Farewell to Toronto

After three weeks of rain, cold, overcast skies, Toronto finally seriously turned the corner to a sunny, warm and flower-blooming Spring. On my last day! Walking around the neighborhood after the glorious concert and last classes with the kids it felt like a different place entirely. Weather can do that. 

 

Though I’ve come here almost once a year for over twenty years, it’s not easy to get a handle on this big, sprawling city. I got to know a ten-block radius near the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor St. all those years and this year, another ten blocks on Danforth St. in Greektown and then the walk on Lawrence Avenue from the subway stop to the school. Truth be told, it’s a hard city for me to get a handle on. Though known as one of the world’s most multicultural cities, it doesn’t seem to have concentrated neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Chinatown, Japantown, Italian North Beach, Latin Mission St., Russian Hill and such. (Greektown excepted). Maybe that’s a good thing, as the population is more mixed in with each other. The downtown feels like a random assortment of high-rise office buildings and condos, without an easily identifiable skyline and few iconic buildings beyond the CN Tower. I took a morning to try to explore the waterfront, expecting a Fisherman’s Wharf kind of scene, but it was a confusing mix of non-descript buildings. 

 

I’m sure that there are intriguing and enticing neighborhoods I don’t know about and next trip, I’ll ask my friends to tour me through them. One thing I notice is the plethora of brick buildings, hardly any of which we have in San Francisco. I’m quite familiar with them from my New Jersey childhood, but whether there or in Toronto, they feel quite heavy and dark in combination with the overcast skies and I could feel that sinking into my psyche. 

 

None of this is to insult Toronto or the Torontonians who live there. The few hundred I know from all these years of workshops are wonderful people and there’s no question that the restaurant scene certainly reflects that multi-cultural population. And the subways! All praise to this system where taking two trains one-way and then back again for three weeks was consistently a pleasant and extraordinarily efficient experience. I literally never had to wait more than two minutes for the next train. And with each of the ten cars pretty full, meaning that people really use their public transportation. Hurray for that! I noticed that there were less on Monday and Fridays and apparently, in the hybrid work scene those are the days that people work from home. 

 

So farewell to Toronto and I suspect we will keep seeing each other. Until then, may Spring burst fully open, the skies be blue, the weather warm and the trees wholly leaved.