Killing Cops and Reading Kerouac
There’s a lady I catch the streetcar with every morning, who I run into as I wait for the 505 Streetcar to the University subway line that drops me outside First National Financial (where this past week my task has been feeding hundreds upon hundreds of pages of documents into a photocopier, and placing large clips and rubber bands around them).
She’s a “blonde” looking thing, with “blonde” here being used here with every negative stereotypical inference I can muster. We wait patiently in the freezing cold for the car to come, and I observe her reading a magazine, which I at first assumed to be Woman’s Weekly or something of that ilk, since Woman’s Weekly doesn’t really exist outside of New Zealand. I like to think that she doesn’t notice me, that I’m like Brad Pitt in Spy Game, but as has been pointed out, I can be quite obvious when I’m staring. I’m a squinter.
See one day I glanced at her magazine, it was Newsweek. The next? The Economist. She chewed through Harper’s and the New Yorker in the next week or so. A day or so later she was talking on her cellphone to her friend about Bush’s late push for peace in the Middle East.
You can probably guess what happened. When I looked at her, I now saw a savvy, well dressed, politically minded up-and-comer. I used to see a Canadian Paris Hilton. Sometimes I’ll look at her and try and revisit some of the pompous scorn I was secretly placing on her. But I can’t, I can’t go back to it.
It’s gone. She’s different to me now.
(And yes, I’m a snob. There’s an undertone evident here. I’m judgemental. And even more judgemental as I wait out in the cold at 8am. I’m not a morning guy.)
So I was thinking about perceptions. The way we see things. How you can never go back, how you can never see something completely how you used to. Experience alters judgement. We are constantly malleable.
Remember your first day at school? High School? University? Remember how big and unconquerable it all seemed? At each of these steps I figured that I could never be the master of this particular terrain. I thought that each step up was the final one that was just too big.
It’s something that I enjoy – the wonder of being swamped by a situation. Cities are the same. Anywhere I’ve lived outside of home, Wellington, San Diego, Melbourne, Toronto – have all at first seemed like an intricate and indefinite abyss that I’d never completely grasp. This feeling always turns out to be fleeting. The new becomes old, becomes comfortable.
A big, new city is just a city is a potential home. Excuse my awkward attempt at a literary reference. But the shoe melts into your foot and it becomes just another part of your life.
We can never comprehend our surrounding situation as we did.
As I said, experience changes perception. But anyone knows this. The trashy woman became a smart lady of standing. And by that token, Toronto went from being an infinite urban abyss of possibility, into “home”, with it’s own unique set of frustrations and challenges.
This plays out for me in how I feel about snow. In November, back in the days when Jon would rise for work about 7, and I would snooze till noon like a slob (days which I resented slightly at the time, but as expected look back on as a simple, golden era), I woke one day to a slip of paper outside my door. It was a hand written note from Jon that read simply, “SNOW!!”
I ran to the window. No snow was seen. It had melted by the time that I had risen from slumber. I cursed my slovenlyness, and probably went back to doing something inane.
The first major snow day came on the 22nd of November. Thanksgiving for the Americans. Wondrous Winter Wonder day for me Jon and I. I learnt that it’s hard to keep your head looking upwards in a heavy snow fall. I also discovered as I raced around town for job interviews that the slapstick movie cliche of the man walking too close to the side of the road and getting drenched in sludge by a car driving through a puddle is a very real risk, not just a bad Hollywood set-piece.
Jon and I convened at home, went outside and posed for photos. It was freezing, and the snow was hard to hold. But we were still kind of giggly about snow in a metropolitan setting.
A couple of snow falls later, I don’t think anyone really liked snow all that much anymore. One Sunday in the middle of December, after probably the heaviest snow fall in our couple months here, the roads, footpaths were almost unmanageable. A ten minute walk took thirty. Getting to the laundromat was a trek of Lord of the Rings proportions. Transport schedules went haywire, that week Jon recounted to me waiting forty minutes for a street-car with wet feet, and when he talked about his fear of damaging his feet in the freezing cold, I knew it was no exaggeration.
