It was a hot night and most people were sitting out on the patio, but we were inside at a booth that had a view overlooking Bloor Street.
As we studied our menus, a bird flew in through the open doors leading to the patio and with a feathery thud, hit the window directly behind our table, and then slid out of sight into a narrow channel that dipped behind the restaurant’s banquettes and between the windows.
The staff seemed indifferent to this small calamity, more concerned with keeping the operation running smoothly than rescuing the tiny bird. For a variety of reasons, our table was incapable of physically rescuing the bird, as well as being unable to persuade anybody else to do what we could not.
The slender alley in which the bird was trapped wasn’t wide enough for it to fully extend it’s wings, but it kept trying. Flapping madly but futilely, it struggled to lift itself out of the mysterious and disorienting circumstance into which it had suddenly arrived. It would rise up, and then just a tiny bit more, almost to the lip of freedom, and then exhausted from the effort, collapse.
There was nothing we could do, and the bird, subject to an indifferent environment it could not comprehend, fought again and again. And throughout the meal we heard the small, determined sounds of struggle, of something almost taking flight and finding the release of infinite horizon.
Glum and distracted, on one of the saddest nights conceivable, we sat there eating amidst the repetition of heroic failure– each one of us not having to work too hard to find a parallel situation in our own lives, each one, rooting like hell for that bird.
Coffee pedants with laptops sit at the cramped tables and servers who pretend to be more interested in maintaining the integrity of their craft than in customer service, work the bar. As Rachelle and I passed through I noticed a table inhabited by a university-aged couple. Serious and hunched over in distant concentration, they both read thin and difficult paperback books in defiance of the populist culture they so clearly abhorred.
“Those things, those things you’re holding in your hands,” I said, as if astonished, “what are they?”
What I’d hoped might result in some whimsical banter instead produced a short, somewhat prickly conversation about the integrity of books, and as Rachelle and I left with our high-end coffees, I was happy to be heading to People’s, an old school diner that served slutty, speedy breakfasts to people with hangovers.
People’s, an iconic Toronto institution, has been around for 50 years and is run by a candid Greek family. They don’t look like the sorts who are transitioning through the service industry into something else. No, they come in all shapes, sizes and ages, and the women who work the floor are good at their jobs, have large arms that will never see a Spin class and seem generally concerned, even offended, if you don’t finish all your eggs. At each booth there’s a barely functioning little jukebox and a huge laminated menu with all the things you expect, in fact need, to find at a diner. It’s a gem, and Rachelle and I have been going there for as long as we’ve known one another.
Well, on Sunday we found out that it had closed.
And there you go.
The world just went and changed on us.
It’s a melancholy thing, this, and as we stood there in front of the place considering all the other inferior options around us, a small group of like-minded people were making the same discovery and going through the same process. One of these people was a solitary, elderly man with vivid bruises on his arms, an expensive watch and a food-catching mustache. He seemed a little bit lonely, even lost in the face of this news, and so we ended up going out for brunch with him at another local place.
He had a very gentle, slightly effeminate manner and he graciously answered all the questions that we asked, telling us that his journey started in Nebraska before winding it’s way over the course of 80+ years through Little Rock, Grand Rapids and Pittsburgh, amongst others, before finding himself in Toronto and sitting across from us on a Sunday afternoon. He told us that he’d found a kind of peace in Toronto, and as he said that there was some sadness in his eyes.
We all tried to order the same things that we would have had at People’s, but it just wasn’t the same, and as we shook hands and promised to see one another again after the meal, we knew that we wouldn’t, that our time, too, had passed.
