Monday, November 9, 2009
(11) Parkdale Huge Tree Poem
King of summer,
at the corner of King & Bummer.
So dark green, you're black inside.
(10) Transit Shelter
“I was architecture student, in Montreal. Judge, he tell me leave, get out of Montreal and don’ come back. I got in argument wid a Haitian guy. So I push him. He fall back and hit his head on a curb but den he jump up, pull out a gun and shoot me, den he fall down dead.”
“Oh yeah?” I said.
I thought of how in Toronto there’s a rule-of-thumb that only weirdoes talk to strangers, so if a stranger is talking to you then they must be a weirdo.
“Yeah,” he said.
This guy was 22 or so, husky; wearing track pants the colour of old city snow at twilight with a black hoodie over several t-shirts. He was standing with a dirty blue knapsack and a squeegee at his boots. He had on a black touque with the Canadian National logo on it, all around the touque a fringe of blonde hair hung down.
I had just stepped into the transit shelter at Bathurst and Queen. It stood beside the snow bank like a discarded aquarium, as grimy as the rest of the street. I looked up and there was his round face. Beside us was a sub shop, up ahead were the steps of an old bank where First Nations guys hang out all year, begging, sleeping, drinking, fighting.
“So I come to Toronto.”
I had no reason to disbelieve. Theoretically, it was possible. The Haitian guy might have had enough adrenaline, blood pressure, pride and anger in him after cracking his skull to get up and pull a trigger even though he was basically dead, a zombie. Shit happens in Montreal. I didn’t know what to say.
He just wanted to have a conversation. He was in the aftermath of a fateful moment. Me, I was an office worker on the way home. In general, I thought I might be going somewhere. I drank Starbuck’s coffee twice a day and worked at a publishing company off King Street.
I came out of the lobby into the cold and started walking west, toward Queen and Brock. The sidewalks were a mess. Millions of rough little rocks of salt lay everywhere, rolling and crunching under my boots all the way. After a block or so my girlfriend called me on my cell to ask me to pick up rotis for dinner, we usually ran out of groceries by Friday. The rotis were in the big pocket across the front of my black nylon parka, two potato-and-chana nourishments in foil. We’d trade heat for the streetcar ride of a few minutes until I was home.
“I was in hospital,” he said.
And he’d been in custody for a full year. My rotis were going to be cold if I had to stand here a long time.
“Wow,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic in a low key and disinterested way.
“That Haitian guy, he was a badass. The judge say he believe me I didn’t on purpose kill the Haitian guy.”
“Good thing,” I said.
A beautiful girl walked by the transit shelter with her long navy blue hair under a Russian army hat with ear flaps. She was wearing a big coat that looked like she’d made it by skinning a red muppet. She had on knee-high black boots with thick laces criss-crossed up the back.
“Yeah,” he said.
My girlfriend doesn’t hate winter at all. Her family was loaded by the time she was born and she grew up skiing, driving SUVs, going to Florida, Bermuda, Mexico, Cuba. For me, the snow is nice at first then becomes a dirty old bandage. The days flicker by with the faulty exposure of a silent film and none of the scratchy charm. Daylight is just an interval either side of lunch.
There was a Dutch painter named Albert Jacques Frank who came to Toronto in the 1930s. He painted alleyways, grey wooden fencing and footpaths set against white; unpopulated works of silence insulated by snow. His Toronto of red brick and damp porch boards is still here if you care to look for it.
I guess it seemed like I didn’t believe him, or that I was indifferent. To be honest, I did want to get home. The squeegee kid took the hems of his hoodie and shirts and lifted them about twelve inches. Like I said, he was heavy, so his belly protruded bare into the cold air between us. Sure enough, he had a scar, entry and exit wounds that almost touched each other. They looked like a long whitish pair of upside down keyholes.
“Jeez,” I said.
The Long Branch streetcar pulled up. He stayed there in the transit shelter chewing. The roti steamed where he had bitten into it.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
“Oh yeah?” I said.
I thought of how in Toronto there’s a rule-of-thumb that only weirdoes talk to strangers, so if a stranger is talking to you then they must be a weirdo.
“Yeah,” he said.
This guy was 22 or so, husky; wearing track pants the colour of old city snow at twilight with a black hoodie over several t-shirts. He was standing with a dirty blue knapsack and a squeegee at his boots. He had on a black touque with the Canadian National logo on it, all around the touque a fringe of blonde hair hung down.
I had just stepped into the transit shelter at Bathurst and Queen. It stood beside the snow bank like a discarded aquarium, as grimy as the rest of the street. I looked up and there was his round face. Beside us was a sub shop, up ahead were the steps of an old bank where First Nations guys hang out all year, begging, sleeping, drinking, fighting.
“So I come to Toronto.”
