Stepping out of the St. Lawrence Market, I stumbled as Toronto’s trademark wind gusts hurled around a freezing rain. The 200-year-old market tipped into the edge of a shabby former warehouse district obviously in the embryo period of gentrification. Through the drizzle, a modest sign on an old brick building proclaimed it to be the headquarters of the Toronto Opera Company.
There, I almost turned back. I was cold. My feet were wet. And in my backpack was a fat new Wayne Johnston novel, a Newfoundland author made for rainy afternoons. I wanted a cushy seat and something hot to drink. Besides, the area touted as the Old Distillery Historic District was probably just a bland collection of tired shops. Why bother? I grumbled. But I was on a mission.
Faced with driving sleet and biting wind that morning, I’d looked outside and thought, “Today is a day that requires coffee shops. Coffee shops with great mochas and no hurry.” But for the coffee shop to be complete, it needed a book. Not the novel I’d brought with me. No. Coffee shops in places away from home cry for books that had been sniffed out from a city’s very own bookstores, with their very regional selection of books.
And juicy book shops, luckily, abound in Toronto, enough to make travelers forget about their numb hands and wet shoes. The prospect of a new book followed by a hot, comforting beverage made being wet and cold almost bearable.
Sniffing around the Northern End
Elliot’s is the kind of second-hand bookstore that makes readers greedy. Three stories of narrow aisles with tall bookshelves hold a minimum of dust among a maximum of tidiness. Mouthwatering leather-bound editions of classics fill floor-to-ceiling shelves by the door, giving way reassuringly to compressed rows of trade paperbacks. This is the place to find old travel guides, modern bestsellers, and a mix of Canadian classics.
Closer to downtown, This Aint’ the Rosedale Library lives up to its name: eclectic. With awards lining its ceiling advertising “Toronto’s Best Independent Bookstore,” it really smelled of books. That fresh paper smell, a slight hint of glue and its promise of literary adventures.
Narrow, sagging shelves, books everywhere, books stacked on the floor in piles, on chairs, but in a strangely organized fashion. Not a store where you couldn’t find anything. A store where you could find anything, including a great selection of lesser-known children’s books and a large transgender and gay section. A store where you could discover a collection of children’s fables by Margaret Atwood and trot with it down to the nearest drinkable chocolate outlet, which I’d passed on the way.
Second Cup, a warm Starbucks-type chain all over the city, has some of the frothiest, delectable mochas I’ve ever tasted outside of France. Inside information informs me that Second Cup also participates in the worldwide Cup of Excellence, a Fair-Trade-type organization that focuses on paying independent farmers a premium for growing the highest quality Arabica beans. The do-gooder participation just lent extra warmth as my jeans began to dry.
Lettieri, also dotting the city, is more chic, more hip than Second Cup. Its hot chocolates are just as good, and its espresso comes in tiny glass cups that just beg to be sipped out of. Sit down with a mug of this, a sparkling water, and a book, and you can stay happily snowed- or rained-in for hours.
Gorging in Old Town
Nicholas Hoare’s bookshop is a feast. An independent seller of new books, its shop is wide and spacious, with appropriately resounding hardwood floors. It’s described as a great place to get coffee table books, but that doesn’t detract from its collections of others, especially nonfiction.
Nicholas Hoare sets up a literary smorgasbord by facing books outward, shamelessly flashing readers with the cover of nearly every book they carry.
The practice brought a new meaning to browsing. I don’t think I’ve ever browsed a bookstore more thoroughly in my life. Even books I’d already read looked different facing out among others on the polished wood shelves, orchestrated with a Vivaldi concerto. I roamed among the menu items until I finally picked up Wayne Johnston’s The Custodian of Paradise, which hadn’t yet been published in the States, and moved back into the rain, to find the much-touted Distillery Historic District.
Chocolate Salvation
Derelict buildings cornered the historic area’s main intersection. Huge green shutters sagged closed under old brick archways. Deciding that the historic area was also in the embryo stage of tourist development, I almost turned away when I saw a shy iron gate and guardhouse across the road. The gray drizzle almost obscured the sign that pointed out the pedestrian entrance to the Distillery district.
There is something tremendously romantic about old brick warehouse areas. Cities that take their renovation in hand carefully—highlighting the history as well as the warm beauty of the buildings while making them modernly accessible—deserve an award.
