The Vinyl Café Notebooks (11 page)

But I didn’t have a forty-five-gallon drum of chemicals at
hand. I just had the bags of newsprint. And it seems to me in the grand scheme of things, I didn’t do any better than they did at all. And my question is, if I
did
have the chemicals, could I trust myself to do better?

19 February 2006

HAIRCUTS

BY CHILDREN

I was walking my bike down by the lake when I spotted my friend Ian walking toward me.

“Hey,” I said after we had said hello, “what the heck is up with your hair?”

Ian, who has a beard and tends to sit on the shaggy end of the scale, looked a bit, how do I describe this? He had a new ’do, which was dramatically short on the sides, yet, well, it didn’t look like it had been touched on top. It made him look...

“Like Lyle Lovett?” asked Ian hopefully.

“More like a mushroom,” I suggested.

“That’s what
I
thought,” said Ian morosely.

Then he told me he had just had it cut at an art installation. By an eleven-year-old.

The event was called
Haircuts by Children
.

The haircuts, explained Ian, were free. The point of the exercise was to make adults rethink their perceptions of kids.

“And have you rethought yours?” I asked.

“In a roundabout sort of way,” said Ian, running his hands through his hair, or what was left of it.

Then he explained something that had transpired while he
was sitting in the barber chair and eleven-year-old Anthony circled him with clippers and scissors.

“The most interesting thing happened in the chair beside me,” said Ian.

There were, he explained, four barber chairs in the room. At the one beside him, an eleven-year-old girl was standing on her tiptoes so she could work on an elderly woman with wavy grey hair.

“The two of them were chatting back and forth, just like in a real salon,” said Ian. “It was very charming. And then, in the middle of this, the old lady turned to the girl and apologized.

“‘I am sorry,’” she said, “‘that my hair is so greasy and tangled. I didn’t have time to wash it this morning.’”

That is the sort of thing you probably hear muttered every day in salons across the country.

“But that’s not the point,” said Ian, who was starting to perk up.

“The point,” he continued, “is what the little girl said in return. She said, ‘Yeah, your hair is greasier and more tangled than any hair I have ever seen.’”

The lady, apparently, smiled. And after a slight pause, the two of them were chatting as easily as before.

Ian was really excited now.

“Imagine if everyone was that honest,” he said.

“Imagine if you were trying on a pair of jeans, and you asked the salesperson how they made you look, and she said, ‘Actually, not very good. They make you look fat.’

“Or imagine if you called a lawyer, and he told you, ‘Sure, I’d be happy to do that, but it will cost you seven hundred dollars, and you’ll be totally confused when I’m finished.’”

As we move through this life, we hear many variations of the truth. We answer each other, more often than not, with attempts to please or influence, or at least not offend, instead of informing each other with sincerity.

“Exactly,” said Ian. “We are all too worried of offending. Imagine how great it would be if everyone was as honest as that little girl. All the time.”

Ian had obviously been inspired.

“It has really got me thinking,” he said.

We stood there for a while on the sidewalk and laughed about his haircut.

“I’m going to get it fixed this afternoon,” he said. “I’m going to the barber. It’ll be fine.”

“What did you tell the kid?” I wondered.

“Oh,” said Ian, smiling, “I told him it was the best haircut I ever had.”

“What?” I said.

“It’s the truth,” said Ian. “It was.”

23 July 2006

THE WORLD CUP

It has been a week now and World Cup celebrations are just about over in Toronto. All that’s left this morning is the odd flag flapping from the window of the odd car, a windy reminder that June 2002 was one of the most joyfully rambunctious months that has ever blown through this old city.

The games were a tutorial for students of urban geology. They learned, if they didn’t already know, that the tectonics of the city’s ethnic alliances run along east-west lines. Italians went to gnash their teeth in the cafés and bistros along either St. Clair Avenue or College Street. Shoehorned between them, along Bloor Street, deposited there during a different geological epoch, the astounded Koreans ran amok in their red T-shirts, with their whistles and chants. The Portuguese had Dundas to themselves until Portugal was eliminated, and then they tucked their pennants away, picked up the lighthearted green-and-blue Brazilian flag and moved up to College, bumping up on the eastern edge of all those dispirited Italians.

