"Home" vs. "Away"

I’m home now. I’m looking at the flea market couch I brought up from California; I had cushions made three times over the years till I got it just right. Now it’s just right. It’s been in my life 42 years.
 
Tim has been in my life 34 years, but he had to be out of town this weekend; so “home” as a notion right now is “place,” not “where Tim is.” That makes for interesting thoughts.
 
Home is Life Admin and Chores
Home is where I came back to two months of unopened mail, piled high. And that’s Issue #1 about home: It comes with what Sophie calls Life Admin. Life Admin is bills to pay, bank statements to reconcile, plants to be repotted, newspaper delivery issues to be complained about, humidifier to be cleaned and put away, etc etc ad infinitum. Life Admin is Chores.

“Away” still comes with Chores, but they’re different. There will always be laundry, but Away laundry is “throw it all in one load.” Home laundry is different temperatures based on color and fabric, which is not a bad thing. In fact, I enjoy being a master launderer, but Away laundry is the three T-shirts and two jeans you brought, and you’ll wait to repair one pair of jeans till you’re home with your sewing machine (Life Admin).
 
Home cooking comes with a pantry and a well-stocked spice rack. Away cooking is like camping: in a bare kitchen, I discovered the only staples I needed were olive oil, vinegar, and soy sauce. My salmon, broccoli, and spinach salads were easy and delicious, and dishwashing was a piece of cake, too.

Away eating is usually street food (roti, char siu bao, a baguette, a Greek salad, whatever I come across), so there’s less cooking (and I’m eight pounds less, too). Home eating means cooking, so it runs up against the do-over-and-over-again problem endemic to Chores.
 
Away comes with a landlord; Home comes with homeownership. Home ownership comes with Life Admin; it’s a love/hate relationship.
 
Away is escape
When I take my Months, Tim, Sophie, and my sister usually visit for a few days or less than a week. This time, Tim came for a month, and I found myself Preparing Speeches in anticipation: “I am not taking care of you.” Wow, I hadn’t expected that, but I realized that Away meant I wasn’t a wife, a mother, a caregiver, a responsible party. I was just Barbara. Although I was first in the Airbnb, I didn’t want to be the household manager, the keeper of Life Admin.
 
It’s different when Tim and I vacation; then we’re both tourists and equals experiencing a place, and we have a great time. But in my Months, I’m what a friend calls a “resident visitor,” and I’m making a life. It’s an act of creation, and I want to be free to explore it without introducing Life Admin. I startled myself with my vehemence – my ferocity even – I’m still pondering that.
 
Home means a Car
Away is public transit; Home is driving a car. My car is often my friend and I look forward to road trips; but public transit is my love. My Presto card and the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) open up a whole world for me while I get to look out windows, not worry about parking or gas, be part of society. Public transit is walking out to a bus or subway stop and knowing one will come within a few minutes. It is not having to check a schedule for the 45-minute chance a bus will come. I used to run Anchorage’s public transit system, but Anchorage will always require a car.

My last streetcar ride in Toronto was very complicated: almost every stop involved a person in a wheelchair, walker, or stroller; so the ramp was often deployed and the aisle got very crowded. I could have been annoyed, but instead I thought: this is a place to grow old! People can still get around in their Third Third, no matter their physical state.

Home is comfort
Robert Frost’s home may be “‘… the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in,’” but Home is also the place that, when you’re not at your best, sick or hurting, “comes with a husband, a couch, a heating pad, a big blanket, Netflix, many library books, a teakettle, and a medicine cabinet.”
 
Home holds memory
When my mother moved out of the family home, she lamented the wall where all our heights were marked as we grew up. Those marks were a symbol of all that had transpired there, all the life and memories. Home holds that past. Away holds re-creation. In our Third Third, those two battle a tug-of-war.

Goodbye, Toronto

I’m saying my goodbyes to Toronto. I’ve seen my last Hot Docs Festival film, and I’m just back from my last author program. I’ve probably had my last roti, checked out my last book at my local branch library, gone to my last art workshop. Horror of horrors, I’ve even watched my last play.
 