I had no reason to disbelieve. Theoretically, it was possible. The Haitian guy might have had enough adrenaline, blood pressure, pride and anger in him after cracking his skull to get up and pull a trigger even though he was basically dead, a zombie. Shit happens in Montreal. I didn’t know what to say.
He just wanted to have a conversation. He was in the aftermath of a fateful moment. Me, I was an office worker on the way home. In general, I thought I might be going somewhere. I drank Starbuck’s coffee twice a day and worked at a publishing company off King Street.
I came out of the lobby into the cold and started walking west, toward Queen and Brock. The sidewalks were a mess. Millions of rough little rocks of salt lay everywhere, rolling and crunching under my boots all the way. After a block or so my girlfriend called me on my cell to ask me to pick up rotis for dinner, we usually ran out of groceries by Friday. The rotis were in the big pocket across the front of my black nylon parka, two potato-and-chana nourishments in foil. We’d trade heat for the streetcar ride of a few minutes until I was home.
“I was in hospital,” he said.
And he’d been in custody for a full year. My rotis were going to be cold if I had to stand here a long time.
“Wow,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic in a low key and disinterested way.
“That Haitian guy, he was a badass. The judge say he believe me I didn’t on purpose kill the Haitian guy.”
“Good thing,” I said.
A beautiful girl walked by the transit shelter with her long navy blue hair under a Russian army hat with ear flaps. She was wearing a big coat that looked like she’d made it by skinning a red muppet. She had on knee-high black boots with thick laces criss-crossed up the back.
“Yeah,” he said.
My girlfriend doesn’t hate winter at all. Her family was loaded by the time she was born and she grew up skiing, driving SUVs, going to Florida, Bermuda, Mexico, Cuba. For me, the snow is nice at first then becomes a dirty old bandage. The days flicker by with the faulty exposure of a silent film and none of the scratchy charm. Daylight is just an interval either side of lunch.
There was a Dutch painter named Albert Jacques Frank who came to Toronto in the 1930s. He painted alleyways, grey wooden fencing and footpaths set against white; unpopulated works of silence insulated by snow. His Toronto of red brick and damp porch boards is still here if you care to look for it.
I guess it seemed like I didn’t believe him, or that I was indifferent. To be honest, I did want to get home. The squeegee kid took the hems of his hoodie and shirts and lifted them about twelve inches. Like I said, he was heavy, so his belly protruded bare into the cold air between us. Sure enough, he had a scar, entry and exit wounds that almost touched each other. They looked like a long whitish pair of upside down keyholes.
“Jeez,” I said.
The Long Branch streetcar pulled up. He stayed there in the transit shelter chewing. The roti steamed where he had bitten into it.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
(9) The Major Star
He accepted our honorary doctorate in environmental sociology.
The Major Star arrived on campus for the award ceremony and we gave him a dark burgundy robe and mortar board with tassel. The weather was perfect. We all thought his smile was wonderful. As he began climbing to the stage to take his seat, we noticed the Major Star had no socks on.
Does it matter? the Major Star asked.
Well, the media is here, you’ll be front row and your bare ankles will show. You’ll be sitting there and the world will see no socks.
A professor from the awards committee, seated in the back, took off his socks. His wife suggested this and the socks were passed up, then along, to the Major Star. Regular brown dress socks. Hand-to-hand they travelled, like a hot dog at a ballgame.
The Dean and then the awards committee chairperson each gave a brief yet witty speech. A pipeline protest in British Columbia was mentioned. Dramatic pet rescues in New Orleans were highlighted.
When the Major Star took the podium he told a knock-knock doctor joke.
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Doctor. Doctor Who? No, doctor me!
Brie, pinot-noir, organic beer, locally-grown salads were available under a white tent for everyone invited. Instead of joining in, the Major Star rolled the burgundy robe, hat and loaner socks into a ball. He gave them to the first person walking by. Bare-ankles, he got in his limo and left.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
The Major Star arrived on campus for the award ceremony and we gave him a dark burgundy robe and mortar board with tassel. The weather was perfect. We all thought his smile was wonderful. As he began climbing to the stage to take his seat, we noticed the Major Star had no socks on.
Does it matter? the Major Star asked.
Well, the media is here, you’ll be front row and your bare ankles will show. You’ll be sitting there and the world will see no socks.
A professor from the awards committee, seated in the back, took off his socks. His wife suggested this and the socks were passed up, then along, to the Major Star. Regular brown dress socks. Hand-to-hand they travelled, like a hot dog at a ballgame.
The Dean and then the awards committee chairperson each gave a brief yet witty speech. A pipeline protest in British Columbia was mentioned. Dramatic pet rescues in New Orleans were highlighted.
When the Major Star took the podium he told a knock-knock doctor joke.
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Doctor. Doctor Who? No, doctor me!
