Working late, I look out over the street, over what I can see of my city. The storm’s subsided. The snow strikes a new ground and horizon. Black asphalt is now white. The performers of modern life are gone, and the emptiness is monumental.

1972 Fall: Holly Hobbie doll

1973 Winter: left mitten

1974 Toronto Islands, Summer: green plastic shovel and right flip flop

When my cousin Shiraz is in town we head for the Kensington Market to absorb its exciting sights, smells and sounds. We leisurely walk the streets picking up some groceries and checking out the vintage wear. You never know what to expect in such places.

We decided to get out of the cold and have some wantons in a local Chinese restaurant. The front window displays meats and fowl hung under bright heatlamps. I have often shown up after hours and still been able to order from a full menu supplemented with ‘special tea’ - beer disguised in a tea pot.

As we were enjoying our soup, Shiraz’s face froze gazing straight ahead. I turned to see a young farmer boy scribing past our shoulders as he carried 2 pigs slung one slung over each shoulder. He slowly shuffled passed the customers from the front door all the way along a narrow aisle to the kitchen in the back. No one else seemed to bat an eye.

That same day we were walking up Augusta Street where most of the houses used the main level and front yards for retailing vintage clothes and nik naks. We came across a sign on a front door with a painted sign of Chinese character and a $4 on newsprint taped to the door. We felt curious so we opened the door and walked into what was an emptied living room with 2 plastic chairs against the wall and a floor covered with loose newspaper for ground cover around a wooden chair.

A little boy came into room playing with a plastic truck. He called to his father who entered the room with a pair of scissors. ‘four dollar’ he said gesturing to the chair. I pointed to Shiraz. Amused, he sat on the plastic patio chair surrounded by a mat of newsprint on the floor. They hardly spoke a word.
He just said ‘good! gesturing thumbs up when he wanted him to stop. The whole experience was very strange.

We listened to the trains from our bed. Always your body next to mine, as the sound of that long shadow moved through its corridor of blackness, crossing the city. The trains cut through bedrooms and back yards, through heat and snow, sleep and sleeplessness. Often we were already awake and imagined the number of boxcars, and what they carried - as the months went by, ever more exotic cargo. We imagined all the towns brought into boom by the laying of the rails, all those that gradually vanished because the rails passed them by.

On summer nights we lay in your dark garden, limbs still hot in the impossibly cold grass, as the whistle found its way to us, through the sound of the leaves, through moonlight. Weaving through the summer night neighbourhood noises of air conditioners and barking dogs, shouting games and night tag, and the metal lids of trashcans circling the sidewalk as raccoons cast them aside with one swipe of a paw. Every night the trains came, passing straight through that particular empty station of the heart, where some part of us longs to follow and is left behind.