A Monday in the Annex

Monday was another breezy, unpredictable spring day, and all the pretty university girls– not quite dressed for the weather–walked swiftly down Bloor Street, each one with a David’s Tea cupped between their hands.

In front of the Shopper’s Drug Mart there was a busker who likely saw Melissa Etheridge when she looked in the mirror. Wearing a beaten, red leather jacket, her hair was a wild scramble, and she sang with a ferocious, biting confidence. She was middle-aged, and all the songs she was playing were classics from the latter part of the 70s, songs that must have recalled the field parties of her youth when everybody passed joints around the bonfire, nodding along as she sang so fully, her future path seeming so clear.

At Sarah’s Shawarma the woman serving me had big, butcher fingers and the look of a farm worker from Eastern Europe. Her eyes were tender and vulnerable, suggesting that all she wanted to do in this world was help other people. And at the only occupied table in the place sat a thin and pale man wearing a Rush sweatshirt. He was finishing the last of his soup with such a dreamy pleasure that I had no choice but to simply stop and watch—as if bearing witness to a pure and holy moment.

When I stepped out onto the street there was a sudden chorus of Happy Birthday. The voices were in tune, harmonizing, and it was lovely, like music you might imagine hearing from across the water, something passing through time, as if light from a star. I looked around and eventually spotted them, five college-aged boys striding happily down the street singing into a cell phone one of them was holding aloft, “Happy birthday dear Rita, happy birthday to you,” and I thought of Rita in 30 years, one day, for no particular reason, remembering the surprise of this message and those beautiful boys.