Toronto is such a city. The stumpy buildings were renovated with a minimum of interference, the old brick maintained, the signs for galleries and cafes small and attractive. The brick streets, even in the rain, felt almost cozy. And it came up trumps. In my halfhearted search for a cup of tea, a polite arrow pointed the way to freezing drizzle salvation: Soma, chocolate maker.
This was not just hot chocolate, not just a mocha. The spicy cup of Mayan hot cocoa on a cold day was an exploration. The scent of chili and cinnamon pervaded Soma’s open space with proudly exposed brick walls. Behind huge glass windows, in the ‘chocolate laboratory,’ two young women poured sauce, cut bars, and coated orange peels with the slow movements and laughing exchanges of people who love their job.
The chocolate drove away cold and a drudgerious walk with a relaxing warmth that was a nod to its Huxley namesake. It restored better spirits for exploring the walkways in the unending rain.
In sprawling Toronto, perseverance is well rewarded: among the galleries touting local artists and craftsmen, the Distillery’s developers had added a slosh of whimsy. Lesser-known quotes from famous names ran along outer walls, brightening the chocolate-lightened day still further: “Nobody has ever walked into a store intending to buy bread and coming out with just that,” Erma Bombeck. “People who live within their means lack imagination,” Oscar Wilde. Temptingly true.
Toronto is for lingering, for warming, for getting you through wretched afternoons full of freezing drizzle and wind. Find your appetizer at a bookstore and hide on a cushy seat with a hot drink while the weather does its worst.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
The Nausea, the Fatigue
Finally, this morning, for the first time in six weeks, I woke up without feeling desperately tired or feeling ill. It felt so good--I'd almost forgotten what it was like to feel normal.
I've been looking at a lot of pregnancy and baby sites, looking for guidance, advice, and stories. Instead, I've found a cheeriness that seems . . . well, to put it bluntly, creepy.
People go on and on about how wonderful it is to be pregnant, and to bear a child, skimming quickly over the uncomfortable bits and pointing out that it's all worth it.
Is it? Personally, I feel invaded. Hubby has started calling it "the parasite," in an affectionate way, of course. I feel tired all the time, nauseated frequently. I can't drink wine, which I love, anymore.
I'm not saying it's not worth it to have children. I still want children. But is it really worth it to bear them yourself? Nine months of intense discomfort and the theft of your bodily functions, to go through a ridiculous amount of pain to push out something that you could love just as easily if it were grown from a glass tube.
Men don't carry babies, but they love them, too. Why should it be a requirement that women go through nine months of purgatory--if not hell--just to feel like they have the right to love them? People love babies they adopt.
Evolution has cheated women. Humans are the only species that not only takes this long to produce offspring, but produces babies that aren't fully developed when they're born (foals walk shortly after being born, for example). All that work and they're not even done? Something somewhere along the way has gone seriously wrong. I vote for a misogynist conspiracy.
I've been looking at a lot of pregnancy and baby sites, looking for guidance, advice, and stories. Instead, I've found a cheeriness that seems . . . well, to put it bluntly, creepy.
People go on and on about how wonderful it is to be pregnant, and to bear a child, skimming quickly over the uncomfortable bits and pointing out that it's all worth it.
Is it? Personally, I feel invaded. Hubby has started calling it "the parasite," in an affectionate way, of course. I feel tired all the time, nauseated frequently. I can't drink wine, which I love, anymore.
I'm not saying it's not worth it to have children. I still want children. But is it really worth it to bear them yourself? Nine months of intense discomfort and the theft of your bodily functions, to go through a ridiculous amount of pain to push out something that you could love just as easily if it were grown from a glass tube.
Men don't carry babies, but they love them, too. Why should it be a requirement that women go through nine months of purgatory--if not hell--just to feel like they have the right to love them? People love babies they adopt.
Evolution has cheated women. Humans are the only species that not only takes this long to produce offspring, but produces babies that aren't fully developed when they're born (foals walk shortly after being born, for example). All that work and they're not even done? Something somewhere along the way has gone seriously wrong. I vote for a misogynist conspiracy.
Grocery Shopping Battles
This morning I'm preparing to go grocery shopping, as I do every Wednesday. To at least three-quarters of the population, the phrase "preparing to go grocery shopping" has no meaning. But for those of us who shrink from the countless inane encounters and pushy crowds of an everyday life, it means everything.
