Day two – 1: Opening: It’s the little things that make a difference. In this case, it’s tulips and pineapple
Day two – 2: A film reel salvaged from the old Uptown Theatre. Digital will make this obsolete
Day two – 3: Having a non-corporate beer before “The Corporation”
Day two – 4: It’s curtains

It was the coldest day I can remember, and it’s settling in to be the coldest night. The air is bladelike, and it jimmies itself into the streetcar which is rumbling up Spadina Avenue, and wedges in around the windows and doors. The passengers are yawning in the cold, and their eyes are small and hard. Eight-thirty.

The frigid air baffles every sound and makes noises sharp and clear and close enough to be constantly surprising. When you open your mouth, you end up talking too loud. And so everybody’s keeping mum. The streetcar sighs along through the freezing blackness.

But there’s one young woman, unabashed by the silent cold, who breaks the ice with her cell phone: “I’m on the streetcar!” she yells at somebody, her voice splintering the night.

Having awakened her vocal chords and found them whole, she begins to address the assembled passengers. She is a big girl, heavy and physically eventful, like a fruit loaf, with a wide happy face and eyes like wet raisins. And she has this dog on a leash, a rubbed little blur of a dog I had not noticed before, blackish, greyish, dishwatery, and shaped like a bottle brush. George Johnson’s poem leaps into my mind: about a man who’s got a dog that‘s “long and sort of pointed wrong”.

This wrongly pointed dog sniffs petulantly at a woman sitting in a single seat across from the door—sniffs and clearly finds her wanting. “He’s starved for attention”, the big girl explains happily, even pridefully. “See, I was unemployed, and I used to stay home with him all the time and I’d be with him, like ten hours a day! But now”, she looks at the woman with something like a plea for understanding in her eyes, “I’ve got this job, and he’s alone all the time.”

“Oh”, says the woman dully.

“His name is Fish”, the big girl says.

“Fish”, the woman repeats, trying to look out into the night and seeing only the big girl’s reflection sailing along over the dark houses.

“Would you like to buy him? The big girl asks. “I’d want five hundred dollars for him”. Then she turns to the rest us of us. “I wanted to put this, like outrageous price on him”, she explains to us all, “so like nobody would buy him? But I guess five hundred’s not really too harsh, right?” and she winks at us.

“His collar’s too tight”, says the seated woman.

The big girl laughs long and loud. “Not as tight as my fucking bra!!” she replies.

Market Gardening was a very important activity in the part of York Township called Bracondale. In fact, the city directory of 1899 lists 44 proprietors of market gardens in Bracondale. One of these was John MacNamara, the eldest son of Michael MacNamara and Bridget O’Dea of Kilmihill, County Clare, Ireland.

From photographs, we know that John grew corn, cabbages and rhubarb. His son, Francis Michael, who lived until 1979, told how each of John’s children was required to weed a row of carrots on the way to and from school.

In 1903, John sold the market garden to his four sons. They continued the operation after their father’s death in 1909, until the property was purchased by the Toronto Transportation Commission in 1921.

Jane MacNamara
Ontario Genealogical Society

PRECAMBRIAN ERA

PHANEROZOIC ERA

PALAEOZOIC ERA