“ Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
–Plato
Frequently, I get lunch at a place called Sushi Bar at the corner of Queen and Broadview. I typically phone-in my order and pick it up. Even though I’m a regular and ridiculously predictable customer, (Sushi lunch special #2 with a seaweed salad upgrade!) a language barrier often makes the conveyance of this order difficult. The other day it felt absolutely tortuous, and after nearly five minutes of trying to make myself understood, I was frustrated, irritable and short with the person I was speaking with on the phone. When I showed up to get the food, I was ignored, and watched with some incredulity as a seemingly blind staff passed me by, as if completely occupied by something other than their jobs.
While this was happening, I noticed the scroll at the bottom of the TV behind the bar revealing alarming details of impending nuclear meltdowns in Japan. For the first time, it occurred to me that the Japanese staff at the restaurant might be justifiably preoccupied, thinking of friends and family, of some idea of home that was being lost.
Some years ago I had some serious health issues. I wasn’t yet 30, and whether it makes sense or not, I felt pestilent and ashamed and wanted nothing more than to separate from the herd. I could not stand to see the pity in the eyes of the people who had known me, and so I stepped away from what I had imagined was my peer group, and began to inhabit the places and solitary hours along a stretch of Beechwood Avenue in Ottawa that would keep me at a safe distance from the life I had known.
I would go to the coffee shops and newsstand during the day, and the bars at night, and I found a kind of anonymity there, feeling like a stranger without a past or future. Nobody needed to know anything about me, and I could live in moments that existed independent my illness, of the disappointing arc of my life.
Of course, what happened was that I became friends with all of the people in those places, and although I went there to vanish, it was actually in those interactions where I was able to rediscover myself, and reemerge into the world.
Years later, after I had recovered and moved to Toronto, I returned to Ottawa to visit my family, and as always, happily hit this strip. I was going to pop into the New Edinburgh Newsstand to buy a magazine and then go to the pub. I wasn’t paying attention to the physical space I was inhabiting, and as I pulled on the door to the Newsstand– like I had done a thousand times before– it was locked. The store had gone out of business while I had been away and somehow this loss hit me with the force of a truck. It was like a part of an ever-present support network had been amputated.
On Wednesday a fire started in the hardware store along this strip and now, almost the entire block is gutted. It’s an incomparably small thing (nobody died) when contrasted with Japan, but it made me feel connected with the expats of Sushi Bar, who like me, must have watched on their computers and TV’s as something they loved and were a part of, so far away now, vanished right before their eyes.