TO, or Tronna, as natives are wont to call it...now known as the GTA.Image via Wikipedia
Sat on the park bench like bookends.
So goes the gorgeous 1968 song by Simon and Garfunkel.
In Toronto for a week, I’m basking in my past, catching up with men and women who have known me since I was thin(ner!) and bouncing off the walls with ambition (still am) and had not yet been married or divorced.
I left Toronto in 1986 for Montreal, New Hampshire and New York, where I’ve lived ever since. I go back two to six times a year to catch up with old colleagues and friends like:
– Vicki, who I met in Grade Four, whose backyard contains what’s left of Pickles, my late hamster
– Joe, my dreamy crush in high school, all blond bangs and deep blue eyes
– Sally, (who shared my deep crush on Joe), my best pal from high school, at whose lakeside house I’m writing this from, and with whom I re-connected at our 1995, 20-year reunion
– Marcia, who met me when I was afire, even at 20, with journalistic ambition: she was the head of public relations for the National Ballet of Canada and (yes) got me a part as a walk-on in Sleeping Beauty. I did all eight performances at Lincoln Center, with Nureyev on-stage as the Prince. It made a great story, especially when I came on-stage about 20 bars too soon on opening night!
– Peter, an architect with whom I fell madly in love on a Cartagena rooftop when we were both there on holiday in our 20s. He’s gay, so we became, and have remained, dear friends
– Stephen, who desperately wanted to marry me when I was 26, and lived with me ages 22-25, but married someone else instead and is now divorced and a PI living in the countryside. It was great to catch up on all those lost decades
– Ken, my former squash partner from University of Toronto, now a lawyer and newly, at midlife, a Dad and husband
I’ve also loved physically passing by my past…
the streetcar rumbling past Maclean-Hunter, the downtown magazine publisher for whom I started my writing career, while still an undergraduate, for a magazine called Miss Chatelaine (hence the kd lang song title!)…the Chinatown restaurant where my Dad made a film in the 1960s…my old apartment building a block from campus, and a block from my Granny’s old apartment building.
And, while Toronto is a city of 3 million or so, the degrees of separation are few:
My sister-in-law — in her early 30s — met Stephen at my U of T Malled event and knew him from rally car racing.
A man I met for a business lunch has a former philosophy professor of mine as his father-in-law
The photographer who took my photo for a story by Canadian Press works with my sweetie on freelance stories for The New York Times
What’s it like now when you visit your hometown?
Did you leave it?
