<\/a><\/p>\nOn Bloor we had the green light to cross but our passage was blocked by a luxury Mercedes that was situated directly in the middle of the pedestrian crosswalk. There was ample room for it to get out of the way and go either forward or back, but the driver at the wheel was distracted. She was texting, and as she was doing so she was smiling\u2014maybe a good idea, the reception of happy news, calming plans. Normally I\u2019d be touched by this glimpse into the small optimisms of a life, but by virtue of the hierarchy her car was designed to imply, all I could see was the sense of blind entitlement money bestows upon certain types of people.<\/p>\n
We then popped into Queen Video to return a few rentals. The woman behind the counter, normally an enemy who refused to make eye contact or communicate beyond the rudimentary necessities of the job, was different. Typically sullen and angry, she was open and affable. She had abandoned her usual attire of severe glasses and a Death Metal Tee, and now in contacts she wore a heartbreakingly bad shade of eye shadow and the sort of top that an aunt from Scotland might send to you as a gift. For the first time in the five years that I have been going there, she wanted to give Heidi a treat. She spoke easily, talking of her own dog and a conversation developed between us and several other customers, each one of us saying things that made the others laugh, and whatever love had found the clerk \u00a0was now beginning to spread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday while walking the dog I came upon a very old woman sitting on the landscaped ledge of some property.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[432,113,138,433,97,35,63,399,434,317,151,96,431,55,105,38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2439"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2530,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions\/2530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}