family & toronto

Favourite thing today: prosaically, generically, happily: spending time with family. This topic, not surprisingly, was on a lot of people’s lists when they opted for the general as opposed to the specific. For me today, it was not spending time with Joel and the kids but rather spending time with my parents, my aunt, and my brothers. There are different types of family pleasures. For instance, the pleasure of hearing about weird little tidbits that I didn’t know before: like the fact that my grandfather shut himself in the bathroom for a year and didn’t come out because he was so distressed by his financial losses on the stock market and the way in which this made impossible so many things he and his family had once enjoyed. Like so many family stories this one seems full of exaggerations (that bathroom? really? he didn’t come out? for a year?) and omissions. This what-to-call-it-exactly? breakdown? retreat? was when he had to move his family (mom was three or four) from their grand house in Rockcliffe to a modest house in the Glebe--which happens to be less than two blocks from where we live now. And so in one of those strange twists of family history, just as my grandfather moved down to live where I do now, I have moved up to live here. And we probably made our shifts (his down, mine up) at around exactly the same age.

I love how every single time we get together weird little (or not so little) things like this emerge and yet, if I weren’t recording them as I am now, they would get acknowledged and then just absorbed into the fabric of our lives. At any rate, this recollection of past family events is one of the categories of pleasure (there are so many—as well as categories of displeasure, needless to say) of family get togethers. (And the food, and the funny-only-to-family jokes, and all the things that go without saying, and all the things that are so familiar like my mom’s blue tea mug with the white birds etc.).

Since I’m in Toronto now I thought I’d look at the favourite things list to see what things people had recommended to do/see/visit here and, remarkably, there is: nothing! Or rather, almost nothing. I think that at least a third of the people who sent in “favourite things” are familiar with Toronto and good number live in Toronto but with the exception of dad’s comment on the ravines, and Nadia’s on flying trapeze courses (flying trapeze courses!), and Melissa’s mention of a jewelry store (Made You Look), there is nothing. Restaurants, cafes, museums, galleries, walks, sculptures, and shops are mentioned in lots of other cities but in Toronto next to nothing. Poor Toronto.