The thing about my Urban Infusion Months is that I get attached. I embrace my new city – even my new neighborhood – and then I feel such nostalgia over leaving it. I leave little bits of me and my experiences all over.
 
When I first arrived and wrote my last post about the thrill of being a little bit scared, a little bit curious; my friend Helen replied, “How are we friends when we’re so different?! Reading this one made me realize how much I now like creating new routines and avoiding confusion!!”
 
As I told Helen, “I definitely create new routines. It’s just that they’re new routines, not the same old, same old for the past 35 years!”
 
So I’d start off every morning checking blogTO to see what new things they’d found for me. And I’d stop off at my Riverdale Branch Library where the librarian posted a new poem every day of April for Poetry Month.

Many nights, I’d catch The Great Canadian Baking Show – four seasons’ worth! – after I figured out the TV remote. I learned that Montreal-style bagels have bigger holes than New York bagels and they’re boiled in honey water instead of plain water. They look scrawny and burnt as opposed to New York’s plump and golden, but that honey water holds a LOT of garlic and onion. So when blogTO announced the opening of Kettleman’s Bagels, I headed down there to check them out and watch the bakers in the window. I do that a lot. A half-dozen bagels are coming back to Alaska with me.

I learned where the Apple store was when my external hard drive crashed, so I knew where it was when Tim lost a cable. Around the corner, Yael has put the recipe for my hair color in the files so she can repeat it. When I discovered that Nova Era Bakery in Little Portugal has a wonderful little café in back, I took Elizabeth and Tim there, too. It’s my new “Spot,” right near Galo de Barcelos.

I have my favorite FreshCo, my favorite COBS Bread, my favorite Bulk Barn, even my favorite Dollarama with my favorite licorice. I have my favorite streetcar (although Tim insists I’ve never met a streetcar I didn’t love). I have a tried-and-true walk up the hill to the subway, and I know where the bad puddle exists permanently in Riverdale Park. I even have a favorite spot on the couch in the apartment living room.

Still, no one sits next to anyone on the TTC yet, and there’s even distancing spaces in theaters, so my salvation has been Meetup: Walking Adventures with Deb. Several times a week, Deb leads us through the nooks and crannies of Toronto to the glorious greenery of the ravines, paths, and rivers. We’re outdoors and unmasked and walking and talking. Siobhan, Penny, Anna, Phyllis, Janet, Alison, and so many other welcoming folks made such a difference. I see what’s ahead on the calendar, but I won’t be here.
 
On Sunday afternoons, the Danforth Jewish Circle let me be a part of their Jewish community and their art workshop to create a print for a tapestry for the sanctuary. Now I’ll only see photos when it’s finished.

In all my reading and conjecturing about parallel lives and multiverses, I think about all the branches of my lives that take off after I’ve left them. There’s the Anchorage Barbara, the Toronto Barbara, the New York Barbara, the San Francisco Barbara, and even the Costa Rica Barbara. If I’d stayed in one place, I could hold my life close and let it continue. But by starting new lives in several places, I have to let them go.
 
This is the sweet and sad part. I have to let them go.
 
Because there’s another part of me that wants to lie with Tim on our back deck in Anchorage and look out over the yard that’s held barbecues and potlucks, croquet games and badminton games, Sophie’s playhouse and once-healthy spruce trees. To bask in all the history of 37 years in one spot.

Toronto -- Round Two

Here I am now – culturally-infused, foot-sore, and exploration-happy – in my latest Urban Infusion Month. Hooray! I’m back in Toronto – three years to the day – but this time for two months. So far, I’ve done Manhattan, London, Toronto, and the Covid-aborted Philadelphia; but Toronto was my favorite of them all.

 I’ve been thinking about what these trips do for me.

• Yes, they’re a chance to get Spring earlier than it comes to Alaska (although Toronto has had snow and winds that suck the warmth right out of me).
  