Brie, pinot-noir, organic beer, locally-grown salads were available under a white tent for everyone invited. Instead of joining in, the Major Star rolled the burgundy robe, hat and loaner socks into a ball. He gave them to the first person walking by. Bare-ankles, he got in his limo and left.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
(8) Regret
The ultimate is to be able to say you don’t regret a thing. I think that’s fucked. It’s like this phoney standard. It’s like taking the standards of a rock star and applying them to your little life as an office clerk. Doesn’t work.
Besides, who’s asking you? If you don’t regret anything it means you haven’t lived, haven’t learned anything. Or you spent your life in a cave on Mars? If you don’t regret anything it means you set some standard out of thin air and then decided you passed it with flying colours.Pin that medal on if you want. People who say they never regret anything usually have done horrible things and, racing to the grave like the rest of us, rationalized it away. Or they are lying. I don’t regret my five divorces, my syphilis or starting World War III. Wow, big man.
We’re talking about the same kind of asshole mechanism as “I never apologize.”Fine, a lot of apologies are not meant. You bump someone with your briefcase in an elevator and you say sorry. Just a little convention of politeness, there’s no sorrow there. Pretty sad when everyone is so narcissistic, self absorbed, enthralled by economics, so speciated that we don’t understand each other except through gut wrenching confessions or ego-maniacal monologues.
What kind of asshole cuts themselves out of a mechanism that is designed to reduce conflict, or the bad effects thereof, in a world so burdened by it? Don’t we understand this even from the point of selfish self interest?
Grow up. Learn to apologize, pay attention to what you are doing, to the world around you. This might mean embracing your sorrow, but if you don’t, well, ...you’ll regret it.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
Besides, who’s asking you? If you don’t regret anything it means you haven’t lived, haven’t learned anything. Or you spent your life in a cave on Mars? If you don’t regret anything it means you set some standard out of thin air and then decided you passed it with flying colours.Pin that medal on if you want. People who say they never regret anything usually have done horrible things and, racing to the grave like the rest of us, rationalized it away. Or they are lying. I don’t regret my five divorces, my syphilis or starting World War III. Wow, big man.
We’re talking about the same kind of asshole mechanism as “I never apologize.”Fine, a lot of apologies are not meant. You bump someone with your briefcase in an elevator and you say sorry. Just a little convention of politeness, there’s no sorrow there. Pretty sad when everyone is so narcissistic, self absorbed, enthralled by economics, so speciated that we don’t understand each other except through gut wrenching confessions or ego-maniacal monologues.
What kind of asshole cuts themselves out of a mechanism that is designed to reduce conflict, or the bad effects thereof, in a world so burdened by it? Don’t we understand this even from the point of selfish self interest?
Grow up. Learn to apologize, pay attention to what you are doing, to the world around you. This might mean embracing your sorrow, but if you don’t, well, ...you’ll regret it.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
(7) Vlad the Landlord
I razzed Vlad about not repairing the brickwork on the garage for two years. Vlad was my landlord.
His people came from a cold cave in the mountains. They owned nothing but a small bag of onions, a wooden crucifix and a picture of Hitler. Life was hard.
Canada beckoned. There was so little in the villages anyway. Twenty years and Vlad was a multi-property landlord in the heart of sprawling Toronto, North America’s fifth largest city. He bought beaten Edwardian houses in assaulted neighbourhoods. Three storey properties, subdivided into rooms and smallish apartments.
I didn’t mind the genteel poverty, the immigrants, quirky artists, lunatics and student neighbours. Across the street was a giant chestnut tree that bloomed beautifully every spring. Vlad’s rents were slightly lower than average, too. I even got a little agriculture project going.
When they were knocking down Massey Harris I slipped around there one night with my friend’s pickup truck and brought back some scrap bricks. I used them to make a raised vegetable bed in the back yard and to edge a garden beside the door to my apartment at the side of the house. I put in potatoes, tomatoes, a half dozen corn plants, and kitchen herbs. Nothing too crazy, just a nice bit of creative urban gardening. This being Toronto, raccoons could be a problem; they’d get at my plants or go in the basement now and then. Vlad hated raccoons.
With Vlad’s tenants it ends badly most times. If Vlad was running a restaurant, say, or any other kind of business, he’d have gone out of business in the first five minutes. Tenants complain to the bylaw officers. They fine him sometimes but he isn’t capable of being a better landlord. His own house, I was there once, it’s a hundred years old, too. Held together by coats of paint and bits of wire.
“Steve, no good you live alone, why no start family?” His idea of a conversation starter. His social skills were about that good.
I did move out eventually. After Vlad murdered the second raccoon, I’d had enough. He used an open can of tuna and a porcelain dish with an inch of water in it. He cuts the end off an old extension cord, sits it in the water and plugs in the cord beside the furnace. One-hundred-and-ten volts.
Going to get my bike next morning, I thought the raccoon was asleep like a last-call drunk with his face resting on the bar. The electricals in the house were late Jazz Age. Vlad could have burned us to the ground. Why wouldn’t he just fix the rotting storm door at the back end of the basement?