Snow sticks around, the temperature never goes above zero all that often. It turns to ice, and sits around on the side of the road going black with dirt. It becomes an eye-sore, and a hazard. I’ve fallen on my ass on many an occasion. My least favourite are the snow piles outside of office buildings where smokers congregate, and end up throwing their discarded cigarette butts. These piles turn a sickly shade of brown where the nicotine and other delightful chemicals seep into the icy snow.
Jogging has been a no-no. And I think that dear Lauren, arriving up from California was slightly shell-shocked by it all. Especially as most of the worst snow fall came in her first week or two in the city.
Snow had officially become a pain. Something to put your head down and endure. It could no longer be a romantic signifier of an idealised Northern Hemisphere white winter. The exotic allure was gone. The jury was back, snow was a miss.
Now after a mid-winter thaw, the snow has gone from the roads, and the once ignored sight of clear streets, is something that looks fantastic to me. They’re just so dry and clear and you can see the green grass of suburban lawn again. It’s fantastic. A real treat. The sort of thing I’d just love to walk down.
Toronto didn’t exactly pan out the way I’d calculated it might. It didn’t correlate into a utopian city of opportunity I sometimes I held it to be before arriving here. Naive as that now seems. On the employment front I’d be lying if I said that my lengthy spell of unemployment didn’t way on my mind slightly. I have a job, but it has just finished, it could have led into more temporary work, but I didn’t want that. My last week was a reminder of the dim realities of this line of work. I literally photocopied mountains and mountains of documents. Staring at the copier, thinking slightly jealously of Jon’s travails (brother Jonathan just returned from a week on the road with fellow New Zealander and renowned Wellingtonian Ben Steele), the decision to go seemed so easy. I don’t want to do this, I couldn’t do this for a whole year. (Yes, Lauren also had just a little something to do with it.)
It seems exciting to be out travelling again – next week Lauren and I will head for six days to Montreal and Quebec City. If anything travelling allows you to dip in, to leave a city with your wonder relatively in tact, or even enhanced. Sure it has it’s own challenges – I realise that prior to leaving America I was waxing lyrically about the joys of laying roots down, and bemoaning the impermance I’m now delighting in – but it protects you from the general frustrations of the day-to-day that can seep in, regardless of whatever city you call home.
It blows my mind a little to think of Jon leaving in a week. Even Jon leaving for a little vacation is felt – he’s been a near constant companion to Lauren and I for coming up six months, and when he leaves, his abscence will be felt as a missing friend, but it’ll also be eery without him, much in the same way a missing limb would. Who’ll let me rabidly talk primary news at them? And who’ll (a bit more gracefully) rabidly talk back?
I’ll miss the boy. I’m lucky to have so much amazing stuff to look back on in the past six months, and I owe much of that to Jon. Even in Cross Street, when the activity died down and it seemed the chips weren’t falling our way, the sporting, pop-cultural, and political discourse always kept my mind turning and entertained. And you beat me at poker Jon, fair and square, but I’m glad I made you work a couple of nights for my five dollars.
Now it’s back to Grass Valley for new challenges. And I’m thrilled. The climate is a little more me… Lauren’s not half bad… Yes, things could be worse.
The moral here is not that Toronto has been dire. When I focus on the things that I’ve done, hanging out with Jon, Lauren’s arrival – it seems a blast. It hasn’t worked out as planned. But that happens sometimes. Lauren got a beating at immigration. Jon and I didn’t really get into the lines of work we desired. We didn’t set too many different social circles alight. Although the three girls I drunkenly tried to scare on Friday night will probably have my face etched in their head for a while…
I see this city differently now. I can’t get back to all the mystery and hope of my first few days. But I have appreciated this experience. I’ve done a great deal of learning and adjusting here. I may not have got the results, but I enjoyed the experience. Even if the challenge occasionally bested me. There’s part of me that will always reflect on Toronto tinged with these frustrations. But there’s larger part of me that will see the greatness in coming out of all of this with a broader vision, the experience of the struggle and the continued joy in the comraderie with my companions of the last half-year, Jon and Lauren.
You never know how you’ll end up looking back on things when the new car smell goes.
I’ll always be glad I came here. It’s just time to go.
Posted by James
Tags: experience, Leaving town, perceptions, reflecting
