markus64

Love Letter to the Danforth

I touched down in Toronto on December 30, 2000, thinking I would be here just one year. Almost 18 years later I’m still here, thanks partly to a neighbourhood named “the Danforth.”

I came to Toronto from Calgary for a one-year program at Humber College. Aside from an arboretum, Humber’s Rexdale Campus doesn’t boast much charm, unless industrial parks are your thing. In Calgary I lived near downtown on a street lined with restaurants, cafes and shops. Rexdale was a bit of a shock, but I knew nothing about Toronto, so it seemed easiest to stay in residence at Humber until I got my bearings. After six months I needed out. I asked for recommendations, and the same neighbourhood kept popping up: the Danforth. I answered a newspaper ad for a room (this was 2001, when advertisements were printed on dead trees) and found one just off Danforth Avenue.

It was a rooming house, with an odd assortment of characters: a Greyhound driver going through a divorce, a short order cook who disappeared in the middle of the night on his bicycle, and Ed, a busking classical guitarist and vegetarian, who despised vegetables: he survived on soy products, constant coffee during the day and NeoCitran to help him get to sleep. I worried Ed would get scurvy, but said nothing.

The Danforth was everything I needed: an eclectic people street, rough around the edges in parts, chi-chi in others. It still had a strong Hellenic presence from its time as the centre of the Greek community, even though most of the Greeks had bugged out long go for suburbia. I taught myself the Greek alphabet so I could read the signs in shop windows, including everything from the octopod in the fish store to the galaktoboureko in dessert shops.

The Danforth became home, from the hippie shop selling patchouli and wispy dresses, to the organic food market, to the pub with the sign outside that shouted “Put tzatziki on it!” Roaming the back streets lined with old brick houses and their neat little gardens was positively therapeutic. Walking and discovering all its hidden gems was like a full-time hobby.

I moved out of the Danforth after a year and a half. Past a certain point, you need an apartment of your own, not a rotating cast of eccentrics you share a bathroom with, but the Danforth will always be Toronto for me. Whether it’s a visit to my doctor and dentist, stocking up on remainders at my favourite bookstore or just seeing what’s changed, it’s the heart of my Toronto.

That’s why I know it’ll bounce back from the shootings that happened in July. These things leave a scar. I know that. I also know the Danforth is the place that showed me it’s possible to have a community in a big, sometimes cold, often indifferent city of six million. That’s why it has the capacity to recover in a way that other places don’t. Communities have an identity, a cohesion that comes with being more than just a name on a map. They’re more than a place to sleep and pick up your mail: they’re places you’re a part of, which become a part of you.

I’m going to the Danforth’s annual street festival, like I do each year. My wife doesn’t get it: she tells me I can get the same stuff without being jostled by a million people, but that’s actually why I go. It’s not like I can’t get ortiki, little grilled quails, at a bunch of places along the strip 364 days a year. There’s a bunch of pastry shops where you can find galaktoboureko and baklava done a dozen different ways, and you don’t have to wait for the one weekend each year when half the city floods the street to get some.

I want to go when that craziness is happening, now more than ever. I actually like that part. The place has changed since I lived there: it’s less Greek than ever, I see more “for lease” signs than 17 years ago, and the old movie theatre has become a concert venue. But its core hasn’t changed: it’s a community, one I still want to be a part of, even for just a few days a year. And now – more than ever – I feel like I want to support it as it bounces back from tragedy, even though I’ll only be a small drop in an ocean of humanity. That’s important to me on some silly, sentimental level, because I still have a connection with that place. I always will.

It’s why I love the Danforth.

Subway Meditations

From the vaults: I no longer suffer from a 90-minute commute, but I look fondly back on my TTC Zen. Relive it with me.

People stare. I’m sure of it. How can they not? I’m just sitting there, eyes closed, clearly not asleep but clearly not part of the hermetical little world hurtling down the subway tracks. My head isn’t drooping incrementally the way it does with those suffering from insufficient sleep, jerking spasmodically up when their chins hit their chests. No, I’m sitting there as quiet and motionless as a dresser’s mannequin. My eyes are shut for what must seem like no good reason to the casual observer. Little do they know I’m secretly meditating.

I have no choice. Most mornings for the last 17 years it’s been my practice to meditate for 20 minutes before heading out the door. It started after a particularly long, dark night of the soul in ‘99 as a kind of new year’s resolution. I was introduced to the fundamentals in karate class as a seven-year-old, and picked up the rest of what I needed to know from books. In the intervening years it’s become an essential start to my day, a check-in and a chance to focus, to inventory how I’m feeling, to balance my mind before the day starts, and to bring my awareness wherever it feels it needs to go.

Unfortunately, my 90-minute commute means I get up far earlier than any night owl should have to. That means economizing time, which means an extra 20 minutes to meditate at home each morning is a luxury I can rarely squeeze in. What does that leave me? A focused 15 minutes on the shaky, rattling, noisy tin can rocketing northward through The Big Smoke each morning.

How it’s possible to meditate with all those distractions is a paradox: the distractions actually help maintain focus. Without the swaying and clickety-clacking, snatches of conversation, acceleration, deceleration and station announcements, it’s easy to get distracted by “monkey mind,” as people far more zen than I refer to it: that propensity for your brain to become aware that you’re trying to focus and chill out, and thus start thinking about what you’re doing, making associations, leaps, observations and worse. Before you know it you’re remembering to pick up Drano on the way home, worrying about your 9:15 presentation, reliving how good the strawberries were at breakfast and hey – how did I end up mental miles away all of a sudden?

