The shouts and instructions of the players echo behind me, the language familiar but impenetrable. So many voices, so many people out on this day. A middle-aged man in a suit sits blowing soap bubbles. They drift away from him, rising above the pedestrians on the sidewalk beneath. Given breath, they hover there for a moment, an impossible glistening, before popping and vanishing into sky. It’s a beautiful spring day and people, optimistic after the long winter, are out in the sun. It’s a kind of parade, really, and every one of theses people is the star of their own movie, an unknowable plot churning within that’s just waiting to be realized.
A woman coasts on a bicycle. Her hair shorn down to a grey, jagged buzz. Something that indicates trauma. She slows, glances over to the stadium. It looks like she is going to smile, like maybe the day is a relief to her, too, like maybe all her suffering had been a passage to mercy. She twists her body and spits, a wild and violent hatred in her eyes.
A reminder.
Even on a day like this.
And past her, across the street, shaded by trees and the tall buildings surrounding it, is a little Parkette. A couple, barely visible, are about to sit on a bench. The ice cream cones they hold are a vivid white. They shine like torches. The pigeons, summoned, come softly down from hidden perches, landing like angels to feed on this mortal light.
The other day I was in a cab heading east on Bloor Street.
It was a beautiful, sunny day in autumn, a lucky day, even, but I was preoccupied by petty grievance. The driver was a smoker, and in order to air out his car before he picked me up he’d opened all the windows. You’d think I’d appreciate this, but I couldn’t get past the heavy, permanent smell of smoke, and the open windows were just serving as conduits, breaches through which all my seasonal allergies might stream. Somewhat unkindly, I asked him to close the windows, which he did, and with that it was like a wall went up between us.
As we approached Varsity Stadium he reopened a couple of the windows I had asked him to close, but before I could protest, music thumped into the car. A marching band–glittering in red and undulating like a flag– was in the stands performing the Battle Hymn of the Republic while a football game unfolded beneath.
Somehow this ignited a million unanticipated things at once, and we drove through the music with our heads out the window, as if it was weather we thirsted for.
On the field U of T was playing Queens and the crowd sounded like a tiny ocean. The athletes, all perfect, all aimed from birth to this moment in time, stood about like gold and blue statues. And one of them was going to make the best catch of his life, something he would return to again and again over the course of his life. Somebody else was going to get injured and never be quite the same. And in that crowd another person would see a beautiful young woman smile and feel nourished. A woman in a wheelchair felt the sun, and parents from small cities and towns, drove in to see their now grown children– now so terribly missed, now just beyond their protective reach.
The driver, whom I had forgotten about for a moment, startled me by speaking.
“I am not from here, so none of this is familiar to me,” He gestured toward the football stadium. “But still, when I hear that music and see all the people, it calls me in my bones. It is a kind of nostalgia, but for what I do not know.”
