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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
West End East End Rumination I remember looking at my first east-end apartment in Toronto a million years ago. I’m not sure why, but it had the feel of a space-mission, a voyage to another planet, crossing over the Don. Children banged on dryers in a Laundromat I passed, and the first landlords reminded me of the puree that would result if Albee’s George and Martha met with Ukrainian Mafiosi. [Today, this would be the premise for a successful TV show, but back in the nineties, no one in my social circle would be caught dead admitting they enjoyed television.]
After much easterly searching, I inhabited a rent-controlled walk-up with a talented painter who ultimately kept hold of the cheap digs as I migrated west again when things soured as they will when your family still refers, twenty years later, to the long-ago ‘mate’ as Sunshine, because of course she never smiled. Ever. Or when she did, people knew to run for cover. I didn’t move back to the east end again for quite some time. And when I did, it marked a sort of blue period in my life, an extended session of navy, or indigo, although during said blue period there was a periwinkle cornflower stage wherein I wrote a collection of short fiction and a novel, so one can hardly say that it was a complete waste, the voyage east. And I didn’t hate living near the water. It kind of thrilled me to be so near it. It was just sooo…white out there.
All of this is to say I find that really, if I am in Toronto, I prefer to be in the west end. There is something Italian about the west side of the city, for one thing, and something Polish and Portuguese and I don’t know, just something. A vibrant back-to-my-twenties-bookshops-and-groceterias fever that comes over me. There is excellent coffee and now, of course, a billion sushi and Korean options. It’s the United Nations of Food and it works for me. It feels more like a low-rise New York. A little squatted down version of the city I really love.
I find a self here on the west side of the city that I suppose I might have buried or convinced myself I did not need to keep alert. The writing self is strangely perked on this side of Yonge: so much to observe, smell, indulge in, observe again, the writer’s essential banquet: to observe with hunger, daily. And to walk.
There’s one interesting memory of life in the east end I want to share. Standing at the corner of Kingston Road and Queen East. Up beside me huffs a handsome lad, jogging in place sort of, waiting for the light. We’d read on a comical literary panel some years before, so I knew the face, the beard, the warm eyes. Paul Quarrington, out for a jog. An esteemed fellow of the typewriter disease, there he was, running. And lately we find our dear friend or colleague Paul fighting for his life, stage four lung cancer. So strange that the memory of life in the east end centres on Paul this way, like a fixed picture. Covered in sweat and dandy and waiting on a green light so many years ago he had NO idea. And all I thought was, `No wonder he gets the ladies---and now he’s out running and everything.” I still smoked then, and felt awash in admiration and self-recrimination, watching Paul out for a run.
And now many writers I know are reading his pieces about facing death in the papers and wondering why we whined so, and wasted time so. And then I have another Paul Quarrington heart memory which is watching him and listening to him in Picton, where we had made him headliner of the rejuvenated Prince Edward County Authors Festival. Poor Paul: the pressure was immense. He read and he played guitar and sang. Complained during his reading, with a guffaw, of an allergy-related cough. How little we all knew then. He sang a song that made me cry, because it reminded me of my former east end neighbourhood in Toronto, where a fellow sat on the cold sidewalk every day and sold pens, shouting “Hey Hollywood!” at passersby and Paul nailed the beauty of it with his song.
East side, west: who cares, really? Magic knows no civic bounds. The city is wonderful, the city is daunting. And with love in my heart for another place where work isn’t, I imagine I feel like displaced Maritimers do: itchy for the seascape they understand, yet mindful of how a lack of paths can also bring a body down. When I loved this city most I was 20 and here I am again, 40, quite certain that I’m a west-end girl after all: bookish and brave, and trying to communicate.
Listening to: Brian Wilson, Bare Naked Ladies and Sunday, by Moby
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