Toronto Tidbits

• A man walked down Bloor St. with big rain boots on wearing a T-shirt that said,

   “I hate rain boots.”

• I brought Canadian pennies from my foreign change drawer at home and discovered that no one takes them anymore. Prices can still be $8.61 or $9.98, but they just round up or down.

• I spilled some seeds from my Starbucks oatmeal and a sparrow checked them out and rejected them. Hmm.

• Ex-Toronto mayor Rob Ford was even more outrageous than Trump. Still the Canadians are stupefied about what’s going on South of the Border. They’re thinking of building a wall.

• The Steinway piano in the room where I teach at the Royal Conservatory of Music is the most exquisite instrument I’ve ever shared a workshop room with.

• The Royal Conservatory is the very place where Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman came in 1962 to drop the seed of Orff Schulwerk in North America (the first and only time they came to North America). Though I worry that the hearty wildflower that grew so abundantly in Canada and the U.S. has become a genetically modified domesticated houseplant, still I’m doing my part to keep it healthy and hearty. And meaningful to do it in the same place where Orff and Keetman stood over a half-century ago.

• We ended the course with a beautiful song and wet eyes all around. We decided that this song was in the Tearian Mode.

• Treated myself to a night at the movies before one more day of teaching 12 visiting teachers from China. Matt Damon, let me be honest here: Jason Bourne compared to Good Will Hunting is a downward career spiral. I will not be seeing the sequel the ending implied.

• Toronto is the first foreign city I ever visited. I believe it was in 1963. If it was one year earlier, I might have bumped into Orff and Keetman. (Hmm, wonder if I could pull off an “Old Doc Jones” tale about that—workshop participants, you know what I’m talking about!)