Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

1 comment(s)

For an unreconstructed Hog Town boy like me, the streetcar ride from Toronto's western reaches to its eastern beaches is a 45-minute sojourn down memory lane. Moments in time flash bright and bittersweet lasting only long enough to recall a smell, a taste, the way the light fell on a particular corner on a certain spring day so many years ago.

Easter is a good time to rediscover the roots of things and ponder the ineffable quality of experience. There, at Jarvis and King, is where I missed my transfer and thus was late on my first day of work in 1984. There, at Greenwood and Queen, is the cockroach-infested flat I rented for my wife and two little girls when I was barely 25.

Was I ever that young? My eldest daughter is a year older now than I was then. Her mother and I stayed with her this past weekend in an extraordinarily well-appointed apartment near Roncesvalles and Dundas. She works nearly full time and still manages to do graduate work in early childhood education. She rises at six in the morning and retires before midnight. She seems happy.

That she is tough, motivated and wise beyond her years is indisputable. She, like many of her peers struggling to build a life, puts the lie to the assertion that the current crop of young Torontonians is spoiled, shiftless and callow. And it makes me wonder how many other assumptions about the nation's largest city and its four million people are plainly, absurdly wrong.

I have always liked streetcars if only because the view of the curb is clear, and a city's curbs don't lie. This time, passing slowly through Toronto's financial district, I imagined the glittering towers of steel and glass as other tourists might: bold monuments for a boastful, big-shouldered metropolis. But as I moved across the Don River into the Chinatowns and Little Indias, through the Russian and Polish quarters, past the Irish pubs and Korean grocers, I saw a different type of urbanity: one that was desperate, hungry, wily, hard-scrabble.

This is the Toronto of my own youth, hardly changed. It's strange that I had forgotten so much of it. After all, the storefront gym was right where I left it, next to the mom and pop video outlet. A few blocks north was the bar that once, decades ago, banned me for some stupid indiscretion involving a toilet seat and a jar of pickled eggs.

On the long ride home, back to my kid's place, I scanned the front page of the Globe and Mail, there to observe Finance Minister Jim Flaherty wailing away on Ontario's Liberal government. According to the report, "he made a special trip to Toronto, where he made a dire prediction about the prospects for Canada's largest economy under the McGuinty government. Without tax cuts, he warned, Ontario is in jeopardy of becoming a 'have-not' province for the first time in history."

I chuckled at the sheer audacity of the statement, coming as it did on the eve of the provincial budget. The implication was clear: Ontario, and its flagship city, is the author of its own misfortunes. It deserves no sympathy or understanding from the rest of Canada. It has committed the sin of failing to live up to the expectations others have of it as a monolithic money machine. And for this, it will be (nay, should be) punished by the gods who run the free market system, tucked away in their cosmic counting houses.

Yea verily, I mused. Woe betide the "haves" who squander their reputations, for they shall have not, so sayeth Lord Flaherty who's never spent a minute on a Toronto streetcar unless accompanied by a camera crew from the 11 o'clock news. Oh well, what are you going to do about a man whose government considers everything outside Alberta suspiciously un-Canadian?

My stop arrived, and I stepped lightly towards the warm welcome that I knew waited for me. I turned the corner and stood, for a moment, outside my daughter's house. The setting sun cast a familiar glimmer on the front stoop, and I began to think of home -- hers there, and mine back in Moncton.

It struck me, like a memory, how much alike they really were.

n Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer. His column appears in this space every Tuesday and Thursday. He can be reached via: www.thebrucereport.com