In the park two Russian men who look like they lived through the Soviet era, sit on a bench. Everyday at the same hour they meet there and talk about a wide range of intellectually flavoured topics. I imagine them exiled professors who settled into unexpected lives over the last 20 years, after departing positions of prestige in the motherland. Their bicycles lay on the ground in front of them, as if abandoned by lovers or children, who unable to control their excitement tossed them aside, and ran to one another.
On the next bench sat a frail and nearly elderly woman in white pant suit. She looked like she might break had the wind blown the wrong way and seemed lost to ghosts and sad thought. When I said Hello she awoke for a moment, her face gathering animation in response before falling quickly back into the darkness from whence it came.
At St. John’s on Broadview two homeless people talked. The woman had orange hair and a tattoo of a cross on her bicep. She sat on a stool, telling the grey-haired man with the ponytail a story, ” I don’t know the details of the incarceration, but I know it’s bad. She had a shitload of warrants against her, and now that they got her I don’t know what they’re gonna do.” Her eyes were worried, fearful, and as she spoke she played with the tinfoil wrap from her package of cigarettes.
The dog and I turned the corner and headed down Grant Street where we bumped into the Native medicine man with whom I normally talk baseball. He had something hanging around his neck that looked like it might have been a potato wrapped in leather and I asked him what it was. He told me it was a healing agent that he wore to purify the airs and create positive energy. Many people, he said, particularly in this area, unwittingly used the sacred to create negative energy.
As evidence he cited a young man who was pacing the sidewalks shouting into his cell phone. According to the Medicine Man he was screaming at his mother, saying all sorts of disrespectful and cruel things. I might have mistook him for a competitive Toronto business man trying to close a deal, and not thought twice about him, but this story made me curious and I wanted to walk the dog near to him to eavesdrop, but he looked utterly furious, like somebody capable of a very bad decision, and so I avoided him.
And back on Queen Street a multitude of people invested in their own lives, each accomplishing their daily tasks. At the convenience store beneath where we live three young boys had stopped in for their regular candy run, the owner of the store gentle and happy to see them again, proud to see them nourished by his stable presence, to know they would never forget the simple joy they felt in these end of summer moments of chocolate milk and ice cream bars at the local corner store.