I used to shop at a local chain, but have recently discovered a Trader Joe's just 40 minutes south, in a crowded area of New Jersey. Since TJ's is vastly cheaper than anywhere else, I kind of have to go there. Besides, it gives you that warm fuzzy of shopping in the granola-friendly Trader Joe's atmosphere.
Problem is, this area of New Jersey is terribly overcrowded. There are people, people everywhere. In small, squeezed streets of what were once separate small towns, women with starched hair and pinched expressions maneuver massive SUVs that take just a bit over their fair share of the road.
I really don't know how these people live like this all the time. I don't know why there aren't accidents all the time, constantly. New Jersey residents are truly terrible drivers, almost as bad as Bostonians--weaving across the road, chittering on phones, never using turn signals.
Anyway, the traffic gamut makes my fingers weak. And then I have to face the crowds. When I get into the parking lot, I sit with my head on the steering wheel for a minute, just to recuperate.
It's hard to explain to a non-introvert what the experience of crowding is like. Not crowds--introversion is not enochlophobia; this is not about the suffocating quantity of people--it's the constant chatter going on around you, the idiotic impulse most people feel to either a) say whatever comes into their head to the person they're with, or b) if they're not with someone, getting out their cell phone because they can't stand not talking to someone even for the short time it takes to choose groceries.
This chatter is like breathing pollution to introverts. Jonathan Rauch's statement, "please shush" sums up an introvert's deepest desire. Please stop talking about nothing. Please be silent for a bit.
For me, this doesn't just apply to someone talking at me over the phone or at a social event. It's all around me, all the time, like some sort of blaring klaxon that keeps me jittery and anxious.
So that's what happens in the grocery store. People talk, talk, talk. They try to make small talk as we stand choosing tea. They say pointless things to the checkout person. They review their sex lives while on the phone. They keep a running commentary with a friend while letting their children run around hapless and screaming.
Like many introverts, I need about two hours of alone recovery time for every hour of small-talk-type social events. After the grocery store, after I've battled pushy, greedy, permanently annoyed drivers for over an hour, and after I've walked through a sea of talk that feels like walking through verbal thorns I need the rest of the day to recover. I can work. I can function. But I just need, desperately to be left alone.
I used to shop at a local chain, but have recently discovered a Trader Joe's just 40 minutes south, in a crowded area of New Jersey. Since TJ's is vastly cheaper than anywhere else, I kind of have to go there. Besides, it gives you that warm fuzzy of shopping in the granola-friendly Trader Joe's atmosphere.
Problem is, this area of New Jersey is terribly overcrowded. There are people, people everywhere. In small, squeezed streets of what were once separate small towns, women with starched hair and pinched expressions maneuver massive SUVs that take just a bit over their fair share of the road.
I really don't know how these people live like this all the time. I don't know why there aren't accidents all the time, constantly. New Jersey residents are truly terrible drivers, almost as bad as Bostonians--weaving across the road, chittering on phones, never using turn signals.
Anyway, the traffic gamut makes my fingers weak. And then I have to face the crowds. When I get into the parking lot, I sit with my head on the steering wheel for a minute, just to recuperate.
It's hard to explain to a non-introvert what the experience of crowding is like. Not crowds--introversion is not enochlophobia; this is not about the suffocating quantity of people--it's the constant chatter going on around you, the idiotic impulse most people feel to either a) say whatever comes into their head to the person they're with, or b) if they're not with someone, getting out their cell phone because they can't stand not talking to someone even for the short time it takes to choose groceries.
This chatter is like breathing pollution to introverts. Jonathan Rauch's statement, "please shush" sums up an introvert's deepest desire. Please stop talking about nothing. Please be silent for a bit.
For me, this doesn't just apply to someone talking at me over the phone or at a social event. It's all around me, all the time, like some sort of blaring klaxon that keeps me jittery and anxious.
So that's what happens in the grocery store. People talk, talk, talk. They try to make small talk as we stand choosing tea. They say pointless things to the checkout person. They review their sex lives while on the phone. They keep a running commentary with a friend while letting their children run around hapless and screaming.
Like many introverts, I need about two hours of alone recovery time for every hour of small-talk-type social events. After the grocery store, after I've battled pushy, greedy, permanently annoyed drivers for over an hour, and after I've walked through a sea of talk that feels like walking through verbal thorns I need the rest of the day to recover. I can work. I can function. But I just need, desperately to be left alone.
