People who use their eyes to receive information about the world are called sighted. Sighted people are accustomed to viewing the world in visual terms. In many situations they will not be able to communicate orally and may resort to pointing or other gesturing. Subtle facial expressions may also be used to convey feelings in social situations.

Prepare the sighted person for his or her surroundings by speaking slowly in a normal tone of voice.

Questions directed at the sighted person help focus attention on verbal, rather then visual communication.

Ossington. I assume it’s named after some quaint village in England itself named after some quaint English Lord (is there any other kind?). Our neighbourhood revolves around Dundas and Ossington. Here you get the street car east to Yonge and the bus north to Bloor. Banks occupy two corners, a community centre the 3rd and a small drug store the 4th. Stand on the corner and you won’t see too many English gentlemen. Old men push carriages of empties to the Beer Store just down the street, old ladies heft big pieces of dried cod and buy-5-pounds-get-one-free sacks of ground beef. On certain summer weekends, the intersection jams with strange parades: there’s the parade consisting mostly of flatbread trucks carrying not entirely sober fellows grilling sardines and drinking beer; the parade of souped up sports cars waving Brazilian flags and endlessly honking their horns; and a religious parade featuring children dressed in white waving crosses. It is all strange to me. I am an outsider. When I go the bakery they ask me what I want in Portugese and I’m too tongue-tied and flustered to point to the gorgeous rolls other customers acquire by the dozen. I blush and leave.

Actually I have a few brick image memories come to think of it. But this early, early memory has set me on a bit of a mild quest. I say mild because I don’t do any kind of active research I just take mental notes when I come across a bit that adds somehow to the image, the understanding, a kind of passive research, I suppose. This image has to do with a bricked street. It’s in some part of the city where there’s a little geography. Its an uphill curve. I don’t know why I think of it as uphill when I suppose it could just as easily be thought of as downhill. It may have to do with an adjustment to the memory when I was told years later that a few hilly streets in Toronto were bricked so that horses could get traction as they hauled wagons uphill. I am loath to admit at this point that I actually have a memory or two of milk being delivered by horse and wagon. The scary edge of this particular pastoral memory has been somewhat dulled recently when I learned that during wartime, to save on fuel some delivery had reverted to horsepower and that the practice continued for quite a while after the war had ended. I think the delivery people became quite attached to the pace and the fact that they were inadvertent local heroes mobbed as they were by children trying to feed and pet the horses and pestering the driver to choose some one fortunate child among the gaggle to help with the reins for a portion of the route. At any rate I think we must have been visiting cousins in the east end perhaps the beaches. There are certain streets in those neighbourhoods that seem to have that same combination of hilly and curved. Wherever these streets are, I imagine that the bricks are still under the asphalt. That would have been the most cost effective way to deal with changing traction requirements.

In the Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan was working out ideas about literary and pre literary conceptions of time The discrete units of the alphabetic mode relate somehow but I’m not quite ready to understand it intellectually I first want to indulge my poetic connection between bricks and memory. Here’s McLuhan:

Homogeneity, uniformity, repeatability, these are basic component notes of a visual world newly emergent from an audile-tactile matrix. Such components the Greeks used as a bridge from present to past, but not from present to future. Van Groningen writes: “The Greek knows and the oriental knows not, how uncertain the future is; an undisturbed past and a prosperous present are in no way a guarantee of a happy future. So we can only value a human life . . . when it has become a complete past, at man’s death, as with Tellus the Athenian.”

Its audience would – and should -- be those interested in material culture and its broader significance: reflective architects, engineers and designers; teachers in those fields at universities, community colleges and art & design colleges, as well as enlightened schoolteachers dealing with design; and students in those areas. It would also include those with an interest -- academic or lay -- in the history of science and technology, as well as those engaged at the public policy level in issues that affect material production of the environment, i.e. civil servants dealing with planning, urban development, federal land sales, and conservation. The audience would also include those with an interest, academic or lay, in the social sciences from an interdisciplinary point of view regarding environmental issues, and in globalization in its physical effects.