It's such a perfect day

 

It's been pretty much my most favourite kind of Toronto November Saturday afternoon, cold enough for my purple scarf.

Brunch with Dexter to go over his new student film concept, and get his impressions of his first Halloween in the city (he loved it, particularly the Church Street festivities, which he attended with his girlfriend and some friends from his film program at TMU.)

After lunch, I headed uptown to check out the explosion of Christmas decor that has bloomed since Halloween. I joke about it, but it's really quite beautiful. I came across a young writer sitting at a table in a busy bookstore signing his novel. We chatted, and I bought one—we've all been behind that table with a stack of our books with people milling around without stopping. I'm looking forward to digging in

The weather was classic fall—bright, cold, with intense colour. It was an easy day to love my fellow man; all of them I passed on the way home. The achingly attractive young couples and their model-looking children; the elderly couples, still obviously in love; the roving packs of teens, who seem to move their arms like propellers as they storm along the sidewalk; the blissed out middle-aged man trailing the scent of a marijuana behind him like a sail; all the small dogs walking their owners around downtown like publicists.

I stopped in at Glad Day Books on Church Street to have one of their delicious lavender lattes and check my email before the last stretch of the walk home.

As I sipped my latte and scrolled, a pair of studious looking queer teens explored the shelves upon which I wish there were more books. I loved their ease in that milieu, an ease that was literally inconceivable in, say, 1978, when I was their age.

"Nobody is 'born that way!'" hiss the religious fanatics and the political LGBTQ-phobes, two groups that intersect too often for my comfort. The answer to them is: "Sure they are. The trick is keeping them alive long enough to be strong enough to deal with you folks the way you deserve to be dealt with." (And, to the rest of us, write books for them.)

You need to be open to the magic of radiant, hard-blue, sourball-coloured autumn days like this, the same way you need to be open to love. If not, the perfection is so easy to miss.