What a month it was.

If you lived in any of these neighbourhoods, you had two
options. You could pull your drapes over your windows and your pillow over your head and try to sleep. That is to say that you could watch the games through your squinted and sleep-deprived eyes and cheer desperately for the team that would celebrate its victory farthest from
your
house, or you could let it rip. You could, if you lived near Bloor and Christie, do just as the Korean T-shirt of favour urged: you could
Be the Reds
. For ten bucks you could
buy
one of those Red Devil T-shirts and plunge right into this great and unexpected shift in the city’s social crust.

That’s what the cops eventually did. At first they showed up at the street parties and stood around on the corners in little blue clusters while whistle-blowing mobs brought traffic to a standstill. Their instincts told them they should keep the streets open, but, thankfully, someone along the chain of command figured out that clearing the streets would be a mistake, intuited that something more important than the flow of traffic was moving through the city.

By the quarter-finals, even the police understood that these were fun-loving crowds, and in a remarkable act of civic trust and good spirit, the police stopped showing up. They handed the streets over to the whistle-blowers, and the taxi drivers and delivery people did what the rest of us did, the only sensible thing anyone could do—whenever they were gridlocked by joy, they started honking their horns and hanging out their windows and high-fiving the kids with the flags.

It was, unquestionably, the Koreans who led the way. It was the Koreans who really got the city going. When the Turks wanted to celebrate their victories, they found themselves
without a neighbourhood of their own. They solved that problem by gathering in joyful Koreatown, where they were welcomed with open arms. For most of June, the Turks and Koreans celebrated their victories together.

This sense of communal joy, which was as much a celebration of ethnic viability and community as it was a celebration of any particular game, a great bursting of national and neighbourhood pride, was captured one last time at the corner of Ossington and College last Saturday morning, an hour after Brazil defeated Germany in the final match.

Eric Timm, a forty-six-year-old schoolteacher of German descent, watched that last game in an Italian café. All month Timm had been driving around Toronto on his motorcycle— flying a giant German flag on an eight-foot-tall flagpole. When Saturday’s game was over, Timm wanted to give his flag one last whirl. At first he didn’t know where to go, and then he felt a responsibility well up in him. The German team he had been cheering for, that had come so far in the tournament, had to be represented at the victory celebrations. And Timm knew it had fallen to him to make that happen.

Timm climbed onto his yellow 1974 Honda 750 and headed for the heart of the Brazilian street party. He only intended to drive by, but when he got there and saw he was the only German around, he was seized by the need to make a statement. He parked his bike at the corner of Ossington and College, at the epicentre of the celebrations, and he climbed up onto his seat. And he stood there like a sentry for three hours.

He cut an imposing figure. He was wearing an Indonesian shirt knotted under his navel, black jeans, motorcycle boots and Ray-Bans. He hadn’t shaved for five days.

“I guess I was a bit of an item,” he said.

You could see him from a quarter-mile away, the black, red and gold flag of Germany sticking twelve feet up in the air beside him.

“I didn’t go without trepidation,” said Timm. “It was a bit of an experiment. I wanted to know how I would be received. I wanted to know if this really was what it seemed to be.”

The answer, as it was
all
month, was a resounding Yes.

“Brazilians high-fived me and bought me drinks,” he said. “Brazilians came over to me to talk about the game. Brazilians asked me to pose for pictures with their wives. They commiserated with me. And they consoled me. They told me the German team was still young. They told me Germany would have another crack in four years.”

That night the moon hung over Toronto like a big white soccer ball. On Monday one of the city’s newspapers said June was a glorious celebration of multiculturalism. They were almost right. But it wasn’t a
celebration
of multiculturalism. It was the real thing. It
was
multiculturalism. There has been a lot of talk over the last twenty years about the richness of Toronto’s diverse communities. From time to time those of us lucky enough to live here get to see that first-hand.

