When I was growing up, my family spent almost all of our vacation time
in Ontario. Twice a year we piled into the family vehicle, which evolved
over my childhood from a station wagon into a minivan into a massive SUV like a
mechanized version of Darwin’s fish, for our bi-annual nine hour drive from D.C. to
Toronto. Our week-long post-Christmas winter trip was spent with my sweet, diminutive
grandmother in the house my mother grew up in in Etobicoke. While my mother cleaned the place from top to bottom
and took Grandma shopping, we spent the week poking around her house,
iceskating on tennis courts (the concept of which amounted to Nobel-worthy
genius in my ten-year-old mind) and, as we got older, reading the soft-core
Christian romance novels my grandmother bought in the hope that my sisters and I would grow up to be devout girls who found pious, rugged men who proposed to us
after chaste courtships. Summer was better: we stayed with my grandmother for a
few nights before proceeding two hours north to Muskoka and the family cottage,
which perches on the rocky shores of a quietly gorgeous lake and remains one of
my favorite places in the world. We were
usually there for about three weeks, a week of which we spent at an
overnight camp in the area when my parents wanted some bloody peace and quiet.
Adding all that time up, I imagine I've spent about a month
in Canada every year from ages 1-18, so altogether at least a year and a half. But it was
in bits and pieces, and it followed a somewhat insular, family-oriented routine. Sure, we went on outings to places like the Bata Shoe Museum when I was a disdainful
teenager (which is by far the worst time of life to bring a young girl to a shoe
museum), and we definitely went to the ROM a few times. We went to a Jay’s game
once, but all I remember of it was the man sitting behind us spilling his full beer
down my older sister’s neck (I’m not sure who was more upset). But mostly our
routine kept us in Etobicoke or at the lake, so my conception of
Canada prior to my move here was assembled from these odd snapshots. As a result, when I moved to Toronto in August I felt as if I knew the city pretty well and expected it to conform to my expectations. But of course I was being hugely
reductive. I've found myself somewhat at sea here, as anyone is when they move
to a city with which they have limited familiarity.
I was lucky enough to find an ideal apartment with lovely
roommates only a ten-minute journey from campus by bike in fine weather or TTC in wretched, although I shouldn't attribute finding my place entirely to luck. Before my full move to Toronto in August I flew up in late July to spend a week dashing all over the city
and waltzing into the homes of complete strangers to see if their basement
apartments were as dank as they looked in their craigslist ads (they were). I
saw five or six places a day, and without a car or a bike at my disposal I was riding the trains and TTC buses constantly, learning the layout of the
city and trying to understand the bus transfer system (which still eludes me).
Riding public transport is nothing new to me. Over the
approximately six years I lived on my own in D.C. as an adult (that last word should
really be in scare quotes), I got around exclusively via metro trains and city
buses. For two of those six years I was living in an apartment a few blocks
west of the uber-fancy Georgetown neighborhood, and for the remaining four I
lived in a group house in a slowly gentrifying, traditionally African-American
neighborhood called Petworth. My
experiences in Petworth could’ve sustained a blog on their own, had I been so
motivated. I once got off the bus with an woman who interrogated me, “What
are you doing here, white girl? White as paper, white girl.” On another
occasion, I returned home to find my block cordoned off with police tape; a man
had stolen a car and then crashed it into a tree up the street while shooting
out the window at the police pursuing him. So yeah, Petworth was interesting. I didn’t
take a lot of evening strolls.
Returning to my point: I've ridden a lot of different forms
of public transit- in D.C., in New York on frequent trips to visit friends, and even in Bangkok. Very little shocks me. But during that first week alone in Toronto I repeatedly witnessed a particular encounter between strangers, enacted like a small drama
three times in front of me, that surprised me.
So here’s the scene: I’m riding a TTC bus, seated halfway
towards the back. The bus pulls up to a stop, and a woman pushing a stroller struggles
on with a toddler or small child walking on next to her. She has her hands
full; in addition to the stroller she might have shopping bags, or maybe she
can’t find her transit pass or a token or the fare, or maybe the stroller is
just unwieldy, as they tend to be. The toddler wanders past the driver towards the
seats. And- here’s where the action gets shocking for me as a spectator- as the
kid is loitering, waiting for his mom to catch up, a complete stranger reaches down, picks the child up, and places him in an open seat.
Seems reasonable, right? After all, the bus could start moving
at any minute, and no one wants a toddler to faceplant in the middle of the
aisle (aside from a few friends of mine with very dark senses of humor). But as
I mentioned, I rode buses all over D.C. in rough neighborhoods and rich ones,
and this does not happen. You do not
touch a stranger’s child. But I saw this happen three times in the course of my first week in Toronto. Twice it was made
more notable in my eyes by the fact that the mother was a woman of color. I
wouldn't venture to touch a stranger’s child in D.C. regardless of race, but
the race relations in D.C. (which used to bear the nickname “chocolate city”)
are tense enough that I admit that I would be more worried about the
potentially negative reaction of a parent of color if I laid hands on their
child. I can remember this situation
happening once in D.C. - the mom was struggling, and the bus started to move. I
put out my hand to catch the already-unsteady toddler in case he toppled, but
she swooped him up and I got a dirty look for nearly touching his arm.
An added complication: on one of these three
occasions, the person to scoop the child up and put her in a seat was a
middle-aged man traveling alone. That surprised me on another level. I've had
conversations with male friends about their reticence to engage in any kind of encounter with a
young child. When they take their young nieces or nephews to the pool or the
park or make faces at a bored kid in line at the grocery store, they run the risk of being glared at or even lectured, unless they have a woman on their proverbial
arm. I remember a conversation with a very good friend of mine, a burly,
bearded sweetheart who teaches middle school math and science at a low-income
Catholic school in D.C. Many of the kids at his school don’t have male role models
in their lives, and as one of the few male teachers at the small school he’s a favorite of all the students, from the preschoolers to his own preteen pupils. But he
showed me how he responds when the kids hug him: with one hand he stiffly pats
them on the shoulder in a show of clear disinterest while his other arm hangs
limp at his side. “I don’t want anything to be misconstrued,” he explained. And
this is a man who has a sanctioned relationship with the kids who are
approaching him for comfort or affection.
Back on the bus in Toronto, each episode ended with casual thanks from the mother. And
everyone just went on with their commute. It was clearly utterly unremarkable
to all involved, but I was astonished.
So what’s the deal?
To address the racial component (and I should note that I'm basing these hypotheses on personal experience rather than empirical evidence): Toronto is much more of a melting pot than
D.C., which is still largely divided along stark racial and class lines of
white/wealthy and black/poor (although there is a growing Latino population).
Furthermore, an influx of recent college graduates in search of affordable
rent is pushing longtime residents out of traditionally African-American
neighborhoods. This, and other factors,
make race relations in D.C. complicated and strained. I also wonder if the smaller gap between rich and poor in Canada, as well as the truly multicultural nature of Toronto, contributes to a closer sense of community. Canadian poverty should be less desperate than poverty in the U.S. due to better social programs and accessible
healthcare, which may result in less of a culture of fear due to a narrower social division between citizens.
To address the pedophilia component: I've got nothing.
But really, how sweet. What I like about Toronto is that the
city feels like a lot of small towns all stitched together, and these experiences
only contributed to that feeling. It takes a village, that sort of thing.
