Taking the dog for a walk through the Annex in Toronto

On our street is a slightly mysterious property. It’s set back a bit and is comparatively low and flat, like a haunted motel. Big and not very well maintained, it has a small fence with stone pillars at the front of it, and the other day as I took the dog past, there was an empty can of lentils on one of them, as if the star atop a Christmas tree.

I’ve never been able to tell who lives in this sprawl of a place, but sometimes I’ll see a girl sitting on the fence or a maybe couple of them standing about smoking furtively. Somehow, they all seem a little sideways, possessing wild, impulsive eyes suggesting that at any moment they might throw a rock through a window or give somebody a hand job behind a tree. There’s just something that feels very delinquent about it all.

The other day there were two girls, both dressed for a humid summer night rather than a cool, windy day in March, standing in front of the place, One of them became intrigued by the idea of our dog, Heidi, a Miniature Dachshund. From the other side of the street she began cooing and flirting, more stripper than schoolgirl, trying to get Heidi to cross over to her, but the dog sensed something wrong in her and grew rigid, barking. And such is this girl’s life, desperate for warmth but always being rebuked by confusion and hostility.

In the line-up in front of me at the LCBO stood an elderly woman– once elegant and the belle of the ball– and her withered husband, now being pushed about in a wheelchair by a Filipino domestic. They were buying a bottle of wine and bickering, getting lost in the small details. The world around them, the people waiting in line, the cashier, the nanny, everything fell away, and there was nothing left but the furious minutia of the moment, this moment to which both of them had travelled together for so long and so far.

A little further along I sat down on a bench and a nearly homeless man, thin as a rail and with the sort of tattoos that looked self-administered, stopped to chat with Heidi. He put his nose right up to hers, his lips pursed, and then he kissed her on the snout. He kept his face there, waiting, and Heidi licked him back, and it was evident that this small, beautiful moment illuminated his day.

Silently, as if an idea rather than an actual person, a young woman in a U of T track jacket ran by us. I could feel her whoosh, like being startled by a deer, and looking up I saw her blonde ponytail bouncing and then vanishing forever around the corner. And then on our way home a guy bounded out of his apartment and smiled at us. Exuberant, he was quickly 20 yards ahead, stretching as he walked, his arms as wide open as possible, as if to gather in the entirety of the day that awaited.