69 Hours in Toronto

Some Scenes

Several seats behind us on the train, a woman and a man - evidently strangers to each other - struck up a conversation in French. The man’s French was strained, imperfect. His accent unplaceable. The woman kept saying that she didn’t really understand what he meant. She asked him often if he meant to say something different from what he said and he’d reply “ah oui oui excusez c’est bien ca que je veux dire” [ah yes yes sorry that’s exactly what I meant to say]. He said just this phrase frequently and, over time, he spoke less and less and just made affirmative sounds until eventually the conversation came to an end. We wondered whether this man, no matter the language, often wants or needs others to tell him what he means. Whether folks in general have a hard time understanding him. We wondered, likewise, if this woman’s corrections were purely about language. After they stopped talking altogether, we imagined that they were each differently negotiating the silence that hung uninterrupted between them for many hours. We kept waiting for the woman to ask the man if he meant something by his silence other than silence. We wondered, if she had actually asked him about the meaning of his silence, what (if anything) he’d say in return. We felt we knew that neither understood each other’s silence, but it’s hard to say for sure.

The man in the seat next to us tabbed between a poker game and a spreadsheet for the duration of the trip. He exhaled loudly often. It wasn’t clear whether these exhalations were caused by the cards or the little boxes or something else altogether. We wondered whether the game and the sheet of numbers were somehow related. If so, we wondered which fed which. We wondered, too, whether he saw - as we thought we did - the similarities between his actions in different windows: click, type numbers, wait, exhale, click, type numbers. He seemed to be enjoying neither, but maybe he was just one of those people for whom joy doesn’t show up discernibly. Maybe those heavy exhales were replete with joy. We tried not to be too creepy, so eventually stopped paying attention to his tabs and sighs entirely.

We took advantage of absolutely nothing we packed to entertain us for the train ride. We mostly looked out the window and drifted in and out of sleep like a cat. Save, in the last thirty minutes of the close to six hour journey, we paged through a magazine. There was a stylelessness to the writing that made it easy and unpleasant to read. It also seemed out of date despite being the most recent issue. Print, obviously, requires or allows for something different than digital platforms - but all the same we couldn’t help, reading stories about the Republican primaries and the WGA strike, that no one cared about any of this anymore and that we might as well be reading about sabertooth tigers or fax machines.

Very briefly fantasized about opening a tiny boutique devoted to small print run magazines from all over the world and then remembered that money existed and no one - ourselves included - had any. Briefly fantasized about a magazine library and then stopped with the stupid fantasies already.

Dozens and dozens of people sporting the synthetic, chemical colors of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team paraded by the train station as we exited. We don’t see Blue Jays attire often. We’re grateful for this because we hate that illustrated bird’s head. There’s something in its eye that suggests it has seen something or sees something that it will not disclose. It strikes us as very judgy and sinister. Its subtle frown doesn’t help.

It occurs to us, while looking at this party of baseball fans, that it’s nice and rare to get to wear clothes that so obviously announce your attitude or intent. Uniforms and lingerie were the only other examples that came to mind, but, in those cases, it’s often unclear whose side you’re really on.

Everything here seems a little too large. As if everyone involved in building anything were using a 1.3:1 scale, but forgot to adjust for that when they started building. The sidewalks and streets are wide, almost vast. It feels like it takes forever to cross intersections, feels like we’re being closely observed for too long by the impatient drivers sitting in cars waiting for the light to change.

We tried to navigate the streets without looking too much at our phone. We remembered, vaguely, which streets run east/west and which north/south. We took random turns. We ended up on a street corner that was absolutely covered with small, destroyed cucumbers. Considered whether smashed cucumbers are a specifically Torontonian act of celebration or defiance, whether the small cucumber represents something other than a small cucumber here. Kept walking until we ran into construction sites that pushed us elsewhere and the crowds thinned out. There was a uniformity to everything we walked by. This, we’re sure, has more to do with late captitalism than anything else. It’s not Toronto’s fault it’s part of the same plastic and generic morass as the rest of the continent. Consequently, nothing (figuratively) jumped out at us until we got to a street corner that was suddenly Times Square-esque? Enormous screens advertised gigantically and music came from somewhere. Some men were selling magazines on the the ground. We couldn’t avoid browsing and being told about all the different deals they had (2 for this much or 5 for this etc.) - but we have no interest in any of these titles and totter away in some random direction.

We eventually walked by a cinema and briefly considered going to a movie - but figured it would be very sad (and yet entirely on brand) if the first thing we did in a new city that we’d never visited before was enclose ourselves in a dark room and stare at a screen for hours. The temptation was real, though.

