A reflective day
Yesterday I took a stroll downtown with a colleague from Costa Rica. After a curry on Queen Street and a coffee downtown we walked up Yonge Street and outside a branch of Footlocker was a pile of cuddly toys, letters of condolence and candles. I asked a bystander what had happened and was told of the shooting of Jane Creba on Boxing Day. A fifteen year old girl that was out shopping with her sister and caught in the crossfire of two young gang members exacting the defence of their delicate and juvenile egos with guns on a crowded city street. Six others were injured and her brief, bright, light was extinguished outside a shoe shop, the day after Xmas. Being outside the country for twelve days, I hadn't heard.

I'm going to get controversial here: I look forward to the day that registered drug users can walk into Shoppers Drug Mart and pick up their cocaine or heroine or anything else prescription for a nominal sum made on a corporate farm, refined in a corporate factory; So they won't have to buy their vice from villains, with money stolen from innocent people; So there will be no villains defending territory for the sale of their detergent cut white powders; So there will be no drug wars and no wars on drugs; So that the users only suffer from their using and they are the only people that suffer, unlike today when the cold dead corpse of a fifteen year old girl, lies in the cold wet ground. The only time her smile will be seen again, is in the tearful mind's eye of the people that knew her. And for what........?



We got a cab to a place a little further up Yonge and were pleasantly surprised to find ourselved in the middle of an Irish folk music night. The pub was packed with people of all ages, the musicians had talent and the beer flowed. Normaly they also have two or three real ales (from a hand pump) on tap as well, which is enough to put any pub outside England on my map. The music was full of energy, as were the girls dancing on boards strewn on the floor, heals and toes clattering an ad hoc Riverdance. The atmosphere was about as good as I've ever experienced in a pub anywhere. I met and chatted with a few friendly people and have decided to make it a regular haunt. There was a girl laughing and joking in the corner of the room with a group of her friends, she appeared to be a Thalidomide victim, although there aren't many left now, so maybe it was something else. I remember them from when I was a small boy, sitting on a bus with my mum and feeling both sad and for some reason embarrassed, perhaps almost guilty. The girl had a big pretty smile, slim, shapely legs and long hair. Her left arm tapered out where her elbow should be, without a hand, her right, the same length but with a wrist, thumb and forefinger. She drank her pint through her straw, clasping the glass between forefinger and thumb. She laughed and joked and chatted away with her pals without a care in the world. I went outside for a breath of fresh air. And a cigarette. When I came back in, the whole pub was holding hands and swaying to some frollicksome Irish air. The girl with the big smile and the big physical compromises, saw me, saw that I couldn't get past and wasn't involved, then pulled me into the human chain. She introduced herself, grabbed me with her hand and I swayed and jigged along in time with the rest of them. What a marvelous tribute to the very best of human spirit she is.

I had a nightcap in my local. I was the only customer, I didn't know the barmaid, but we got talking. She is from the Ukraine, a pretty, charming and enigmatic woman, in her early twenties and busy studying for her degree. Her family brought her to Canada because she had contracted bone cancer due to Chernobyl and escaping the radiation was an imperitive. We laughed and talked and I walked home a little while later, a little more reflective, a little happier and a little humbler for my day out.

Maybe Sunday was trying to tell me something.