It wasn’t that kind of operation, Vlad and Son. His son was big, creepy Peter with the overlapping history of criminal convictions and head injuries.
“Steve, every day I go church pray drugs. Drug ruin son’s life.”
Vlad would come around and bother me without calling. I always knew if he’d been in the place when I was at the magazine because it was like somebody walked around with an aromatherapy spritzer full of kolbassa juice.
Once, I was surfing the web and he knocks on the door. Time again for the annual pre-winter ritual wherein he drains the air from the steam heating system. The rads are huge cast iron things with decorative feet. Like the rest of the place, they’d be something if you scraped them and repaired them.
“Steve, why you always on computer, work so much?”
I told him he could go ahead with the rads and went back to my laptop. Pfffssssst, went the kitchen rad. Pfffssssst, went my tiny bathroom with the squeaky floorboard in front of the mirror. Vlad clumped into the hallway and pfffssssst went the hallway rad. He came into the living room and pfffssssst went the rad under the window.
“Vlad,” I said in annoyance.
He had my favourite coffee cup and was holding it to the steam valve. The cup was full of rusty black drainings, like a toxic latte.
“That’s my cup.” I said.
“Well, what else I use?”
One day, I came home from work and discovered he’d helped himself to half of the bricks I’d used for edging the garden. He took the bricks out of the ground and used them to repair the garage wall. The stucco had fallen off years before. Where there had been a dozen rotten bricks you could now see my scavenged bricks had been cemented in.
“Cheapskate,” I muttered.
Vlad was the subject of a lot of muttering. He never spent any money on anything. We asked him to repair kitchens, washrooms, drywall, running toilets, loose stairs, basement mould, the front door. He’d mumble something about the gypsies or the injustices of Communism or German occupation or Russian liberation or the ruthlessness of the partisans who hated both or how hard it was when he came here. He smelled like booze often enough to boot.
The garage was tumbledown, narrow. Inside was a grey 1979 Ford van. Inside the van was the even older lawn mower. When he or Peter would come over to cut the grass they’d open the garage door, pop the hood on the van and hook booster cables up. The van would roar into life and be driven forward enough so the side doors could be opened to get the lawn mower out. Reversing the process, they’d put it back.
The lawn mower would vomit blue puffs and the smoke used to hang in a layer over the yard and sidewalk. He should have just dumped the gasoline on the grass and burned it off.
I whipped out my phone and gave Vlad a piece of my mind about the bricks. I sounded mad and was righteously glad I to. Vlad was an idiot.“Why’d you take the damn bricks from my garden?”
When I got home next day and was unlocking the door, I could see Vlad had been there. There was a row of brand new, factory-fresh bricks stuck in the ground around my garden.
That night I was in bed reading a copy of Wallpaper magazine. The lights flickered. I figure that’s when the raccoon went for the tuna.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
His people came from a cold cave in the mountains. They owned nothing but a small bag of onions, a wooden crucifix and a picture of Hitler. Life was hard.
Canada beckoned. There was so little in the villages anyway. Twenty years and Vlad was a multi-property landlord in the heart of sprawling Toronto, North America’s fifth largest city. He bought beaten Edwardian houses in assaulted neighbourhoods. Three storey properties, subdivided into rooms and smallish apartments.
I didn’t mind the genteel poverty, the immigrants, quirky artists, lunatics and student neighbours. Across the street was a giant chestnut tree that bloomed beautifully every spring. Vlad’s rents were slightly lower than average, too. I even got a little agriculture project going.
When they were knocking down Massey Harris I slipped around there one night with my friend’s pickup truck and brought back some scrap bricks. I used them to make a raised vegetable bed in the back yard and to edge a garden beside the door to my apartment at the side of the house. I put in potatoes, tomatoes, a half dozen corn plants, and kitchen herbs. Nothing too crazy, just a nice bit of creative urban gardening. This being Toronto, raccoons could be a problem; they’d get at my plants or go in the basement now and then. Vlad hated raccoons.
With Vlad’s tenants it ends badly most times. If Vlad was running a restaurant, say, or any other kind of business, he’d have gone out of business in the first five minutes. Tenants complain to the bylaw officers. They fine him sometimes but he isn’t capable of being a better landlord. His own house, I was there once, it’s a hundred years old, too. Held together by coats of paint and bits of wire.
“Steve, no good you live alone, why no start family?” His idea of a conversation starter. His social skills were about that good.
I did move out eventually. After Vlad murdered the second raccoon, I’d had enough. He used an open can of tuna and a porcelain dish with an inch of water in it. He cuts the end off an old extension cord, sits it in the water and plugs in the cord beside the furnace. One-hundred-and-ten volts.
Going to get my bike next morning, I thought the raccoon was asleep like a last-call drunk with his face resting on the bar. The electricals in the house were late Jazz Age. Vlad could have burned us to the ground. Why wouldn’t he just fix the rotting storm door at the back end of the basement?