Monday, February 5, 2007
The Need for Fantasy: Harry Potter to Finish
I was both excited and depressed to hear that J.K. Rowling has finally finished the last Harry Potter book, and it will be published on July 21st. Excited because I love Harry Potter, and depressed because there will be no more.
Many of my more literary friends look down their noses at people who love good fantasy, science fiction, or mystery novels. But they're missing out.
First of all, fantasy in particular employs some of the most delightful and inventive aspects of the human imagination, whimsy that could never be fully explored in regular fiction. Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia are just two of the best of the genre.
Fantasy also allows authors to write about what is most noble in humans. By pitting an absolute evil against those with courage, a sense of honor, and human-sized flaws, we are allowed a rare belief that humans are capable of being selfless, altruistic, and just plain good.
Isn't it worth something to have literature that answers these needs?
Lastly, I know from experience that fantasy and science fiction can be lifesavers for people with difficult childhoods. Mine was abusive and terrifying, yet reading fantasy literature kept me sane, kept me believing that a better world was possible and that better people existed.
Harry Potter entranced me from the first book, and I've read the entire series (so far) at least ten times. Aside from the wonderful, imaginative world Rowling has created, it is one of the best series I've ever read about growing up.
Harry's entire struggle against evil is a metaphor for every individual's struggle to become an adult. To face, finally, the fact that we are each alone, that our parents cannot fix the world for us, to face up to our own expectations and fears, and our own fight to be fully realized individuals, pursuing a life that is meant for us, to emerge from that warm cocoon of childhood--that is what Harry Potter shows us. How cold it is to grow up, how scary and lonely, but how magnificent it can be if we're willing to face it.
Many of my more literary friends look down their noses at people who love good fantasy, science fiction, or mystery novels. But they're missing out.
First of all, fantasy in particular employs some of the most delightful and inventive aspects of the human imagination, whimsy that could never be fully explored in regular fiction. Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia are just two of the best of the genre.
Fantasy also allows authors to write about what is most noble in humans. By pitting an absolute evil against those with courage, a sense of honor, and human-sized flaws, we are allowed a rare belief that humans are capable of being selfless, altruistic, and just plain good.
Isn't it worth something to have literature that answers these needs?
Lastly, I know from experience that fantasy and science fiction can be lifesavers for people with difficult childhoods. Mine was abusive and terrifying, yet reading fantasy literature kept me sane, kept me believing that a better world was possible and that better people existed.
Harry Potter entranced me from the first book, and I've read the entire series (so far) at least ten times. Aside from the wonderful, imaginative world Rowling has created, it is one of the best series I've ever read about growing up.
Harry's entire struggle against evil is a metaphor for every individual's struggle to become an adult. To face, finally, the fact that we are each alone, that our parents cannot fix the world for us, to face up to our own expectations and fears, and our own fight to be fully realized individuals, pursuing a life that is meant for us, to emerge from that warm cocoon of childhood--that is what Harry Potter shows us. How cold it is to grow up, how scary and lonely, but how magnificent it can be if we're willing to face it.
Florida: Not Just for Teeny-boppers and Wrinklies
I've always been a person who despised Florida. I thought it was for the most boring retirees on the planet (i.e., people who might as well die because all they do is play golf and complain about kids and neighbors), plus all the people in college I really hated (the perfect girls with perfect tans and the guy jocks). A visit to Orlando two years ago did nothing to change this. Florida was stifling, both in terms of weather and intellectual stimulation.
To be fair, I'm not a sun-lover. I burn. I don't like to be hot. On a hot day, if there's no shade, I scurry around like a pathetic bug, trying to find shade. Around 70 degrees is my perfect weather, plus I like a fair share of rainy days and love winter. So Florida and I don't mix well.
But I've just softened my opinions on the place. Last weekend hubby and I took a nearly spontaneous trip to Fort Lauderdale. JetBlue was offering crazy cheap flights from our local airport, so we took them. Not realizing that it was Super Bowl weekend (I don't like football, either, and hubby is a foreigner who thinks football is for wimps and prefers rugby), we got stuck driving to a hotel about 60 miles from Fort Lauderdale and Miami, heart of sugar-growing country.
I have to say we were both pretty fascinated. This land is flat, flat, flat--a "sea of grass," as one writer put it. On the map, roads skirt regions that don't say "here there be dragons" in so many words, but they definitely leave that impression. Here there be alligators, definitely.
