, a place that to Jeff, who skirted around its edges for years in Pickering, romanced and adored in what seemed like every possible spot one could physically penetrate. Through Infiltration, I read his adventures — that you could sneak up and walk through Union Station's stunning glass galleries, that you could crawl underneath the city through storm drains and map it in your own amazing psychological, three-dimmesional way. I read his seditious and inspiring words for a year before bothering to get in touch to try to make friends, and boy was I not disappointed.
When Jeff died it was much more complicated to love Toronto: I felt like he had shown me so much of it in such an unusual way that he had in some sense painfully inscribed each walk and fountain and stairwell for me. He used to tell me that one of the best things about urban exploration was that you felt you had such a special bond with the buildings you'd seen the secrets of; that you learned about your city in a way that made it so much more truly yours. I resented him for showing me something so beautiful and then abandoning me to enjoy it without him alongside, but that didn't make Toronto any less grand.
But through the course of those nine years I lived there, things had shifted, not just through Jeff's kind of influence but that of other people who had made it cool to like the place you live, rather than hip to complain about how everything sucks all the time like in most cities. We loved Toronto together and suddenly there were weird art projects and subway parties and public space initiatives that didn't seem just political or just fun but part of a way of seeing Toronto as malleable and loveable, as a place whose history and stature could be woven into our crazy dreams.
I found myself walking (not nearly enough, in the end) with a loosely organized bunch who attempted to interpret and proscribe what the city meant to them through wandering. The first time I went, the guy in the fancy scarf didn't quite have me convinced that the walks were more than just people strolling through ravines and subdivisions talking about Guided by Voices or freelance writing or whatever — but two years later I know I had only scratched the surface, have only scratched the surface, of the ways Shawn Micallef wants people to love Toronto. To re-consider Toronto at a difficult (personal) time through thinking about public space, psychogeography, and simply letting the city tell itself to you in all its many ways, was something I needed dearly. Shawn — whether on a late-night boondoggle drive to Garbage Mountain in Etobicoke or any of dozens of mass text-message harangues to meet him at the beach — continually nourished and pushed at me to take the city's gifts more seriously, both by surrounding oneself in its stories and by simply not being passive in responding to them. I could not have had a better tour guide to constantly remind me how good we had it, and though I am moving to another city I feel deeply for, Shawn, I have not turned my back on loving Toronto and I will not let you down.
I think what I learned to love most about Toronto in the end wasn't just that it was charming and liveable and full of culture and pointy Victorian houses and vaulted glitter-lined expressways and secret waterfronts, but that it is of a scale that feels like you can fully apprehend it. It's a great city with the benefit of being such a humane size (and condition) that you can feel real ownership of it as a citizen — I remarked to my friend recently that the town is so small that I know the guy who makes the recorded announcements on the subway platform. But it's really not population size as much as it is attitude and availability; whether you're writing an amazing historical novel born from a love affair with the city archives or simply watching streets metamorphosize, it's possible to feel not just belonging to Toronto but like it belongs to you. I only hope I can carve out a section of overwhelming New York to feel this proprietary about, this proud, this awed on such an intimate scale, as I have with Toronto. But if perspective is the right place to start, then I think I have had amazing people help teach me to remember what I already know about the greatness of the urban landscape. I have a new place to make mine, and even if 8,000,000 people have already shoved in line ahead of me, I think I might know a few tricks to do it right.