  
• And yes, I feed my live-theater lust – I’ve already been to five plays here with two more in the next few days.
  
  
• And yes, I get to be car-less while happily gorging on transit.
  
  
• I get to escape meal-planning; grazing on ethnic street food or fruit returns hours to my days!

These are four really big reasons.
 
My only difficulty can be social isolation. There was that rough time in London because British people don’t talk to people they don’t know, but Toronto was special because Torontonians talk to everyone!
 
But this is a Covid-changed world. Even Torontonians don’t talk to everyone anywhere. Everywhere – including on transit – we’re six feet apart, wearing masks, and not making friends. But on the other hand, the rest of the world isn’t very far away: with Zoom, I still meet with my Alaska book club, Bricolage art challenge group, and my siblings. Some days I don’t even feel like I’m gone.

What I’ve learned so far is what my months really do for me. They confuse me. They stump me. They fill my days with riddles and glitches, happy accidents and utter confusion. When I get on a bus I’ve never been on before, I have that squirrelly nervous feeling: What if I miss my stop and end up God knows where? I sit on the edge of my seat.

I seek out this feeling; it’s why I’m here. It’s the Quest for New-ness, the thrill and mystery of non-stale, non-stagnant (without my fear of heights). I do my produce shopping in Chinatown, where everything is way cheaper. Lately, the big crop is strawberries. Two big baskets of strawberries for $2 each (and that’s Canadian dollars!). But over there, on the next table – same vendor – they’re $1 each. How can that be? Why?

Because $1 strawberries go bad twice as fast as $2 strawberries.

I try to be helpful at grocery stores, bringing carts in from the lot to the store. But yesterday, when I saw a woman loading her car, I offered to bring her cart back in, and she looked askance at me. Why? Well, when I returned the cart, there was a little plastic thing hanging, and when I attached it, a dollar – a loonie – popped out! Uh, oh! I bet that woman is telling her family about the panhandler taking her cart money!

My day is filled with things that need figuring out: Why does the remote work easily to turn things on but has a terrible time turning things off? How do people easily deal with their milk in floppy, plastic bags? Does the Sweet’n Low paper go in the Blue Bin, the Green Bin, or garbage?
 
Oh, I have bigger questions: Why did Matthew Wong’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario appeal to me so much? Was it because they were all blue, that they spoke of isolation, that they had simple lines, that Wong was self-taught, that he was bipolar and killed himself at 35? Was it the work itself or the artist’s pain in creating it? Is that why Van Gogh moves me?

In the play, “Gloria,” when Gloria shoots everyone in her workplace except Dean, Kendra misses it all because she’s out getting coffee and Nan is hiding under her desk. All three write a book from his/her perspective and argue about who has the right to “the story.” Who owns any story?
 
Big questions and little ones. When I wake up in the morning, I have to remember the new place where I store the cereal, which drawer has my underwear. Is it easier to go up Spadina and walk west or Bathurst and walk east?
 
Nothing is routine, and the strange interrupts the ordinary at a moment’s notice. Every day, at any moment, I can get a jolt of difference, newness, confusion – even panic. And wonder, too. I like living like this.

 

Why I Do It

Why do I go to a city all by myself and spend a month there? On the one hand, there’s attraction: the search for capital-A Art and Capital-C Culture. On the other, there’s prevention: not wanting to become stale, avoiding stagnation. Both of these fall under my Quest for New-ness.

Basically, during the month, I can walk to more places, experience more things, and learn more things than on the average day in Anchorage. I wake up not knowing what the day will bring. Nothing is familiar; everything requires preparation or resourcefulness. I have to be on my toes, and for me, that’s a very pleasurable feeling.

In Anchorage, stimulation has to be personally created. Sometimes I feel like I have to work hard to remain curious because it’s all so familiar. Maybe it’s lazy to ask a new place to add zest to your days, but if the goal is zest, then I’ll take it however I can get it. And in my Third Third, the goal is zest.

So what did Toronto do for me? What gave Toronto its 10-out-of-10?

