Dear God, could you move the sun? It’s in the painter’s eyes.
excerpt
Family Parade
The household is in a state of chaos.
My mother rushes around the kitchen grabbing tin foil, plastic wrap and lunch bags for the aloo-chutney sandwiches spread in rows on the kitchen table.
“Oh Ji,” she shouts to my father, who is running up and down stairs gathering picnic supplies. “Can you get my purse from the closet? And grab my sunglasses too!”
My little sister Anika bounces a rubber ball along the kitchen walls yelling “Orange! Crush! Pepsi!”—with a loud thump following each exclamation—in imitation of a game I gave up playing last year. As usual, she forgets to say “Cola!” at the end.
Meanwhile, my grandmother shuffles down the hallway, lamenting her aching bones a bit more loudly than usual, and mutters about going out in hot weather. And my aunt and cousins, who have just arrived, talk all at once in the entryway, urging us “Chalo! Chalo!”—hurry up—so that we will not be late for the parade.
Upstairs, I am seated on my bed, arms crossed, tapping my heels with impatience. I have been waiting to use the bathroom down the hall, which my grandfather has occupied for the last half hour.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 4. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Toronto locations referenced in this piece
“Ten minutes later, I am seated in the ‘kids car,’ driven by my father, as he tries to navigate the weekend traffic on the Don Valley Parkway . . . ” —Don Valley Parkway
“I can already hear the echoes of steel drums accompanied by a heavy bass beat as we begin to walk over to University Avenue. It lends an air of energy and excitement to the city and I start to feel more optimistic about the outing . . . ” —University Ave.
Chill, Hush
Maybe the one thing people should know about me is that I hate my house. It sounds mean, doesn’t it, like I’m telling everyone that I secretly stick pins into a voodoo doll that looks like my brother, or that I overfed my pet Guinea pig when I was nine just so I could watch it die. The house hasn’t done anything to deserve all this ill will. In fact, it just sits there on this ordinary street in East Vancouver, its front covered with red bricks, the lawn lined with a row of rhododendrons. I suppose architects might hate how boxy it is, or how the textured stucco on the sides just collects dirt and bird shit. It’s squat and practical and you would never notice it if you were driving by. Really, it’s nothing more or less than a respectable house. But I hate it.
It’s mostly empty these days, empty air in the long hallway, circling in on itself. Sounds come from the basement, like whispers or sighs, as if the rooms are lonely and have started talking to each other, each word like a breath.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 4. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
A Pair of Parades
When I phone my mother, Blanche Ruth Jamieson Moses, born in 1924, to wish her a happy birthday, she challenges me.
“So how old am I? ”
“You don’t look a day over eighty!”
She rarely talks about the past—she’s so present—so when she mentioned that, once upon a time, she’d been in the Santa Claus Parade, she got my attention.
The first Santa Claus Parade, such as it was, took place the second day of December 1905. Santa Claus arrived by train at Union Station and was greeted by Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Eaton. Santa then walked through the streets to the Eaton’s store.
My own experience of that parade, once upon another time, was always on television and only in black and white. Though my parents might take or send me into the actual city of Toronto in the summer for the CNE or to visit family who lived here, the televised town where that parade took place, sometimes through electronic snow, was always somewhere beyond the horizon. It was not any part of my quotidian imaginings, although at night it was certainly often a distant light.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 4. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Toronto locations referenced in this piece
“The first Santa Claus Parade, such as it was, took place the second day of December 1905. Santa Claus arrived by train at Union Station and was greeted by Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Eaton . . . ” —Union Station
“Santa then walked through the streets to the Eaton’s store . . . ” —Eaton’s Store
“Though my parents might take or send me into the actual city of Toronto in the summer for the CNE or to visit family who lived here, the televised town where that parade took place . . . was always somewhere beyond the horizon . . . ” —CNE
“Grandma ran a boarding house over on Bleecker Street, in a row of houses in the block, I think, north of Carlton, a block east of Sherbourne . . . ” —Bleecker Street
“It was probably in the last year I attended York University, 1976, that my friend Wendy and I decided we’d make the journey down from Downsview, at that time a solid ninety-minute commitment on the TTC each way, to attend The Parade . . . ” —York University
“Which may explain why they’d made the move in the first place and starts to explain how a Cayuga/Tuscarora Indian girl ended up way back then in—I’m imagining—a red and round bounce of a dress accompanying Santa’s sleigh down University Avenue . . . ” —University Avenue
“We were also dispirited by all the popcorn, wrappers and cigarette butts the crowd left behind, by the surly cops herding the crowd back with steel fences at the corner of University and Queen, and by the kids cranky in the cold . . . ” —University & Queen
Chinatown East
Keep holding me like this and help me untie my birth language my first language steeped in bruises, knotted up in a child’s still body petrified with fear words thrown at me alcoholic bodies raging into me embedded like ceramic shards all around my little heart me, so small and already convinced my home felt like captivity . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 4. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Cough and Brume
My son is late. A few nurses have passed by my room since he called this morning, and a little while ago a shady white apron holding a folder and a pen stood still as I opened my eyes: another one of those modern healers, levitating at the edge of my sheet, checking off boxes on a piece of paper, assessing charts and tonsils before sending me back home.
The man in the next bed is fond of football games and bells. He is dying and he has to remind everyone of it until the end—until his palms give up, his eyeballs roll into his head and disappear, and his church calls for prayers. A million and one cigarettes are hosted in his chest, and his coughs release smog and eject curses. If it weren’t for the divide between our beds, his spit and a brume of toxic fumes would have reached over and killed me by now.