It wasn’t that kind of operation, Vlad and Son. His son was big, creepy Peter with the overlapping history of criminal convictions and head injuries.
“Steve, every day I go church pray drugs. Drug ruin son’s life.”
Vlad would come around and bother me without calling. I always knew if he’d been in the place when I was at the magazine because it was like somebody walked around with an aromatherapy spritzer full of kolbassa juice.
Once, I was surfing the web and he knocks on the door. Time again for the annual pre-winter ritual wherein he drains the air from the steam heating system. The rads are huge cast iron things with decorative feet. Like the rest of the place, they’d be something if you scraped them and repaired them.
“Steve, why you always on computer, work so much?”
I told him he could go ahead with the rads and went back to my laptop. Pfffssssst, went the kitchen rad. Pfffssssst, went my tiny bathroom with the squeaky floorboard in front of the mirror. Vlad clumped into the hallway and pfffssssst went the hallway rad. He came into the living room and pfffssssst went the rad under the window.
“Vlad,” I said in annoyance.
He had my favourite coffee cup and was holding it to the steam valve. The cup was full of rusty black drainings, like a toxic latte.
“That’s my cup.” I said.
“Well, what else I use?”
One day, I came home from work and discovered he’d helped himself to half of the bricks I’d used for edging the garden. He took the bricks out of the ground and used them to repair the garage wall. The stucco had fallen off years before. Where there had been a dozen rotten bricks you could now see my scavenged bricks had been cemented in.
“Cheapskate,” I muttered.
Vlad was the subject of a lot of muttering. He never spent any money on anything. We asked him to repair kitchens, washrooms, drywall, running toilets, loose stairs, basement mould, the front door. He’d mumble something about the gypsies or the injustices of Communism or German occupation or Russian liberation or the ruthlessness of the partisans who hated both or how hard it was when he came here. He smelled like booze often enough to boot.
The garage was tumbledown, narrow. Inside was a grey 1979 Ford van. Inside the van was the even older lawn mower. When he or Peter would come over to cut the grass they’d open the garage door, pop the hood on the van and hook booster cables up. The van would roar into life and be driven forward enough so the side doors could be opened to get the lawn mower out. Reversing the process, they’d put it back.
The lawn mower would vomit blue puffs and the smoke used to hang in a layer over the yard and sidewalk. He should have just dumped the gasoline on the grass and burned it off.
I whipped out my phone and gave Vlad a piece of my mind about the bricks. I sounded mad and was righteously glad I to. Vlad was an idiot.“Why’d you take the damn bricks from my garden?”
When I got home next day and was unlocking the door, I could see Vlad had been there. There was a row of brand new, factory-fresh bricks stuck in the ground around my garden.
That night I was in bed reading a copy of Wallpaper magazine. The lights flickered. I figure that’s when the raccoon went for the tuna.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
(6) The Stupid Shoes
Spring rolled around and she began to agonize over shoes. Lydia, my friend and neighbour, that is. Organic cork soles, tempting criss-cross straps, just a bunch of really killer shoe stuff started going on in her mind.
Now, Lydia is a starving artist and amateur opera singer. I got to know her because she’d practice scales, sing entire scenes outside during the summer. Not something you expect when sitting on the fire escape reading the paper with a coffee unless someone like Lydia moves to your street.
She couldn’t afford a whole lot of shoe lust. Lydia’s student loans were as big as ever ten years after they were acquired. I gathered there was romantic trouble as well. Instead of the usual choruses of Verdi I heard the final fight, with a local radio DJ, one afternoon. Talk about having a face for radio.
The major purchase the shoes would require was denied several times and then acted upon impulsively, like a spare doughnut. I’ve bought good used motorcycles for less money.
Sure, the shoes looked fantastic. She told me they felt even better. The shoes were also stupid.
First day out, the unfamiliar heels, soles and calf-flattering straps caused a stumble. Lydia tried to recover and whacked her left big toe straight into a curb in Kensington Market. I had to take the truck down to the hospital and give her a lift home. I also took her for groceries once and drove her to her physiotherapist twice that summer.
For a month, the only shoes that she could put on, because of the pain and swelling, were the stupid shoes.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
Now, Lydia is a starving artist and amateur opera singer. I got to know her because she’d practice scales, sing entire scenes outside during the summer. Not something you expect when sitting on the fire escape reading the paper with a coffee unless someone like Lydia moves to your street.
She couldn’t afford a whole lot of shoe lust. Lydia’s student loans were as big as ever ten years after they were acquired. I gathered there was romantic trouble as well. Instead of the usual choruses of Verdi I heard the final fight, with a local radio DJ, one afternoon. Talk about having a face for radio.
The major purchase the shoes would require was denied several times and then acted upon impulsively, like a spare doughnut. I’ve bought good used motorcycles for less money.