Neighborhoods
    I stayed in Cabbagetown (named that because it used to be the farm area, and there was still a farm behind my street). But even a Martian would know this was Cabbagetown: the big welcome sign, the cabbage flags flying in front of houses, the murals on the side of buildings.

No matter where you are in Toronto, the street signs will tell you what neighborhood you’re in.

In Leslieville, the rainbow-painted benches will let you know you’re in Leslieville. In a big city, you belong to a little corner of it.

Ethnic Food
    Guidebooks and magazines wax enthusiastic about Toronto’s food scene and recommend all sorts of restaurants, but I could count the number of restaurants I ate at on one hand (maybe with six fingers). Instead, I eat “street food.” So I had my vegetable roti from the lady in the Absolute Bakery around the corner, my falafel from the guys at Zaad, my focaccia from Sud Forno, my souvlaki from the guy in Greektown. I even had the knish shaped “like a hockey puck” from Pancer’s Deli, but my only absolute and total bust: the famous Peameal Bacon sandwich which caused a gag reflex at the time and bad dreams afterwards.

Theater
    New York has Broadway and London has the National Theater, but Toronto has dozens of smaller, intimate theaters doing brave things. I went twice a week and still fell behind.

The only challenge: the proliferation of 90-minute, no-intermission plays: panicky women line up at the restrooms washrooms beforehand. I once had to escape through an exit sign … and ended up outdoors in an alley. (I got back in.)

Restrooms are called “washrooms.”
    Does that inspire more people to wash their hands? Some of the uniformly clean, readily-available, beautiful, designer-quality public restrooms washrooms even have high-tech automatic door locks/lights/openers.

100 Branch Libraries!
    After a while, I just started going to anything because they all turned out to be so interesting. Some of the highlights of even the less-famous events:

• Free Tuesday afternoon documentaries (Faces, Places such a wonderful French film)

• The “eh list authors” (Barbara: What does E-H stand for, electronic what? Librarian: It’s our A list. Took me a while…)

• The author of Woman Enough dealt with a challenging question: if there are many, many human variations on the spectrum of chromosomes, hormones, and testosterone levels; how do we begin to create a level playing field when sports only has two categories: male and female?

• The two guys who wrote Slow Death by Rubber Duck and used themselves to show how toxic some of our everyday objects are (credit card receipts – yikes!) 

The sign in Type Bookstore
    Other bookstores have the usual: History, Cookbooks, Graphic Novels, etc. This one made me laugh.

The Dish with One Spoon wampum covenant
    This is an agreement made between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the allied indigenous nations of the Anishinabek in the area: everyone is eating out of the same dish (shared hunting grounds) so they have to limit what they take to one spoon so there is enough for everyone. A land acknowledgement precedes every event in Toronto, but I especially like this imagery.

Bata Shoe Museum (shaped like a shoe box)
    Who would have thought to create a whole museum around what shoes can tell us about history and anthropology? From The Gold Standard and all its golden footwear to the U.S. military Reconnaissance Boot from the Vietnam War (which left a Viet Cong footprint, not an impression of an American boot); a whole afternoon easily slipped by. I only wish I could have taken my mother to see that.

The Impact
    Toronto: I’m going back.

Jumping Hurdles

When I was in high school, I was the manager for the boys’ varsity track team. Somehow I got the idea that when I reinvented myself at college, I could tell people I did the low hurdles. I was going to lie to be someone I pictured myself to be but wasn’t.

I don’t think I actually did the lie, but Wikipedia says, “Low hurdle races are a now, generally defunct form of track and field hurdle racing.” I find it fitting that now in my Third Third, my first third aspiration is … defunct. But low hurdles are still in operation for women’s track, so I guess I’m all right (if I were to reinvent myself).

I think of low hurdles as obstacles in my path that seem more do-able than impossible. A high hurdle – a whole foot higher – might stop me dead, like a wall. But the low hurdle is a challenge to get past. And what’s a low hurdle for me might be just a blip for you.

