Friday, December 02, 2005

The Urban Soup (Part IV)

Middle of the day. Uptown. I'm wandering the old neighbourhood. Squat buildings containing laundromats, convenience stores, pizza joints, Russian bakeries, billiard halls, Chinese take-out. It is drizzling nad I"m thinking where everyone is and I feel humbled by the energy that goes into making a city's etire population migrate every single weekday from their houses to their work sites: their boring laundromats, scaffolds, counters, bars, lecture theatres, street sweepers. And it occurs to me that I'm back in high school, walking past a neighbourhood where I can remember some non-heroic exploit on every few meters of street. Here is the corner I stood and brooded over gummi cokes; there the building with the strange homoerotic sauna; there my home for two years, a little further down the block another of my homes; around the corner we find the pre-penultimate. You have to be willing to relocate in this town. I stroll past the hills I used to toboggan down as a wee lad and I look up at the tenth-floor window where more often that not I obseved children play, from where I saw car crashes, lighning, the attenuated constellations and wondered at the lives of the people in the building facing us. I remember the living room where my brother almost died from choking on a grape; I remember the benighted hallways and mail slots; I remember the community pool where prurient boys chased less prurient girls and occassionally succeeded in tearing off an article of clothing. Ovelooking that is the apartment where the grandparents lived and watched, far above the parking lot where one time a young driver plowed a car into my uncle's near-dead jalopy and we stood arguing with them, in front of the stairs where the paramedics rushed up when my grandmother had some sort of fainting spell or cardiac arrhythmia. I walk down the laneways I walked with my friends, humming Beatles songs from time to time (we only knew two), thinking of the way to school and all our secret shortcuts to the schoolyard that taught me English and taught me to swear and one time the tough kid just kept punching the portable until his hand bled and the portable was minimally dented. I recall the time we played our first game of tag on the rickety wooden structure and for the first time we allowed girls to participate. I stutted and shimmied down the beams and down the metal pole and up the rope dealy. I knew who I was chasing: always had a thing for Asian girls, especally ones who gave me cookies. Nowadays I find them no different, but that was then: I was young and in a new world: literally a new world. I could just as well have languished in some ditch in some unknown town in Eastern Europe, poking snakes all my life. But I digress. The school I remember, but I also remember the walk from school: the lawns trampled where they meet the sidewalk because we always walked three to a sidewalk, where we dallied and my grandmother would urge us to hurry up in broken English and we laughed at her. At home we'd play the Nintendo or whatever was available: I always preferred the open-ended games. And they have the temerity to call them the projects! To consider our neighbourhood the wrong side of the tracks! (Literally: there is ahighway that divides our immigrant hive cluster of apartment buildings from the well-off area of sprawling, waste-of-space houses. I pass those blocks quietly; I reach a sort of philosopher's walk where I always did my first halting thinking. That's how I thought: not in books, not in class, but on this path. School was simple and well-defined: this was the real thing in all its complexity. But I didn't put it that way back then. Then I climb on the subway and flee back downtown to just as much squalor and just as much living.

Native American Proverb: "With all things and in all things, we are relatives."

4 Comments:

Blogger Y said...

Beautiful stuff.
Almost shed a tear. almost.
Finals always make me so nostalgic too.:(

8:32 PM  
Blogger A. D. said...

And how...

Too young for actual life experience, but old enough to be nostalgic. So it goes.

By the way, I wanted to comment on something you posted, but your posting system seems to be not working. Them's the breaks, I guess. (What I wanted to write can be summarize as "very true", plus or minus a few gimmicks.)

Cheers!

8:09 PM  
Blogger Minimalism Fanaticism said...

good prose. i miss toronto.

1:53 AM  
Blogger Y said...

Um..don't know what is wrong with my comments settings.
But thanks.., guess I'll miss the few gimmicks though.:/

12:29 PM  

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