Sure, the shoes looked fantastic. She told me they felt even better. The shoes were also stupid.
First day out, the unfamiliar heels, soles and calf-flattering straps caused a stumble. Lydia tried to recover and whacked her left big toe straight into a curb in Kensington Market. I had to take the truck down to the hospital and give her a lift home. I also took her for groceries once and drove her to her physiotherapist twice that summer.
For a month, the only shoes that she could put on, because of the pain and swelling, were the stupid shoes.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
(5) The Battle of Lansdowne Library
Grandfather came to mind yesterday. An errand randomly sent me through the intersection of Bloor Street and Lansdowne Avenue. There’s a corner for you. A corner about as inspiring as a black-and-white photo of the Communist Party designated pleasure quarter of Minsk in 1959 during a wintertime power outage at night.
The coffee shop there is dubious. Its name changes more often than people overdose in the washroom cubicles. Traffic is heavier and buses seem noisier here. Most people avoid Bloor and Lansdowne because it flattens the emotions and is just a low-rise waste of a major intersection in Canada’s business capital and North America’s fifth largest city. About the only thing to catch the eye here is the slim neon tubing of a three-part sign that depicts a stripper. In blue pumps, she’s from an age of kinder, gentler smut. She leans forward at the waist every five minutes or so all night, every night.
Some of the now forgotten history of the corner may explain the taintedness of its present. That arch-fronted, stuccoed building holding up the stripper stands at what was once a weedy empty lot but had been the location of a graceful library.
Yes, a library! A fine one, noted throughout the British Empire for its spaciousness and sensible layout. Fifteen tall stained-glass windows graced the Lansdowne Avenue side. Equal to anything in the mother country, or the American republic, no expense was spared, dear reader, on the Lansdowne Library.
Lansdowne Library had acres of interior murals depicting a Dominion of Canada still all youth and clean water and made of nothing but scenic wonders. The latest standards in electric lighting and sound insulation were applied. Electric book lifts and pneumatic tubes were installed to speed knowledge to hundreds of patrons at a time. The newspapers raged as costs spiralled up for such things as a wonderful copper dome, twin observatories, music hall, and ornamental fountain. The interior was noted for its especially rich use of materials, mahogany and dark green and white marble.
Sadly, the call to war that so shocked the world in August of 1914 went up just weeks before the new library was to receive its many books, bound volumes of periodicals, children’s materials, Braille translation machinery, atlases, almanacs, geological and fossil specimens, gazetteers, stamp and coin holdings, musical recordings and planetarium fittings. The war did not go well and began to draw great resources. As the battles of 1916 began to unfold in failure, horror and strategic blunder the Imperial War Offices slid a tentacle toward the Lansdowne Library. It was taken up as a documentation office. Pointless, prolonged, scientific slaughter being as administratively intense then as it is now.
Grandfather’s part in the Great War came to an end when he made his last sudden explosive decompression with the Royal Canadian Navy's Diving Bell Squadron Number Six. In 1920, ex-second lieutenant Owen Russell found himself back in Toronto’s west end with relatively little to do. It is said that each day he put his big, dark blue duffel coat over his strong six-foot two frame and took a quiet walk through the streets of the place he’d been raised in, reflecting on the near lethal combinations of responsibility and adventure he’d recently experienced.
Thinking that he might be cheered looking in on what had been billed, at his departure nearly five years earlier, "the loveliest single cultural treasure within direct sight of a Great Lake," by Ontario Premier William H. Hearst, Grandfather decided to walk to the Lansdowne Library after his bacon and eggs one morning. He found himself looking through the dusty rear windows of a disused shell instead. Devoid even of the rows of meticulous Imperial War Office clerks.
By Christmas, Grandfather was the head of the Unemployed Veterans Committee barricaded in the library. "Jobs, Dignity and the Allotted Books or Red-style Revolution Here As Well," was the demand. A quotation from a UVC leaflet further illustrates the nature of the standoff.
"...if we are thrown out of our improvised home and the community soup kitchen closed we will surely march on city hall with these dozen Vickers guns for a petition. Oh yes! The authorities should remember that we are doing them a service in taking over this empty building. We are using it to distribute food which we collect from sympathetic dockers, market men and trades people on Saturdays and have now a scheme on hand to mend the kiddies' boots and send them dry-shod to school ...we in this way keep control over 17,000 unemployable men who might otherwise be driven to far more violent things than seizing an empty building ...ours is a sensible, direct sort of action, we don't want to break anything if that can be avoided."
New Year 1920 dragged in with the authorities showing intermittent interest in negotiation. A brace of water-cooled Vickers machine guns were more than enough to keep the Toronto Borough Constabulary across the street. Many of that force were just back from the European war and knew what overlapping arcs of gunfire meant for human bodies protected only by cloth uniforms. Others had become TBC men when specifically warned by friends and older male family members to seek local police employment in place of military service. At the same time, the Vickers guns enraged the authorities as did the hint of Bolshevism. A harsh, make-an-example-of-them response was inevitable.