The stimuli provided by the Toronto Transit Commission mean the gears in my brain suffering from a deficit of attention have something to chew on besides themselves. That makes it possible to focus, to remember what I’m doing and then to let it go. Simply being able to manage those distractions is a useful practice in and of itself.

So there I sit, eyes shut, looking sightlessly across the car, bag on my lap, hands crossed over top just in case anyone decides to try lifting something (it hasn’t happened yet). I’ve only got so many minutes before St. Clair station, when the train will likely make a short turn back downtown, forcing everyone off. So I have to make the most of the time I have, which provides an extra incentive to focus. And so I begin.

10 – 9 – 8 (“The next station is St. Andrew – St. Andrew station.”) 7 – 6 – 5 (Someone sits down next to me) 4 – 3 – 2 (Is that garlic? Who has garlic for breakfast?). 1. Repeat.

On a bad day I’m too frazzled to really calm that monkey mind and prepare for the day. Maybe a kid sits down next to me with some exceptionally bad death metal bleeding out of his earbuds. Maybe this is the one train in ten where the P.A. is exceedingly loud (“THE NEXT STATIONS IS ST. ANDREW – ST. ANDREW STATION!”). Maybe the guy who just sat down next to me really should have taken that shower he skipped this morning.

Or maybe the distractions are just right, and I can tune out the monkey mind and wipe the slate clean for another day.

Relax. Focus. Reset. Commute.

One of the Luckiest Men in the World

There’s a certain cliche you hear every time a guy gets married: “I’m the luckiest man in the world!” I hate cliches; journalism school rung them out of me. The only time I’ll use a cliche is when it’s true. That’s why – and I’ll qualify it slightly so you don’t think I’m exaggerating – I’m one of the luckiest men in the world.

Finding the right woman in your 40s is not easy. In fact, most of the time it feels damn near impossible. By the time you reach your 40s, you’ve gone through years of dating hits and misses: countless hours spent scouring online dating sites, going to parties and social events when you’d really rather just be at home chilling with Netflix, using every means at your disposal to meet people so that maybe – just maybe – you find that one girl.

The struggle is real. It’s not like being back in college where you’re swimming in a sea of potential. Every year you get older, that sea seems to get shallower and shallower. But you keep going out to those parties, professional events, social events, an occasional date with someone who looks and acts nothing like their “OkCupid” profile, and after a while, maybe you start to lose hope. After a while, maybe you start to accept the idea that you’re just meant to be alone. That might be the way it was meant to be, and maybe that’s not so bad after all: the new season of House of Cards is coming up, and home alone with the dog and a bag of Doritos seems not so bad after all. Or so you tell yourself.

But then maybe – just maybe – you get invited to another party, an ordinary birthday party for a friend. “I don’t want to go!” you tell yourself. And then you think about it a little more. “Ah, I’ll go. But I’m not dressing up; I’ve had enough of trying. I’m just going to throw on a hoodie, some jeans and sneakers.” And you go. You chat for a few hours with friends, and just as you’re getting up to leave, maybe you see someone… someone pretty. Someone who, as it turns out, has a real personality. “Oh, hey. How you doing?” (Opening lines are not everyone’s forte). After another couple of hours of unplanned interaction, you say “Hey, let’s connect on Facebook because – you know – professional networking and such. No pressure. No big deal. We’re cool. Yeah. See you later.” You don’t want to seem too eager.

You go on a few dates and get to know her. She’s smart, whip smart. She has a serious job. And she likes Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Check, check and check! You go on some more dates, things start to get a little serious, and one day you say, “I love you,” and she says “I loke you.” “Loke?” What does that mean, “I loke you?” She explains that it’s halfway between “I like you” you and “I love you.” At that point you realize that perhaps things are going more slowly than you had at first anticipated. But that’s ok; you can wait. You think, potentially, this is worth waiting for.

And then one day, many weeks later, she says “I love you” back, and we are no longer in Lokeland. But things aren’t all rose petals and unicorns. Your combined age is over 80, and thus you’re both very set in your ways. Like the way she wants you to rotate where you sit on her sofa so the wear pattern evens out over time. Or the way the spice jars in your place need to be kept in a certain order that reflects which ones are used more, because that actually makes sense and results in maximum spice efficiency. All these little things that couples have to get used to about each other are the same, but by the time you’re in your 40s they’ve had 20 years to set like concrete. Sometimes it is murder letting go of all those things you’re used to, all those things you think you need to be a certain way for you.

But here’s the important part: you make it work, because in the end being with her is more important than just about anything else you can think of, and you know she’s the best thing to happen to you in a very long time. One day, many months later, you pop the question and she says yes, and then proceeds to tell everyone how nervous and dorky you were popping the question. And eventually you find yourself in a room full of people explaining how lucky you are, because in spite of all the years of being alone and all the looking and striking out and dating blind alleys, and people looking and acting nothing like their “OkCupid” profiles, you stumbled across someone whip smart and beautiful and successful and stubborn and driven and frustrating and challenging and rewarding and the whole nine yards. Somehow, against all odds, you found her.

Which is why I’m one of the luckiest men in the world.