As I was preparing to leave Toronto, my sister phoned. My month there had been a 10-out-of-10, but I was in the middle of my hurdle accounting: I had to get on the plane ... with less than fifty pounds in the suitcase. I told Elizabeth the trek to the airport was rife with hurdles:

1. I had to pack less than fifty pounds in the suitcase without a scale to measure. And I had accumulated a lot of paper: theater programs, books for my friend Mark on Toronto’s urban planning, four magazines on Toronto’s culinary treasures for my friend Judith, library handouts, maps, more maps.
    
2. I had to get the suitcase on the 65-Parliament bus, and if the old style bus came, it would be hard to get in the front door. I needed the new kind of bus to pull up to the stop.
    
   
3. For some strange reason, Toronto’s subways only have escalators that go up and stairs that go down. Usually that’s no problem, but not with fifty pounds of suitcase. I could always bump it down one step at a time, à la Winnie the Pooh, “bump, bump, bump.”
    
4. And then, here it was, the Big Hurdle, the one that chilled my blood: weighing in at the check-in with my suitcase. What if it were more than fifty pounds?!?

Some of you might be thinking: what’s the big deal? So you pay extra or you move some stuff around.

No, hurdles are personalized. This was my Big Hurdle, maybe not yours. You may have problems going to live in an unknown big city all by yourself for a month, but that’s a blip for me. My Big Hurdle was facing an airline agent with a suitcase to be weighed. It kept me up at night.

My other sister said, “Mail stuff.” I had already been that route. Canada Post, even with its lovely pink mailboxes all around town, cost A LOT. It took me $30 to mail a 1-pound picture book to a friend. A woman I met said there’s a service called Chit Chats; they drive your stuff across the border and mail it in the U.S. for way cheaper. My sister said, “Use Chit Chats.” Uh, oh, new thing, new thing! That’s another hurdle alert!

When I think of my Urban Infusion months, I think of my first time using a borrowed cell phone, my first time using VRBO and Airbnb, my first time using Lyft, my first time not knowing my geography, my first time all alone; and they were harrowing. But they were low hurdles and I made it over. Once you make it over, hurdles become blips; but they still start out as hurdles.

Chit Chats was a hurdle.

So I prepared: I isolated my paper products in a bag inside the suitcase, so if it was too heavy, I could move it to carry-on. I chickened out and left the culinary magazines behind in the apartment. I departed the apartment a hurdle-fearing nervous wreck.

1. The right kind of 65-Parliament bus came.
    
2. As I approached the stairs of the subway, a man reached out, grabbed my suitcase, and took it down the stairs.
    
3. At the airport, I mustered my courage and thought, “Project confidence. Be friendly, and she’ll let your overweight bag on.” I slid the suitcase on the scale: 47 pounds exactly.

Sigh.

What Taxes Buy

Buying anything in Toronto comes with a moment of surprise. I think I’m paying $2 to scan my artwork, but the clerk turns to me and says, “$2.26.” I ready $3 to pay for my $2.99 beverage, and the clerk says, “$3.42,” and then I have to fuss around in my wallet again.

It’s called tax, something tax-less Alaskans are not used to.

Now I’m going to describe a sample day – yesterday – in Toronto. First, I walk out to catch the 506 streetcar on the corner. Within a minute, it shows up. There are seats available – red plush upholstered seats – and I can tell when my stop comes up because the recorded announcement is clear and the sign showing “next stop” works at the front.

[This was so shocking at first: in New York City, the public recorded announcements sound like this: “ssshhhhXXXchchchhsssdsttt.” Here they say, “The next stop is Yonge Street, College Station subway.”]

So I get out at College Station and switch to the 1 subway at no extra charge. It comes within a minute, too, but that’s because it runs every 2-3 minutes. Every 2-3 minutes! I am in transit heaven – with more plush seats!

