Own This Town

The birthmonth cavalcade of good times continues! On Monday Mark had the pleasure of announcing his new job! We are so excited and I’m very proud of him. He really wanted to work in a job he could be passionate it about, with cool people, doing cool work, and he looked for it and he pursued it, and he got it!

On Tuesday it was mainly just a normal day but then a friend of Mark’s dropped by in the evening with a copy of Lowfield for him to sign, and also Greek pastries. And stayed to chat. So it was still a special day at the 11th hour.

On Wednesday I started my mini-vacation, since I’m trying to hang with Mark as much as possible before he goes back to work. We’re both enjoying this little interregnum where we aren’t (too) stressed about the future but Mark actually working hasn’t started yet. I kicked the day off by going to the doctor, but then met up with Mark at Barque for lunch in Roncy. Barque is always a treat but they have these super cheap and delicious lunch specials. I think they are intended as takeout but you can eat in their nice restaurant or on the sunny patio if you want. $15 for a sandwich and a side! Decadent! After, we went to High Park (this was of course why I trekked from my doctor in Scarborough all the way across town) for CHERRY BLOSSOM TIME! Every year Toronto goes bananas for Sakura and every year I wonder if I really want to bother and then I do and it is WORTH IT. Gosh, it was lovely. We were a little later in the season this time and so, while there were still plenty of blossoms on the trees, there was also starting to be a delicate snow of blossoms drifting down and on the ground. Absolutely magical.

(also Wednesday; sitting on the streetcar)
RR: Let’s see your new shoes!
MS (pulls shoe out of shopping bag)
RR: Oh, very nice. That was a good choice. (Mark has been buying and destroying and rebuying the same sandals every few years for our entire relationship, but this year the shoe store didn’t have them so he bought a slightly different pair of sandals—very exciting)
MS: AND I saved like $30. It turns out I was a loyalty program member and didn’t realize. So all these years I have been buying sandals and these shoes (points at feet, indicating Cons) I have been getting points somehow. So these were only like $40.
RR: You were in a loyalty program and didn’t know? How?
MS: I don’t know! She said it was by email address and offered to look me up and it turned out I had all these points. Aren’t you proud of me?
RR: Well…
MS: I would like you to be proud of me. I got a deal!
RR: I’m concerned you have lost control of your life.
MS: I don’t really want control of my life.
RR: Can I have it then? I want you to get a loyalty points credit card. One you understand.
MS: No.

Thursday was supposed to be the big vacation event: Thermea spa in Whitby. As the crow flies, Whitby is not far from Toronto, but as Go buses fly, it is very far indeed. Thermea spa is quite nice and I would recommend it…if you have a car or are organized enough to rent one. I do not recommend the Go bus to Whitby. I certainly don’t recommend trying to take a taxi in Whitby, say, from the Go station to a local spa—this appears to be impossible or anyway, no taxi ever materialized. People were very surprised we don’t use Uber—so much for the varying sides of that labour dispute. In the end, we took local transit in Whitby, which might be called the Dart? It was surprisingly good—don’t let the anti-surbanan-transit naysayers get to you. And then we walked a ways. We were pretty much the only pedestrians. The FAQ of the spa does not tell you what bus route they are on—we had to ask someone at the station. The FAQ does helpfully explain the existence of car-sharing apps. I think the expectation, in retrospect, is that few people would try to do what we did.

I’m a big believer that life need not be car-dependent, and that I don’t need to be trapped by the confines of a car. I don’t like to drive, and I don’t want that to limit me. My doctor’s office is near where I lived three moves ago and very far from where I live currently, and when someone there asked me “HOW did you get here?” I could scarcely resist saying, “On the bus you can see from that window behind me (and two others).” I feel good about my understanding of public transit and the better I understand it and can use it, the more I feel like I own this town (and surrounding towns)—I can go anywhere, do anything, for very little money and…well, considerable time but I have time. I grew up in a small town and I don’t want to recreate that in a big city—I can get and do many things in my neighbourhood but Toronto is too exciting and diverse to be limited to my little ‘hood.

This is my theory. In fact, after nearly 25 years here, it’s starting to wear me down. The TTC has been radically underfunded, disrupted, and maligned so much that it hard to rely on it the way I used to. The Go bus Whitby situation was nearly overwhelming, and I felt really helpless because I couldn’t just give up and go home, which is always the recourse when I’m actually in Toronto. And don’t even get me started about how the Go stations are being run—the locked bathrooms, the total closures in the evenings so you have to wait for your bus outside in the freezing cold. This is all, of course, part of a larger systemic issue (making life as hard as possible for the unhoused, and nothing terribly easy for anyone who relies on a public good, I believe)—this is Mr. Ford’s Ontario, strong mandate and all.

I’m sad about how much I want a car—one tragedy of the commons is that is how strongly it urges us to opt out of collective goods into private ownership. And another tragedy is the shared delusion that some measure of private ownership can ever completely divorce us from collectivity—who owns the roads, the highways, the licensing system and the traffic cops?

I hate it. I don’t even want to go to Whitby that badly but it was a representative experience. Anyway, sorry, this post rambled a bit. The spa was very nice. We’ll probably get a car soon. And then I will have to go back to Young Drivers yet again because this is a lot of angst to take to the streets.