Police Master Sergeant David "The Bastard" McMurrin, a Belfast man, hammered with his nightstick on the library door. Grandfather opened it two inches and asked McMurrin what he wanted. The Master Sergeant, newly promoted to the leadership of the Special Disturbances Squad, leaned in and uttered his foulest curses. McMurrin was taking the strike personally and the caution of many of his own men had angered him further.
Grandfather remained silent. The morning was all sun and ice.
“You’ll not see out the day in there, Russell,” McMurrin affirmed. The red hairs on his neck tingled with the prospect of smashing in somebody’s smug face for them.
McMurrin had been in charge of the security detachment in the shipyard that built RMS Titanic before he came to Canada and joined the Toronto Borough Constabulary. During his Belfast tenure McMurrin instituted a morale-building athletics program that increased its members’ skills in bare knuckle boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling, rugby, football, Ludo, checkers and hitting Catholics with cement blocks.
Now, as I've mentioned, Grandfather was a navy man. And not just of any deck-swabbing kind either. In the salt chill of the North Sea mine fields he'd learned to skipper the most enormous class of diving bells, the Morris-Hawker Mark 10s. Complex craft, diving bells require difficult trim adjustments to operate smoothly. These adjustments are accomplished with a cast iron wrench, the size of which can be guessed by its having been nicknamed “the elephant's pecker” by the men who used them. Aside from the duffel coat that matched the eyes McMurrin now stared into, an example of such a wrench had been Grandfather's sole souvenir of participation in the First World War.
The sound McMurrin's skull made when Grandfather's wrench crowned him King of the Pigs was heard all the way to the steps of the Provincial Legislature, so it is said. At Grandfather's funeral in 1961 the largest of the floral arrangements was from Toronto's finest who also honoured him with their full pipe band. McMurrin, secretly in the pay of higher levels of government, had been unpopular for years and a younger, more progressive, generation of local police yearned to be free of him.
An entire brigade from the Provincial Police Force replaced the Toronto Borough Constabulary and directed a wave of arrests at the network of women supporting the barricade. Water and electricity was shut off. Also, an internal element favoured quitting the library protest when a relief act promising nineteen cents a week to all mothers with a minimum of six children was passed. Grandfather hewed to the wishes of the majority and led the march out of the library. He continued straight to the lounge in the Drake Hotel where he could be found for most of the next forty years.
At sunset, the day of the victory parade, a mysterious fire tore through the library. Each of the fifteen stained-glass windows exploded with a report like a sniper's rifle and dropped into Lansdowne Avenue. Grandfather is said to have winced each time.
When we walked by yesterday the stripper leaned over and, well, we knew how the old man felt.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
The coffee shop there is dubious. Its name changes more often than people overdose in the washroom cubicles. Traffic is heavier and buses seem noisier here. Most people avoid Bloor and Lansdowne because it flattens the emotions and is just a low-rise waste of a major intersection in Canada’s business capital and North America’s fifth largest city. About the only thing to catch the eye here is the slim neon tubing of a three-part sign that depicts a stripper. In blue pumps, she’s from an age of kinder, gentler smut. She leans forward at the waist every five minutes or so all night, every night.
Some of the now forgotten history of the corner may explain the taintedness of its present. That arch-fronted, stuccoed building holding up the stripper stands at what was once a weedy empty lot but had been the location of a graceful library.
Yes, a library! A fine one, noted throughout the British Empire for its spaciousness and sensible layout. Fifteen tall stained-glass windows graced the Lansdowne Avenue side. Equal to anything in the mother country, or the American republic, no expense was spared, dear reader, on the Lansdowne Library.
Lansdowne Library had acres of interior murals depicting a Dominion of Canada still all youth and clean water and made of nothing but scenic wonders. The latest standards in electric lighting and sound insulation were applied. Electric book lifts and pneumatic tubes were installed to speed knowledge to hundreds of patrons at a time. The newspapers raged as costs spiralled up for such things as a wonderful copper dome, twin observatories, music hall, and ornamental fountain. The interior was noted for its especially rich use of materials, mahogany and dark green and white marble.
Sadly, the call to war that so shocked the world in August of 1914 went up just weeks before the new library was to receive its many books, bound volumes of periodicals, children’s materials, Braille translation machinery, atlases, almanacs, geological and fossil specimens, gazetteers, stamp and coin holdings, musical recordings and planetarium fittings. The war did not go well and began to draw great resources. As the battles of 1916 began to unfold in failure, horror and strategic blunder the Imperial War Offices slid a tentacle toward the Lansdowne Library. It was taken up as a documentation office. Pointless, prolonged, scientific slaughter being as administratively intense then as it is now.