I’m going to the Deer Park Branch of the public library. I’ve never been there before, but Joanna Goodman, author of The Home for Unwanted Girls is speaking. There are 100 branches of the public library, and I have three within blocks of my apartment. I am always stumbling over yet another branch library in my wanderings.

Every few feet, I pass a litter/recycling box. All the litter boxes include recycling. At first, I thought people were just throwing litter in the recycling hole, not separating their recyclables, and it annoyed the daylights out of me. But then I discovered that here they recycle EVERYthing: any rigid plastic like plates and cups and containers (as long as they’re not black), juice boxes, milk cartons, pizza boxes, foam coffee cups and takeout boxes. So it’s not messing up the recycling; it’s DOING the recycling.

The compost bin even takes my dirty, food-covered napkins!

After the author talk – where every seat is taken and we’re all impressed and enthralled – I dawdle around downtown. I pass a homeless person asleep on the sidewalk, and two community service women are talking with him, asking him to stand. Yes, I’ve seen homeless people in this city of three million, but not to the numbers I’ve seen in Anchorage (one-tenth the size). I have also passed many clinics, social service buildings, detox centers. One storefront had a sign that it was a Sewing Repair Hub offering classes in sewing repair and then helping the women set up mending businesses (while keeping textiles out of the waste stream). They are addressing their social ills.

I stop at Soufi’s restaurant because I see that it’s a Syrian restaurant and I can have manakeesh, which I’d loved in London. Then I head to the main Toronto Reference Library where about 500 of us have been lucky enough to reserve a space to hear Sally Rooney, author of Normal People. (Did I mention that all this is free?) I pass the Newcomer Services Desk, where a woman is helping a new immigrant. Many of the libraries have those desks.

I’m sitting next to Joan, who turns out to be a major theater-goer, seeing two plays every weekend! Two plays every weekend! She turns me on to a play I hadn’t heard about, and when I get home, I immediately buy a ticket for it.

I could have waited till Saturday morning, when I go to my branch library and get a free MAP, Museum + Arts Pass. That’s how I’ve been to the Art Gallery of Ontario, for example. I can get one pass a week, but I didn’t want to take a chance the performance would sell out.

Heading home is no problem because even at night, the buses and streetcars and subways still come frequently and there are nice shelters that say when the next one is due.

A friend of mine lives here and says the taxes are very high, but his husband is very sick, and they can receive many, many services and quality care.

That’s what taxes pay for. This is what a community looks like when its citizens and businesses contribute financially to its operation. This is what a government can provide when it has financial resources. Only Alaskans believe it has to come free.

Reality Intrudes

Every now and then, reality delivers a crushing blow to fantasy. Take Niagara Falls.

This is the Niagara Falls of my imagination: Honeymooners go there because it’s so romantic, the power of the waterfall underlines nature’s majesty, the shared border gives it international significance. All that and the extra my fantasies add to it.

When our family was in Argentina in 2012, we visited Iguazú Falls on the border with Brazil. It was beyond spectacular. The force of the waterfall filled every fiber of your person. It thundered through you, pounded your atoms. You had to hike trails to get to the overlooks, and it was all Nature-with-a-capital-N.

So imagine my distress to discover Clifton Hill right across the street from Niagara Falls.

No one warned me! The shock of a giant Frankenstein eating a Burger King hamburger, King Kong on the side of a tilted over Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Dracula’s Haunted Castle – it’s monster land! Then there’s Big Top aMAZEing Fun and Lazer Tag and Mini Putt. And Rainforest Café and IHOP and DQ.

“Clifton Hill: the Street of Fun at Niagara Falls.” Everything all jammed together with outside loudspeakers proclaiming the horrors within. I couldn’t imagine anything more horrifying.

This is what travel does: it opens your eyes. To wonder and beauty and novelty and awe. And sometimes, disappointment and shock that what you see is not what you imagined and just not pretty.

Tim turned to me and said, “At least we’re not here on our honeymoon.”

No, our honeymoon was spent in horrendous winds and rain on Twin Lakes. Wind so bad our tent poles bent and snapped. Wind so bad there were white caps on the lake and our pilot couldn’t get in to pick us up. Wind so bad we hunkered down under the tarp and never even dreamed of unpacking the kayak.

