A Saturday With Billie

The past few days: I realize that so many things happen each week, I don’t get around to thinking about or writing about many of them. Here are some from the past few days. On Friday Maurice brought Billie from Barrie to spend the weekend with us. That girlie is a great weekend morning lounger. She decided to sleep in the living room instead of my office because she finds our couches more comfy than the little IKEA set up that we put in place especially for her visits. I eat my breakfast (in fact most meals) in the living room but my early AM eating, writing, and reading newspapers on an adjacent couch disturbed her rest very little. Even when she finally pulls herself into a semblance of consciousness, Billie enjoys a continuation of her own inner world by settling into a book or a game on her ubiquitous tablet. Much time passes before she emerges into a fully sentient being, keen to eat and to explore a larger world. Makes sense to me and it works for both of us as I continue with my own Saturday AM slothful habits.

Late in the morning Mark, Billie and I boarded a Spadina streetcar, travelling its now truncated route (due to construction) down to King St. From there we walked along that really interesting thoroughfare – a more up-scale and shi-shi area than my own native Annex locale – that I enjoy but do not prefer. I tried to take some photos of Billie riding the backs of some large cow sculptures in the park that commemorates its former life as a market, but the sun shone so brightly on my cell phone/camera that I ended by taking several snippets of videos instead. Pretty cute though.  Passing through the BCE place we decided to have some lunch at the Marche. Billie was uninterested as she had had breakfast just before we left home, but, seeing the amazing set up of individual kiosks distributing made-on-the-spot pizzas, salads, rotis, full dinners of chicken or beef with various vegetables, crepes – sweet or savoury, gelato, deserts of every description, and etc, her eyes grew larger and larger. She walked about for some time trying to balance her fairly full constitution with the smorgasbord of delights before her. She settled finally on a dish of French vanilla gelato, and later, a brownie. She is now keen to bring her mother down to sample this marvellous gastronomic spread.

From the Marche Mark, the tour guide, took us to see the first Toronto Post Office  on Adelaide St. The front entrance was shut due to some repair work but we accessed the rear and walked about the restored ground floor. Antique tables, quill pens with paper and ink ready for use by any interested visitor, and a host of other original artefacts, photographs, and explanatory notes gave a good sense of the working of the postal business of the day. I was particularly struck by a board which detailed the historical uses and abuses of the building itself after it ceased to be a post office, and the work done to restore it to its present state. We are so lucky to have had (and to still have) people in this city sufficiently interested in and concerned about our history that they would expend lots of energy and money to preserve it.

By this time Billie and I were feeling the effects of the warm day on our too heavily shod feet and were attempting to influence the guide to head for home. But, we had one more important stop to make: the St Lawrence Market, in full swing for its Saturday morning incarnation. We passed up going through the hall itself, though we did walk through the farmer’s market across the street. In the StL Market we headed upstairs to the gallery to view Nir Bareket’s photographic exhibit, My Eyes Have Seen. The exhibit consists of photos taken over many years by Nir; most are part of the collection of the City of Toronto. They showcase several sites or themes on which Nir has focussed, for example, his haunting photos of the Don Jail, and, a series of pictures showing the plight of Toronto’s homeless population. Each section of the exhibit is introduced by someone connected to that particular area or theme. For example, the pictures of the Don jail are introduced by John Sewell, of former mayoral fame. (Remember when we had mayors with serious concerns?) He writes of the effect that Nir’s photos had in convincing people of the importance of saving that site of historical suffering, lest we forget from whence we have come.

The section that was most affecting for me personally contained photos from the March of the Living, a pilgrimage taken by Toronto students (and youth of other countries) some years ago, to sites of the Holocaust in Poland. At Auschwitz the entire group of young people walked together the few kilometres from Auschwitz 1, the original camp, to the later constructed Birkenau, Auschwitz 2, a main site of extermination of the Jews transported there from across Europe. Nir accompanied the Toronto contingent to Poland and to Israel which they visited later. Throughout he documented their physical and emotional journeys to these sites of powerful historical import. For many, as he has said, the journey was life changing. Nir’s exhibit will remain at the gallery of the St Lawrence market until July 19/14, if you are interested in seeing it. Definitely worth the visit with or without overly heated feet!

The remainder of our day was fairly anti-climactic: we returned home to Major St in time to watch the Blue Jays go down to a second defeat at the hands of the visiting LA Angels. Emily came over to play with her cousin in my office. We enjoyed supper cooked by Mark, the chef, and watched one segment of a TV series called My Inner Fish. This particular piece focussed on our inner monkeys – the development of colour sight and of the oppositional thumb/index finger in that branch of our ancestry, the how and the why of these developments and what they allow for us primate humans. Really engrossing stuff! Afterward I took Emily back to her dad’s place and the rest of us retired with our books to our beds.

Starting to write this post, I intended to survey many of the events of the past several days, but as you can observe, I have gotten no further than our Saturday spent with Billie. But that is plenty. A good spring day with an interesting and funny girlie:  fully enjoyed by all.