Grandfather’s part in the Great War came to an end when he made his last sudden explosive decompression with the Royal Canadian Navy's Diving Bell Squadron Number Six. In 1920, ex-second lieutenant Owen Russell found himself back in Toronto’s west end with relatively little to do. It is said that each day he put his big, dark blue duffel coat over his strong six-foot two frame and took a quiet walk through the streets of the place he’d been raised in, reflecting on the near lethal combinations of responsibility and adventure he’d recently experienced.
Thinking that he might be cheered looking in on what had been billed, at his departure nearly five years earlier, "the loveliest single cultural treasure within direct sight of a Great Lake," by Ontario Premier William H. Hearst, Grandfather decided to walk to the Lansdowne Library after his bacon and eggs one morning. He found himself looking through the dusty rear windows of a disused shell instead. Devoid even of the rows of meticulous Imperial War Office clerks.
By Christmas, Grandfather was the head of the Unemployed Veterans Committee barricaded in the library. "Jobs, Dignity and the Allotted Books or Red-style Revolution Here As Well," was the demand. A quotation from a UVC leaflet further illustrates the nature of the standoff.
"...if we are thrown out of our improvised home and the community soup kitchen closed we will surely march on city hall with these dozen Vickers guns for a petition. Oh yes! The authorities should remember that we are doing them a service in taking over this empty building. We are using it to distribute food which we collect from sympathetic dockers, market men and trades people on Saturdays and have now a scheme on hand to mend the kiddies' boots and send them dry-shod to school ...we in this way keep control over 17,000 unemployable men who might otherwise be driven to far more violent things than seizing an empty building ...ours is a sensible, direct sort of action, we don't want to break anything if that can be avoided."
New Year 1920 dragged in with the authorities showing intermittent interest in negotiation. A brace of water-cooled Vickers machine guns were more than enough to keep the Toronto Borough Constabulary across the street. Many of that force were just back from the European war and knew what overlapping arcs of gunfire meant for human bodies protected only by cloth uniforms. Others had become TBC men when specifically warned by friends and older male family members to seek local police employment in place of military service. At the same time, the Vickers guns enraged the authorities as did the hint of Bolshevism. A harsh, make-an-example-of-them response was inevitable.
Police Master Sergeant David "The Bastard" McMurrin, a Belfast man, hammered with his nightstick on the library door. Grandfather opened it two inches and asked McMurrin what he wanted. The Master Sergeant, newly promoted to the leadership of the Special Disturbances Squad, leaned in and uttered his foulest curses. McMurrin was taking the strike personally and the caution of many of his own men had angered him further.
Grandfather remained silent. The morning was all sun and ice.
“You’ll not see out the day in there, Russell,” McMurrin affirmed. The red hairs on his neck tingled with the prospect of smashing in somebody’s smug face for them.
McMurrin had been in charge of the security detachment in the shipyard that built RMS Titanic before he came to Canada and joined the Toronto Borough Constabulary. During his Belfast tenure McMurrin instituted a morale-building athletics program that increased its members’ skills in bare knuckle boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling, rugby, football, Ludo, checkers and hitting Catholics with cement blocks.
Now, as I've mentioned, Grandfather was a navy man. And not just of any deck-swabbing kind either. In the salt chill of the North Sea mine fields he'd learned to skipper the most enormous class of diving bells, the Morris-Hawker Mark 10s. Complex craft, diving bells require difficult trim adjustments to operate smoothly. These adjustments are accomplished with a cast iron wrench, the size of which can be guessed by its having been nicknamed “the elephant's pecker” by the men who used them. Aside from the duffel coat that matched the eyes McMurrin now stared into, an example of such a wrench had been Grandfather's sole souvenir of participation in the First World War.
The sound McMurrin's skull made when Grandfather's wrench crowned him King of the Pigs was heard all the way to the steps of the Provincial Legislature, so it is said. At Grandfather's funeral in 1961 the largest of the floral arrangements was from Toronto's finest who also honoured him with their full pipe band. McMurrin, secretly in the pay of higher levels of government, had been unpopular for years and a younger, more progressive, generation of local police yearned to be free of him.
An entire brigade from the Provincial Police Force replaced the Toronto Borough Constabulary and directed a wave of arrests at the network of women supporting the barricade. Water and electricity was shut off. Also, an internal element favoured quitting the library protest when a relief act promising nineteen cents a week to all mothers with a minimum of six children was passed. Grandfather hewed to the wishes of the majority and led the march out of the library. He continued straight to the lounge in the Drake Hotel where he could be found for most of the next forty years.
At sunset, the day of the victory parade, a mysterious fire tore through the library. Each of the fifteen stained-glass windows exploded with a report like a sniper's rifle and dropped into Lansdowne Avenue. Grandfather is said to have winced each time.
When we walked by yesterday the stripper leaned over and, well, we knew how the old man felt.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
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