But at least we weren’t at Niagara Falls!

P.S. What was pretty, even very pretty: the ice to the side of the falls, the swooping cloud of birds in front, the spinning swirls of water, the mist, the Niagara Parkway, Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Beauty lurks.

Welcome to Toronto!

I’m pretty sure it’s something in the water. Something that seeps into the bodies of people in Toronto and … activates them.

I’m doing my annual “urban infusion” month in Toronto. Before this month, all I knew about Toronto was that it was in Canada and wasn’t Montreal, but I’m not even sure what “not-Montreal” meant.

So I did my research and discovered that Toronto was loaded with theater, with art, with neighborhoods, with public transit – all my prerequisites. I bought tickets, signed up for email newsletters, squelched several pre-trip anxieties. But the British-thing still haunted me, the part where people don’t talk to strangers in public. I can still flinch over the trauma of my first week in London, my week of zero human interaction. Weren’t Torontonians kind of British?

There I was in Union Station, facing a steep staircase with Robin’s massive suitcase and the need to find a Shoppers Mart to buy a transit pass. What’s a Shoppers Mart? Or rather, What’s a Shoppers Mart?!? how am I going to find one? how will I get downstairs? and WHY can’t Lyft find me where I am because three drivers have abandoned me after supposedly reaching me where I’m NOT?!?

Then one very nice man carried my suitcase down, another walked me to the front of a hotel so Lyft would have a destination, and another gave me a specific address to tell Lyft. I am beyond grateful.

Two hours later, Presto transit pass and library card in hand, I was an hour early for a library program. Everyone else was there with a friend or knew the staff or was a “regular.” I could always read a book, but David, the man next to me, engaged me in conversation and, before I knew it, we had exchanged contact information so David could send me some additional information. We’re now Linked In.

Two nights later, I happened to sit next to the theater reviewer at a performance. She knew all the local companies, the casts, the playwrights, the artistic directors; she was in her element. She and I discussed theater, watched Iphigenia get sacrificed, and afterwards, Lynn offered me a ride home.

Yesterday, I stopped in at a Japanese restaurant to ask about their miso soup. I left, but several minutes later, the owner found me at my bus stop to tell me something else about miso soup. He offered to give me the paste so I could make some by myself at home.

Do you see it? This spirit of welcome, of assistance, of openness, of friendliness?

[Alert! You cannot read these next few paragraphs without noting my delirium of excitement about the miracles of right-time right-place. I can’t put exclamation points after every sentence.]

In the library calendar, I discovered that the Toronto Public Library has a special Arthur Conan Doyle Collection – Sherlock Holmes and fairies and séances and spiritualism – and that the annual lecture with the Friends was to be held Friday!

So, again, I walked into a room where I knew no one, but this organization has been together for 18 years and they all knew each other very, very well. A man and woman approached me, introduced themselves, asked what brought me here. Turns out Barbara has written a play about Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harry Houdini meeting in the afterlife with unresolved issues about Arthur Conan Doyle; and she introduced me to Mike, the man next to me, who is head of the Bootmakers of Toronto. I am just in time for their bi-monthly meeting about Mycroft Holmes and more and more Sherlock! (Now I must use exclamation points!)

It’s not just that one Sherlock Holmes fan by luck found herself in the midst of many, many Sherlock Holmes fans. It’s that they welcomed me, they invited me in. How many times have I been at a meeting or gathering back home where lots of people called hellos out to others and moved seats to sit next to friends and there were some New People or Strangers who were on the periphery? How we might say hello … but then get right back to our conversations? Did I ever offer a Stranger a ride home? Did I embrace the Stranger?

I’ve been in Toronto only five days, and yet I’m flush with the warmth and friendliness shown me. Maybe it is in their water – it seems pretty widespread and contagious – but I’m not going to forget how welcomed I feel. I’ll bring that back home with me.