Last Week Rachelle and I went up to the french restaurant Baltifole for dinner. It’s an unexpected place, sitting like a little colonial outpost on a crumbling and dodgy stretch of of Chinatown East. The food is sometimes very good, it’s always reasonably priced and the waiter reminds me of Eddie Izzard, so I’m always happy to go there, as it does indeed live up to it’s billing of serving the “best french food in Chinatown.”
Extreme weather was predicted for Toronto that night and as we started to walk home after the meal it began to rain, slowly and in thick beautiful drops. It was romantic and fun, this. I kind of wanted to get caught in a torrential downpour, but I’m not sure that Rachelle was similarly inclined, and so we ended up kind of hurrying home and kind of not, as if playing a of game of chicken with the weather. It was probably around 10:00, and I felt like a child, out past bedtime, dawdling home at summer’s end. By the time we got back the rain had come in earnest and the thunder had begun to crack.
Dashing up the fire escape and into the apartment, locking the door as the wind picked-up and heavens broke, and then having a worried yet happy dog running to greet us, was a description of home and safety.
From the security of the bedroom we opened up the door onto the veranda, turned off all the lights, and watched the storm unfold beyond Queen Street. Never in my life had I seen an electrical storm of such intensity. It was beautiful, but it was scary, too, just as it should be– the sheets of lighting a constant strobe in the sky, the dog shivering in fear between us.
Watching the storm and feeling a sincere sense of awe and gratitude, I was given to think of change. The weather itself is an example, it’s evolved n my lifetime and it seems clear to me that an era of extreme and unpredictable climate change is upon is. And so it goes. We’re all in a surging river and we can’t grab hold to that one branch and then kick furiously against the stream to sustain our golden days for eternity. The weather changes. Whether we want it or not, we’re pushed along by forces we can’t control, and ever moving and turning corners, we love what we can, be they the moments small or large.