My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.
On the last day of October in Toronto a man in an art gallery said: “Showers should be coming in around 4 pm. They don’t always get it down to the hour like that.”
It was one of those summers when people just kept coming to stay, and I’d pull out the futon and slap on the sheets and set my friends up in the living room. My place was small, and the overcrowding really bugged my girlfriend, who was far more solitary than me. There’d be a breather of two or three days before each new onslaught, and we knew that in a couple of months, the visits would all be history. But then the Pope called, and I couldn’t really turn him down. He was coming to Toronto for a few days, and he’d be pretty busy, but he wanted somewhere to crash at night, and he remembered my futon fondly from years past.
I’m not just another American gringo, chasing old lady luck South. Staring wide-eyed at their beautiful skin, at the bones of the burros, the dogs and the rats. It’s not why I’ve come,
to stare, to open my eyes this wide, sucking the lemon before I drink.
A few weeks ago, on November 4, 2003, fourteen Kurdish refugees and four Indonesian sailors landed a small ship on the coast of Melville Island, eighty kilometres north of Darwin in the territorial waters of Australia, with the intention of demanding political asylum. Apprised of the news and weary of the tide of asylum seekers, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, took a drastic decision: he decided to cut off Melville Island (together with four thousand other islands belonging to Australia) from the nation’s territory.
Voyageurs by Margaret Elphinstone took me back in time even further, to Upper Canada in the early 1800s, when Toronto was known as York, and Yonge Street stretched north past the last farm in Upper Canada into Mississauga Indian country. Into this rugged environment Elphinstone puts Mark, a young Quaker from England.
Tatsea and her husband Ikotsali, the main characters in Armin Wiebe’s book Tatsea, are searching for each other in the Canadian subarctic. Tatsea and Ikotsali are members of the Dogrib tribe who are separated when their village is raided by Cree from the south, and the novel is the story of their search for each other and their survival in a hostile climate.
Until I found The Glenwood Treasure by Kim Moritsugu (Dundurn), I thought writers of adult books were ignoring one of the tried-and-true plots of children’s books: the joys and pitfalls of searching for treasure. Blithe is the quiet daughter of swanky Rose Park socialites who returns home for the summer after an embarrassing divorce.
Here in Vancouver we had Honest Nat’s Department Store at 48th and Fraser, and in Karen X. Tulchinsky’s book The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, Toronto had Lenny’s House of Bargains on College Street near Spadina, which, according to Tulchinsky’s story, was started by Yakov Lapinsky and his cousin Max.
