Archives for June, 2008

Moving west the names of Toronto’s subway stations take on a decidedly romantic turn. Even Jane station, nestled between Old Mill and Runnymede, makes me think, for some reason, of Camelot. It helps that here the train moves through ravines and over water. Even in the winter, the light here cuts shallower and brighter than elsewhere in the city.

I have no reason to be this far out west, except that the green is different here and that is a good enough reason and has been for several months now. So one afternoon, I get off at one of the subway stops and make my way to the park and the river that runs below the tracks. At first I think I’m lost, but then I sight the underbelly of the bridge. More precisely, I see the bridge and see the water reflected along its underside, the wind making ripples of silver on the sturdy concrete, well before I arrive at the river bank.

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I accidentally took the bus to Sunnybrook Hospital the other day. It’d been several weeks since I’d been there last, when my mother had asked me to go with my father in case the meds made him too drowsy to drive home. So I went with him though I hadn’t driven in months. That was his first visit to Sunnybrook in about a year, his appointments having taken place at other hospitals in the city. When we got there, my father somehow recognised the parking lot attendant as the same man who’d been there the last time he’d parked here. After leaving the car in the underground lot my father went to say hello, while I waited for him at the hospital entrance. Later, while we waited for the test results and I fell asleep in the waiting room, he bought the man coffee and donuts.

It’s a late summer morning, not quite noon. The bus is mostly empty and not many more people get on here. I hadn’t expected the route to be so circuitous, have already made three transfers to get this far. The loosely planned morning I’d plotted out is beginning to fall to pieces and I begin to feel tired. With an hour and a half to go still, I already know I’m going to be late for a class I’d rather not attend anyway. This morning I’m headed to Glendon. I’ve never been before and am as yet unprepared for how lavishly green York’s second campus will be, how extravagantly peaceful. For now, rolling through the hospital grounds, all I note through the bus windows are varying shades of grey. Metal everywhere, reflected over in the glass and in the mirrors. In the wheelchairs and the pavement. Even the cars, machines that generally make superficial sense to me, seem to dissolve into naked exoskeletons.

Both my parents were in their thirties when my mother had me, their first child. The fact of their ages meant shifting things to me growing up. It has come to mean very specific things to me these last few months, three years. Continue reading this entry »

We shake hands and exchange names. “So that explains the f,” he says.
“Oh.” For some reason embarrassed, I put my hand up and slip it back under my shirt. “I didn’t know it was showing.”

That first Eid at Queen’s the four of them got together and when I escaped to Toronto that weekend, gave me the chain and pendant.

I lost it once. I’d taken it off one night and then forgotten about it. It would be weeks before I would put my fingers up to my throat and feel its absence, weeks after that before I’d do my bed and find it entangled in my sheets. I’ve never taken it off since and it’s become like skin in its permanence, rinsed in soap and shampoo like the rest of my body. Mornings I wake up and bleary-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror bring it back to the front, because it invariably twists around to the back of my neck during the night. It’s the only of piece of jewelry I’ve ever owned for any extended period of time. Everything else eventually slides off, rolls away.

I wondered recently if whether I’d ever take it off and why. It isn’t sentimentalism that makes me keep it on. The five of us have grown too far apart for it be a marker of something undying. Four boys and a girl, all of us grown so different from what we used to be and from each other, our friendships now marked more by distance than anything else. We see each other at weddings and at funerals where our conversations are a curious combination of formality and familiarity. It’s that it’s become a habit, something that requires effort to justify removing. A familiar groove around my neck, cool only where the f lies flat against the skin over my sternum.
It’s like a name that your mind has latched onto. Long after the person whose name it is ceases to mean anything to you, long after your memories of him have faded into transparent pieces of harmless nostalgia, still his name resurfaces, inexplicably – like an expletive, almost. A word whose meaning is irrelevant, just the sound of it in your head anchors things for a moment.

It’s grown tarnished, the silver chain darker than it once was and the edges of the pendant a shadowy grey. I wouldn’t buy something like this for myself now, but I’ll polish it tonight and remember to put it on before leaving tomorrow.

There’s a boy, he’s new here, who’s replaced the man who used to perform at Pape. A white kid, about my age, maybe a few years younger, with blonde hair cropped close to his scalp and a cleanshaven and quiet, very quiet face. He’s dressed in a nondescript white sweater and dark, baggy jeans. He plays an electric guitar and he plays it like it’s a violin. I’ve only seen him twice now. The first night, I walked by him and then every step got slower, with the people going home spilling around me, until I had to stop just around the corner, where I knew he couldn’t see me, though it also struck me that he played like he didn’t care who stopped to listen or if anyone even did, seated on his stool, bent over his guitar, eyes on the grimy floor.

I turned back after a few moments, dropped some change in his open case, and walked back out to the buses without looking at him. He has a face that isn’t just quiet, but almost sullen, that in its silence turns in only on itself, an absolute reserve, unbroken. He doesn’t sing as he plays, for which I’m grateful, because that first night I remembered again how much I love the guitar, the way the strings from a lone guitar played well and slowly can hold you, how that solitary sound can slide under your diaphragm and determine the rhythm of your breath.

And he plays it like it’s a violin – a part of me doubles back to note that I probably don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that, because as much as I love music, I love it uncritically and mercurially, by turns guided by prejudice and by whim. Occasionally even by guilt and embarrassment. So I couldn’t tell you, really, what distinguishes a man’s playing a violin from his playing a guitar, since I’ve never paid close enough attention. Except the thing is that I also never thought an electric guitar could sound the way that boy made it sing. It made my breath catch a while in that dark subway. I would have liked to have heard it again today.

I love music. I think if it weren’t for the fact that so much of my self is already invested in words and I possess limited heartspace, I’d love music more consciously, more coherently. I make it sound like work, I know, when music for most people is something you do for fun, easily and without self-consciousness. It’s true that I make everything out to require more effort than anything ever really does, but however much I do love music, I don’t think I give it the attention it’s due.