These days, I think you have to live in a small town to really appreciate what peace and tranquillity mean, and how valuable they are.
After a day on the streets of downtown Toronto — amid the crowds, the noise, the sheer thrusting, bustling, ill-mannered insensitivity of the place — when you board the train bound for home, the ticket in your hand is like a passport to paradise.
Yet even outside the city, through the suburbs, into the surrounding counties, there is still the trash, all the scrap and rubbish of forgotten projects, pointless plans that failed: Metro’s sad logo stamped on the county’s page.
The train races east, and on every side there are fields that seem to be waiting to become tomorrow’s suburbs.
Indifferent fields there, waiting, dumb, like sheep;
the urban wolf will eat them while they sleep.
I used to live in Toronto, in its long-gone naive years, when there was nothing to do on Sunday except wait for Monday. Birth rates soared; what else was there to do on Sunday? Temperance was strong. In 1969 when I arrived (from Montréal), if you had a beer on your own front porch you could be arrested.
“Toronto the Good” it was called then. Hasn’t been called that for a long time. It’s been called a lot of other names, though. “Toronto, the city you love to hate.” That term is coming back into current usage, and ironically by the Torontonians themselves. When was the last time you heard the mayor’s name when it wasn’t followed by a four-letter word?
Toronto used to be a beautiful city; still is in many areas. But it’s still not in a lot of others. The traffic on the downtown streets is a joke that doesn’t get many laughs. Where else can a pedestrian walk beside a motorist in traffic and carry on a lengthy face-to-face conversation for miles? The pedestrian could read him War and Peace and never miss a comma. Right now traffic is at a standstill. At the moment the only alternative is to move backwards, but in effect that’s a step ahead. At least traffic would be moving.
Looking back, the city’s beauty once was there, but today in the city’s core little of it remains.
I’ll sometimes seek that city once again,
but in its ugly face I’ll seek in vain
the beauty I recall, that used to be.
There, beauty’s dead. Yes, beauty’s fled, like me.
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