Visitors from Jacksonville

Walking home tonight in the mercifully cooler night. It's been so humid that tonight, the t-shirt I wore to the gym was almost as damp as the one I took off after my workout.

Too, the AC at home has been busted for the past 5 days. As unpleasant has it's been for us, it was worse for old Beckett, who's been panting on the floor a lot more lately. But it got fixed tonight, thank God, and the house will be cooler when I get home.

I met a middle-aged tourist couple just north of the Marriott. The husband had the "dad" mien of a man who was used to knowing where he was, and how to get to where he wanted to go, brow furrowed, alternately glaring at his phone and looking around, trying to place himself. It's a visitor look I've seen a thousand times, especially in summer.

His wife was stunning. She had beautiful cornrows, green contact lenses, and a chunky diamanté pendant spelling out QUEEN in bold letters. In spite of decades of committed gayness, I confess my heart did the tiniest flip. There was a trail of Dior Addict perfume in the air when she moved,

I asked them politely I might help them find what they were looking for.

Unsurprisingly, the husband said they'd be fine, but the wife told me they'd seen a large Toronto sign on the way in from the airport, and were trying to find it. She thought it was nearby—was it? I told her it was a few blocks south, at Nathan Phillips Square. "Not too far to walk?" she asked. I assured her I'd just come from there.

"Welcome to Toronto," I said as they turned and prepared to walk the 3 or 4 blocks to the big Toronto sign.

The wife said, "We're from Jacksonville." She paused, then added "Florida," placing her hometown in case I wasn't sure which Jacksonville it might have been.

"You brought the weather with you!" I said brightly, with a general wave towards the drift of residual lower-hanging clouds.

"We're sorry," she said, smiling a smile so white and dazzling that my heart did that little flip again as she and her husband walked off, hand in hand, into the vast humid night twinkling with garlands of coloured neon lights.

 

Canada Day...out of town

 

Feeling a pressing need to spend this Canada Day outside of the city, the Hero MD™ and I drove deep into the countryside outside of Toronto, first north to Kleinburg, in then west towards Georgetown, specifically Norval, then back north again to Orangeville and Camilla.

I've been most positively marked in my life by the countryside, first as a child in Switzerland, then on the exquisite Western prairies during my high school years, then later with the Hero MD™ when we lived in Milton, before it became the sprawling, sclerotic suburb community it has since become. In the countryside, my blood pressure drops. The absence of my fellow man is a balm like no other, and there is something ineffably soothing about the miles of farmlands, forests, and blue skies.

The silence of the countryside isn't merely aural; you can feel it in your soul. And in the oddest way, it roots me in my family's Ontario history—a history that was never emphasized by my father, but which came to me in later life, and with which I connect, like WiFi, whenever I'm outside the demanding, even oppressive forcefield of Toronto, which has been my home for 42 years now. I love my "home" cities, here and abroad. They make sense to me, and I can navigate them with joy and ease. But the countryside is who I am when I'm most still, and most myself.

Today was a perfect example of that. The fireworks outside the house will probably blast on for hours yet—thank God Beckett is too ancient to be bothered by them. But I checked in with my country, and my roots, hours ago, and had a Canada Day that made sense to me, whoever (if anyone) else it might have made sense to, or not.

PRIDE in the Globe and Mail

 

This past weekend, the Globe and Mail ran a full page 800-word excerpt of my essay from Pride as an op-ed in the Opinion section, which is national. (For the benefit of our American friends and family, the Globe is Canada's equivalent to the New York Times.) I first saw my byline in print at age 15, in 'Teen magazine, on a newsstand at the Winnipeg bus depot in November 1977. I can remember that moment like it was yesterday, and even after all these decades, and the advent of online media, there is still nothing like seeing it in a physical newspaper or magazine. Years ago, my dad and I had a very earnest and serious talk about whether or not gay marriage would ever be legal—he emphatically believed it would not, certainly not in either of our lifetimes. As an ex-journalist himself, I wish he had lived to see this morning's Globe, and his son's words in it about the necessity of Pride. I know he would've loved it, even if the drag queens might've freaked him out a bit.