Chinese Broccoli

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?"

Continue reading "you ain't seen the last of me" »

Posted by liz at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In October 1995 a Canadian guy by the name of Scott Rumble stopped me from punching out a really annoying girl at a Guided By Voices show in London, Ontario. (Her, throwing elbows and hair; her friend, throwing herself inexplicably at guitarist Mitch Mitchell.) Three years later I'd take him up on his offer to crash at his four-square apartment in Burlington, the city where my grandfather died: I distinctly remember crossing the border at Port Huron in a slate-grey fall, and driving round a twilight bend on the 403 near Waterdown where I pulled over and told Scott I was nearby.

"We'll put some tea on for you," he said. I was moving to Canada and I really had no idea what I was doing.

Continue reading "canadian thanksgiving (no really)" »

Posted by liz at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My friend Sean likes to foment community in unusual and interesting ways, and for him this isn't entirely an outward thing as it is an inward thing as well. "I was thinking," he said to me last night, "that maybe I don't need to ever leave my neighbourhood at all?" Naturally that'd short him on the odd opportunity for cornbread and company in the west end, but I occasionally see his point, somewhat like a fantasy, wherein everything is contained and makes sense and is proximal in a way that feels not limited, but full of blessing.

I feel that way about my own city, for the most part (it can only give me what it is, of course, and other places can only give me what they are), and today I imagined for a moment I might get away with the same kind of thing myself—only stay within these walls, shun the last-summer-flingness of Labour Day, buckle down and work before one of the city's main pleasures—that ten day stretch of sitting in a dark room, I mean—swallows me whole. If I haven't stayed in town for more than two weeks at a time in four months, shouldn't the counterbalance be to stay inside all day some days when I am home, reconnect with the pleasures of cleaning one's basement? But just as I was questioning my motives, I was reminded that you don't decide these things for yourself: invitations came loudly as four-fisted bangs on the door.

"We're going to be having a magic show today. In twenty minutes. Excuse me. The next one will start in twenty minutes. And my little sister tried to eat out of your ashtray but I'm not going to smoke until I'm sixteen, because my mother said you should try everything once in your life, and I'm also going to try cola, I'm eight and I've never tried it, but I think I'll have one bottle every four years. We'll be starting in twenty minutes. I'll come back and get you then."

And so of course I went, and even the (other) grumpy widow and the (other) disaffected hipsters on the block straggled over for the 3:40 showing: mostly sleight-of-hand, a pair of rigged dice, some sidewalk chalk and a stolen tampon. Everyone clapped, and everyone left themselves for a moment and joined what was going on around, because, and in spite of them. You can't fight it, I guess—I left the house and drank coffee and got all my work done, smoked out by the buzz of snowbirds and the trickery of children. And I have a feeling that the full goodness of days can't often happen in a tiny vessel like my own house. But at the top of the street, where the wildflowers bend and encroach into the sidewalk, and you can almost forget you're in civilization—well that may just be a portal.

Posted by liz at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)