There were some very tall tipis and a good number of tents and makeshift shelters made with tarps set up openly in a park in a place we find out is called Cabbagetown (fr). A police SUV parked at the park’s edge, but no cops were in sight. There’s a concrete building of some kind in the middle of the park and someone has spraypainted “BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE / LIVE HERE / STAY SAFE” on one of its walls. The normalcy of urban encampments is briefly unsettling. It is now just a regular feature of life in cities that could, easily, divert funds to help shelter those who might prefer more solid walls and roofs.

We got to a grocery store that, it turned out, was closed for renovations. We asked the teenager standing at the entry in a horrible smock that we assume was a uniform whether there was another grocery store nearby. He looked up from his phone and said “I’m sorry. I don’t live here” or maybe “I’m sorry I don’t live here.” And then an elderly woman wanted to hold him personally accountable for the store’s closure and her inconvenience and we walked away.

We’re not going to describe the person with whom we stayed, her house, our conversations, or anything else - but will say that being welcomed into and feeling truly welcome in someone’s home is such an underappreciated and beautiful thing. It feels as though it shouldn’t be possible to feel at home in place you’ve never been before and yet, somehow, it is. We didn’t want to sleep the night we arrived, but - very late, eventually - we slept soundly under a weighted blanket which (we learned) is a miraculous invention and viable possible solution to all of our many problems.

Setting off into Toronto proper the next morning, we learned that all machines that dispense subway fares are broken. They are, of course, broken everywhere in Montreal - but here they are broken differently and we don’t know how to make them work despite their brokenness. As we tried to shove our debit card into a slot that wouldn’t have it, mashed the unresponsive buttons, looked around to ensure no one is witnessing us struggle with this large mechanized ticket cupboard, we came to believe that these machines were maybe deliberately malfunctional. We came to see that these machines were designed broken. Each subway system (we’re convinced) selects a defect unique to them - debit card readers that don’t read debit cards, say - so that the people who ride that subway system feel part of an in-crowd, feel that they belong to this city and within this system. Using the subway fare machine works like a shibboleth. It rejects the efforts of the outsider, the interloper, and forces them to humiliate themselves by talking to the sour-faced man sitting behind bulletproof glass which, upset, we did and hated having had to.

Like seemingly everything else here, the subway car is large. It’s spacious in here, uncramped. The experience isn’t unwelcome, but it is strange. We are NOT smooshed between a child’s backpack (full, invariably, with hard and angled objects that prod) and a businessman who refuses to hold onto a pole or strap or anything and veers and stumbles like an asshole whenever the train stops. Instead, we stand alone and look at our phone at nothing worth looking at.

Another friend’s house and another welcoming so deeply felt that the city’s foreignness feels irrelevant. That we live a life alongside such generous, gorgeous people with such lovely minds seems like an incredible, undeserved stroke of luck. As before, we won’t describe anything specific that happened as we talked for hours with a friend, but she had to excuse herself briefly to take care of some work and moved a certain kind of way by the nice day, we guess, and the fact that we had paper and pen, we idly drew the view from where we were sitting because taking a photo felt immediately like the wrong way of keeping part of this afternoon after it was over.

We sat, later, with friends in a park. A young woman was doing a (let’s call it) suggestive dance from one end of the park to the other. She writhed and wiggled and crawled and dipped with her headphones on across several hundred yards of grass. She was smiling fully. Beaming even. From our bench, we talked briefly about whether what she was up to was choreographed or improvised, whether she wanted the attention of others or was indifferent to it. It was quite the performance regardless of whether it was meant to be one.

You’re looking or waiting, we imagine, for something dramatic or revelatory here. We could, we suppose, comment more pointedly on the differences between Montreal and Toronto. There are many, but most do little to provoke our interest. This place is, though, English in a way that feels utterly foreign. We’re not used to overhearing conversations in English while walking down the street and reading English words on all the signs advertising sales or breakfast sandwiches or whatever other nonsense commercial enterprises feel like yelling visually at everyone. We’ve lived in anglophone cities before, but this is maybe the first time that we realized we’d rather not. At home, English is something mostly restricted to friends and family while French is for our interactions with neighbors or service/retail workers or random passersby. We appreciate the distinction, the different registers. It helps, also, that our grasp of French is infantile compared to our English. We, necessarily, can say only about half of what we might want to strangers. There’s little room for nuance. The person with whom we were staying in Toronto noted - she having lived in Montreal for a long time - that flirting becomes weird in a second language. One’s never sure what subtext, what subtlety, is being sewn into your second or third language word choices. We like, though, being forced often to be dumb and blunt, to be forced to communicate as clearly as we can rather than with as much finesse as we can manage.

Another late night and another restful sleep.

It threatened to rain which fucked with our intent to spend time taking pictures. We took this while walking towards downtown.

It immediately afterwards started to rain for real and we worried about our camera first and then wondered just how wet we were willing to get for the sake of walking around for hours.