7 July 2002

THE FRONT LAWN

The idea of the suburbs in the United States, I have read, can be traced to the journalist and father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted, who designed Central Park among many others, became suspicious of downtown neighbourhoods, like mine, and went in search of what he called “a holy green environment,” neighbourhoods that he believed would be better for the health of the family. Olmsted’s idea was to create housing developments with the look of a park—and thus the front lawn was born, and the notion that families who believed in the greater good would “keep up their lawn.”

At the heart of Olmsted’s philosophy was his belief that “landscape has an effect on the unconscious” and his assumption that the best effect is achieved by “a gently rolling landscape of green.”

It was an assumption that made so much intuitive good sense that no one thought to question it. Or no one where I grew up, or lived, ever questioned it. So pretty soon everyone had a front lawn. And pretty soon the competitive spirit raised its head, and the quest for the perfect lawn became so obsessive that grass was so vigorously weed-whacked,
sprayed and rolled that it lost its connection with holiness, and lawns began to look worryingly more like living room rugs than any holy thing.

I can mark exactly where and when the rebellion began in my neighbourhood. The Dunker family down the street— Europeans—plowed up their front yard and let it lie fallow for a season. They wanted to see what would come if they let nature take its course. What came was goldenrod, of course, and Queen Anne’s lace, blue chicory, buttercup, dandelions, and bunches of other wild and native plants, until eventually what came were the weed police. The weed police told the Dunkers they couldn’t do what they were doing. They had to have a front lawn.

That was ten years ago.

One night this week, I realized that the Dunkers were, like most rebels, just slightly ahead of their time. The seller of lightning rods, as Ray Bradbury wrote, arrives just before the storm. Over the last decade there has been a slow but steady shift in the front yards that I walk by. Flowerbeds have been creeping over their borders, overflowing their boundaries and spilling out over the grass. There are no longer lawns in front of a good 50 percent of the houses I pass—all through my neighbourhood the front lawn has been shrinking to the point of disappearing.

One of my favourite yards is completely void of grass. Instead of a lawn, this yard is crammed to overflowing with shoulder-high coneflowers. It is only a small yard, but the flowers are so tall and the yard is so full of them that you get the feeling if you stepped off the sidewalk and in among them, as I’m often tempted to do, you would disappear and have to
push your way through them for hours before you found your way out.

These, of course, are among the best days for walking because all the stuff in these gardens is slowly embracing autumnal colours, the golds and purples that give a rich sense of natural rhythm to the neighbourhood that lawns can’t offer.

I don’t hate grass. But I like the new way of growing it more than the old. There is a woman who lives not far from me who is still growing grass, but she’s doing it with reckless abandon. She has a yard of grass, but it isn’t Kentucky bluegrass, and it isn’t cut as short as a toothbrush. The grass in her yard is exuberant grass, as tall as the grass on the prairie before the white man arrived. These days it is seven feet tall, with sprays of russet and pink flower heads that will, over the next few weeks, bleach out into bits of straw and eventually be smashed to the ground by the November rains. Another reminder of the rhythms of nature. If you walk by her house when there is a breeze blowing, her lawn rustles like tree leaves, or if you pass in the late afternoon, and it is backlit by the sun, you can see her grass arching up, the seed heads spraying out like a fountain. The effect is gorgeous, although I wonder if Olmsted walked by one night he might just consider it a mess.

31 September 2000

KISSING CONTEST

I was walking along Queen Street on a Friday afternoon not long ago when I spotted a crowd in front of the Mexx clothing store.

I am a sucker for crowds. It is a journalistic affliction. If there are fire engines, I follow. And if people have gathered up, I need to know
what
they have gathered up about. Put
me
at the back of a crowd, any crowd, and rather than walk away, I am doomed to work my lemming feet right to the front.

At the front of
this
crowd were seven largely immobile couples, embracing in the store window.
Living mannequins
, I thought to myself.
What’s the big deal?
I was about to file the event under
old news
and move on when I spotted a big clock on the sidewalk keeping digital count of the hours, minutes and seconds. I wondered if maybe something grander was afoot.