At the Annex Hodgepodge a large middle-aged woman sat at a table, her face glowing faintly from her tiny laptop. She had a sheaf of papers beside her, all marked with a surprisingly girlish script and it looked like maybe she was tracing her family ancestry, or at least, looked like a woman who might enjoy doing that. She liked Heidi, our Miniature Dachshund, and began to talk to us. The dog shook her head from side to side, making that ear flapping sound. “Oh,” the woman said,” I grew up with dogs. I love that sound, it reminds me of home!” and her eyes were so wanting to tell a longer story.
A man was walking quickly along Dupont. Moving away from the liquor store he was carrying two bags. As the dog and I approached him he stopped, putted the bags down, clenching and unclenching his hands, rolling his shoulders. I said, “getting heavy, eh?” He gave me a very unfriendly look, “yes,” and then he picked them up again and hurried into a waiting white van.
As we passed south on Madison I saw a ne’er do well teenager sitting on a stone fence that lined a property. He wore a lumberjack shirt, was smoking a cigarette and had a look of callous indifference to the world that sends shudders of fear and loathing through parents across the world. Suddenly, as if breaking free of something, a girl in a vivid, red bathrobe came sprinting out of the house toward the boy– her thin, pale legs flashing in the light as she ran and then jumped, like a feral creature escaping, onto the fence beside the boy.
In Yorkville there were almost pretty girls with unnatural tans standing on the sidewalk texting–sour, troubled looks on their faces as they waited for their delinquent lunch dates. Just in front of the Bay Street Subway station two people were being arrested by the police. I watched for a moment, and then grew embarrassed and hurried along into the city where across Avenue, Heidi and I fell in step with two beautiful people dressed in perfect black. They looked like a movie star couple, the woman smoking behind sunglasses and emitting a lofty unfriendliness, the man’s nose literally upturned. I hoped that they might be drawn to the warmth of a dog, but they ignored us and moved swift and important across the street, disappearing into the lives that awaited within Morton’s Steak House. A block or two along, a lunch-drunk young couple came smiling and laughing out of the Duke of York Pub, and then my favourite moment, a solitary girl in a white toque smiling to herself, happy with the Christmas purchase she had just made and carrying it home like the prize it was, delighting in how it might spill out into the life it was destined for.