Very, it turned out.

A little-recognized consequence of the forever opioid crisis is the impossibility of just simply using some establishment’s bathroom. We always either need a key or a code or to spend money. We usually don’t want to engage in some elaborate social ritual to get access to a toilet, so probably did (and often do) horrible damage to our bladder as we waited until we found a mall or somewhere sufficiently crowded that barring immediate access to bathrooms would a) be a hassle and b) dissuade folks from using in them. We visited the (formerly?) famous Eaton Center that Fred Jameson talks about only to use the bathrooms. We admired the (fake?) Canada Geese suspended from the ceiling on our way through, though, and got a little lost and turned around by aggressively unhelpful signage.

We visited probably too many bookshops. We used them to orient ourselves in the world. They’re an excuse to move from one place to the next, an excuse also to pause somewhere for a little or long while. It’s easy - browsing shelves - to forget that books aren’t and ought not be an end in themselves.

Queen Books on Queen Street E. reminded us that we should spend some time reading only stuff published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and then we started to wonder if we’re just suckered in by that press’ austere and lovely design decisions rather than their roster of authors and then we stopped really caring either way and left empty handed.

We ended up entirely wet, but had no intention of seeking shelter or going back to our temporary home until we’d seen all we might want to see. We took random turns down streets and saw shops and restaurants. We tried to locate the encampments on the University of Toronto campus, but mostly got lost and saw a lot of things we didn’t really have any investment in seeing. We looked at graffiti and parks and people. We smoked too many cigarettes.

We briefly worried that we hadn’t done or seen or experienced enough while here, that we hadn’t visited the city properly or accrued enough exciting stuff to share then, better, stopped worrying entirely about that because we saw that big iconic spire thing and felt nothing at all about it and (momentarily) accepted that we’re really just not that into the things that make places places and rather just love the people we love and really only ever move our body to get closer to them somehow which, as far as ethoses go, feels pretty OK.

A little girl and (we’re assuming) her mother exited a place that sells eyeglasses and our walking pace synced up with theirs briefly. The little girl was wearing what were very obviously brand new glasses. The frames were the brightest blue we’ve ever seen. She kept touching them with her fingertips, adjusting how they sat on her ears. She turned and asked her mother why she had to wear glasses. Her mother told her it’s so that she can “see properly.” The girl took a moment and then asked why she has to see properly. After a few more steps, the mother said that it’s because “when you’re in older years at school the teacher is going to write things on the blackboard or on the whiteboard and you’re going to have to be able to see what they’re writing even if you’re in the back of the classroom.” The little girl said nothing to this and kept fussing with her new glasses. We were struck by the practicality of the mother’s answer and how it flew entirely past the questions that were really being asked. Why can’t I see just how I see? Whose determining the proper ways of seeing? Why are we concerned with them or going along with their bullshit? What’s so wrong with seeing improperly? We’re hoping, by now, the girl has hidden her glasses multiple different places and finds ways to skirt proper sight here and there.

Another late night and another restful sleep.

We got lost on the way back to the train station and ended up near factories?

We found our way to the train station and a dozen mennonite women walked by us crowded together, making their way somewhere. We admired their bonnets and wondered if, from their vantage, it looks like we all dress very similarly too.

Our train was delayed. We eventually started filing onto the escalator that led to the platform and something happened and someone screamed and then a bunch of vested train employees pushed through the crowd and evidently rescued an old man who man have fell or just collapsed and they led him off to a seat somewhere and waited for EMTS to show up to help and for reasons we couldn’t understand then decided that no one could use that escalator (because it would cause us all to fall?) so we took a strange circuitous route up to the train platform. We heard someone up ahead ask an employee if the old man was OK and they just said “He should’ve been more careful” and left it at that.

There was, we were told over the terrible speaker, a “traffic jam” on our route. We didn’t know this happened. We thought trains were more predictable than cars, that of necessity one would need to ensure that no more than one train was using one set of tracks at the same time. Not so, apparently. We sat for an hour unmoving and hated everything in the world. We hated things less when we got moving again.

There is a large body of water near Toronto that was very pretty. We thought about taking a picture, but thought about it for too long and then it was out of sight.

The very young person next to us on the train was on the phone the entire trip. We tried not to eavesdrop. We put our headphones on. We slept and listened to music and a podcast episode or four and slept for hours. Pulling finally into the station in Montreal, almost home, we took off our headphones and heard the young person tell the person on the phone in English that they’re there, “in Quebec,” and that “now no one is going to understand [them]” and then they made a joke about whether they could learn French in five minutes and then paused a beat and listen to what the person on the other end of the line was saying and then they said “no, no, you’re right, you’ll understand me, you always understand me” and laughed.