Near College and Yonge Street an old woman was sitting on a stoop. She appeared to be homeless and was wearing so many inappropriate layers of coarse wool as to give her the appearance of a character from a fairy tale. She had a hand cupped over one of her ears and was rocking back and forth, muttering. Curious, I stopped and listened, “testing, testing, testing, testing,” she repeated.
A little farther down the street a mini van pulled-up to the curb and a family of beautiful hippies emerged. This was as surprising to me as if aliens had alit. The wife took a photograph of the husband, her stepmother and their two children standing in front of an apartment building. I offered to take a photo of all of them but the woman, the mother of the young children, said, “Oh no, I certainly don’t need to be in THAT photograph!” a statement left open to interpretation.
In Dundas Square a festival was taking place to celebrate National Aboriginal Month. There were perhaps two-dozen tables, each one selling dream catchers, paintings and various other opportunities. A motley disassembly of people wandered about, eventually being funnelled to the foot of a stage where a fashion show was taking place. Six young women, each one either more or less certain of her beauty than the next, stood in a row with their hands on their hips and cheeks sucked in.
Few people were watching.
The show over, the person on the microphone called the designers out to take a bow, and two young girls who may well have been in high school appeared to a smattering of applause. After having their forever-moment, they headed to the back of the stage, and one of the girls– the heavier one– threw her arms up over her head in victory, and somehow the flesh swinging from her arms was simultaneously heart-breaking and inspiring.
Beside the stage, a redheaded woman covered in tattoos was trying to maintain control over about six children, one of them a beautiful, shirtless aboriginal boy with hair like a rock star. She was trying to distract them and get them to play, shouting as if angry:
Ring around the rosie,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down!
And surprisingly to me, all the little girls in their pretty dresses and the one, perfect boy, all fell giggling and shrieking onto the hot, summer asphalt.
Shirtless, an emaciated old man wobbled down Dundas Street past Filmores Hotel. His belt was cinched so tight that it’s tongue hung down and dangled by his knees. He stopped into a diner, one of those places where all the waitresses had seen a hard life and now old themselves, had reached the age where they would always identify as a mother or a grandmother, reflexively calling each poor soul who came their way– regardless of age– “Dear” or “Honey” as if each one was a lost child returning home.