Twenty miles out of the seriously overpopulated Palm Beach/Fort Lauderdale/Miami region, you run into miles and miles of nothing. "So, anything to do around here?" we asked the girl at our hotel. "Nope," she said, in the manner of teenagers everywhere who grow up in rural regions. I sympathized--there had been nothing to do in my wheat-growing hometown, either.
But, being beyond teenage years, we were entertained: we chased a semi-truck full of oranges (wouldn't they have tasted good, fresh off the tree?), watched sugar cane being harvested, and stopped to watch a pond full of lazy-floating alligators, herons, and egrets.
This region is also one of the most environmentally devastated in the country. Once, these swampy miles fed the precarious ecosystem of the Everglades. Now, with waterways redirected and canals dug to feed the voracious water needs (and water greeds, like golf courses) of the wealthy South Florida population, the Everglades regions are almost destroyed.
Stopping at a rest area on "Alligator Alley," I played with an interactive display that showed just how much this area has changed since white man decided we could grow sugar and other groceries on it. For those who love the earth, and cherish wild places where birds can roost, it's devastating.
The government is embarking on a stupendous effort to redirect much of the water systems. Will it work? Who knows. But it will definitely be a fight between people who care for everything, and people who care for nothing outside their own overpriced walls.
__________
The second part of the trip was a friend's whirlwind tour of Miami and Miami Beach, which was a pleasant surprise. Miami Beach is a cool, fun area--lots of cafes, pedestrian walkways, and streets packed with preserved art deco architecture--not something you see everywhere. This is a place I wouldn't mind coming back to, which, being a traditional hater of Florida, rather surprised me.
In the end, there are many reasons to see Florida. And none of them have anything to do with baking on a hot beach.
To be fair, I'm not a sun-lover. I burn. I don't like to be hot. On a hot day, if there's no shade, I scurry around like a pathetic bug, trying to find shade. Around 70 degrees is my perfect weather, plus I like a fair share of rainy days and love winter. So Florida and I don't mix well.
But I've just softened my opinions on the place. Last weekend hubby and I took a nearly spontaneous trip to Fort Lauderdale. JetBlue was offering crazy cheap flights from our local airport, so we took them. Not realizing that it was Super Bowl weekend (I don't like football, either, and hubby is a foreigner who thinks football is for wimps and prefers rugby), we got stuck driving to a hotel about 60 miles from Fort Lauderdale and Miami, heart of sugar-growing country.
I have to say we were both pretty fascinated. This land is flat, flat, flat--a "sea of grass," as one writer put it. On the map, roads skirt regions that don't say "here there be dragons" in so many words, but they definitely leave that impression. Here there be alligators, definitely.
Twenty miles out of the seriously overpopulated Palm Beach/Fort Lauderdale/Miami region, you run into miles and miles of nothing. "So, anything to do around here?" we asked the girl at our hotel. "Nope," she said, in the manner of teenagers everywhere who grow up in rural regions. I sympathized--there had been nothing to do in my wheat-growing hometown, either.
But, being beyond teenage years, we were entertained: we chased a semi-truck full of oranges (wouldn't they have tasted good, fresh off the tree?), watched sugar cane being harvested, and stopped to watch a pond full of lazy-floating alligators, herons, and egrets.
This region is also one of the most environmentally devastated in the country. Once, these swampy miles fed the precarious ecosystem of the Everglades. Now, with waterways redirected and canals dug to feed the voracious water needs (and water greeds, like golf courses) of the wealthy South Florida population, the Everglades regions are almost destroyed.
Stopping at a rest area on "Alligator Alley," I played with an interactive display that showed just how much this area has changed since white man decided we could grow sugar and other groceries on it. For those who love the earth, and cherish wild places where birds can roost, it's devastating.
The government is embarking on a stupendous effort to redirect much of the water systems. Will it work? Who knows. But it will definitely be a fight between people who care for everything, and people who care for nothing outside their own overpriced walls.
__________
The second part of the trip was a friend's whirlwind tour of Miami and Miami Beach, which was a pleasant surprise. Miami Beach is a cool, fun area--lots of cafes, pedestrian walkways, and streets packed with preserved art deco architecture--not something you see everywhere. This is a place I wouldn't mind coming back to, which, being a traditional hater of Florida, rather surprised me.
In the end, there are many reasons to see Florida. And none of them have anything to do with baking on a hot beach.
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