As the light fades across the deep, cold blue waters of Lake Ontario, a quick gust of wind hits me through my jacket; a reminder of the approaching bitter cold Canadian winter. I needed some time alone, and I had found the perfect spot. Jutting out into the lake, this quiet park seemed somehow removed from the ever present glow of the city lights that surrounded it on three sides, the last being taken up by the seemingly endless darkness of water. The spot brings me back to the fading autumn light of just a year ago, not so very long if you really think about it.
I had grown up like any normal kid, in a whitewashed suburb that was clean and safe and one hundred percent sterile, some 1950s pipe dream. I didn’t mind it- I had my friends, and to me it seemed perfectly fine. But things must always change, and when my Mom got a job in Toronto, I went with her. My parents were long divorced, and while I had a family full of stepbrothers and sisters, they never played any role in my life. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, which is a terrible time to move. I got there and I knew no one. That summer was the most boring time of my life, not the kind of boredom that I would complain about as a kid, but mind-numbing, soul-crushing emptiness. Boredom doesn’t quite describe it. I’m sure I could have found ways to amuse myself, but I was not where I wanted to be, and I couldn’t get over that simple bitterness. And that is exactly where I found myself one day not long after school had started.
I was riding the TTC streetcars, the humming little bright red machines that cover much of the city. They are mostly old, but look sleek enough, and add a sort of homage to the past, before streetcars were taken off the streets of most North American cities. They are nice enough, and cheap; I made good use of them. I had to get to school that morning, and it was cold, but a nice kind of cold, the kind that makes me feel awake, alive. All fall mornings are like this in Toronto. It was crowded, and I took one of the few remaining seats.
I had checked out of reality for a moment, lost in my own thoughts when the man next to me said something. To me. I was momentarily stunned. I had never heard someone break the tired, almost sad silence of public transit with a complete stranger. The thoughts that came to me immediately mainly revolved around this man’s questionable sanity, but I managed to suppress the urge to get up and walk away. The man looked to be in his thirties, just a little bit disheveled, with a scraggly beard.
“I’m sorry?” I responded, a strange phrase now that I think about it- at once an apology and a question. The man found thus funny. He laughed a violent, jarring laugh that seemingly rose out of nowhere. This startled me, which he found even funnier. I felt more embarrassed than threatened, so I felt no urge to jump off the streetcar when the brakes quietly wailed and died down and the doors slid open.
“I said, what’s your name?” he repeated.
“Andrew” I stammered out. He smiled.
“My name’s Matt” he replied quickly and immediately launched into a monologue of sorts. Though I do not remember participating in a conversation, in the course of the next ten minutes before I arrived at my stop, I was treated to this man’s story.
He had an impressively fast way of speaking and had an accent that, strangely, I couldn’t place. I always find it interesting when people have their own way of speaking. The man managed to convey to me many things. He was born in the American south somewhere, big family, small house, nothing to do. He never tried in school- he would never have had a chance at going to college anyway. After high school he was left with an intense desire to escape, and that is just what he did. He left his neighborhood, left his tiny little town, left his state. He claimed to have wandered most of the U.S., though he chose not to elaborate. I never quite understood how he survived for all those years- there are certainly people who hike the entire Appalachian Trail or something like that, but I assumed you had to have some money to be able to do that. He treated this entire story as a pleasant tale, interesting, but not necessarily unusual. He came to Canada because he was bored with America and thought he should move on. He was stopping here on his way to God-knows-where and thought it was nice enough. As the streetcar pulled quietly into my stop, he abruptly cut off as I got up.
“Funny story, isn’t it” he said quietly. He laughed again as I got off, seemingly unfazed by my lack of a reply. I stepped into the street, dazed by this man’s ability to shatter the monotony of my day.
I thought I might walk home, past the stores and restaurants of Little Italy, where I might feel like I deserved something to eat. I was shocked to see my new friend sitting by the side of the road. I can’t honestly say I know why I stopped, but there was something about this man that made me want to talk to him. And so I stopped. He was sitting in a tiny little park (if you could even call it that), with a few benches, some trees with only a tiny patch of dirt at the bottom, and a graffiti adorned wall. He was surrounded by a group of people, who looked like the kind of people who would be walking around a city street, nothing too remarkable, and he appeared to be engaged in a story. I stood awkwardly near the back of the group that was near him.
He began, “There was a family that lived up the road from me when I was young in a little run down shack; they were outcasts, loners; I don’t even think their kids went to school. We didn’t mind them much, and we never would’ve bothered them, in fact, we hardly noticed ‘em at all. If we had we might’ve felt bad, though we were little better off than them. They could’ve used help for years, but we didn’t know if they even wanted any, nor did we care. One spring, it started raining and wouldn’t stop. The water came right up out of the river and took everything we had. We didn’t have anywhere to go, and the county didn’t have any money for the shelters that the big towns set up for people that year. The water had cut us off from the rest of the world. We were left there, on the banks of the muddy, nasty water that drove on unstoppably toward the sea. Now, there was a house that was safe up against the steep green hillside. We were desperate then, and so we climbed that hill and knocked on the door. The little girl that came to the door shocked me; she seemed perfectly normal, and so did the rest of her family. She looked a bit like some of my friends at school. The inside of their house looked like a lot of the other poor families’ in town, with a few holes in the wall and some sad furniture, with a distinct sad rotting smell, something not too unusual for us. We stayed there for three weeks, and I have always been grateful for everything they did. I never spoke to them again. We moved not far away after those storms, and came back to our old town many times, but never once did we stop by their house. I don’t think that thought ever occurred to us at all.”
He finished his little story and chuckled, an apparent habit of his, and slowly got up. Without pause, he stumbled into a jog, and then into a run and disappeared down the street. It sounds unreasonable, almost cliché, but he was not a subtle person. I still can’t say I completely understand it, but it was, at least, by far the most interesting thing to happen to me for a long time, and it has encouraged many such interesting events since then.