meaning in the moving design

I get bored working at the bookstore, most days it's pretty quiet. I spend most of my time reading and writing. Here are some tinkerings from the latter.

The Ammamobile
there's something in the way of bones
the slow motion creak of its movement, its meandering path
its curious tunnelling until finally, in a gruffly contented way
the bones set, and you resignedly take ownership of this design.
Creased by the furrowed brow of hard labour
Scored with the rings of the famiy tree
A matriarch's body is marked with the evidence of her living.

She is ninety-six years old. Her lips crust over with a blatant non-chalence to manners and pretense. Her body makes unapologetic gurgling noises. Gas passes through orifices hidden under layers of swaddling, wrapped around her as if the slap of global warming will send the artctic freeze over the Indian subcontinent any moment now. She is not a body, not even a face. She is a set of eyes looking sulkily at a table of feasts she is no longer equipped to digest. They have stationed her in the middle of the room, facing the remnants of a savoury meal, her grandkids and great grandkids and whosit's kids all circling her, running around and around the stoic Amma statue. The grown ones have left her at the mercy of the little ones, whom she knows, despite her useless ears, are no doubt making too much noise. Her pursed lips of disapproval are hidden beneath her layers, and she grows more incensed with every ignored and silent chastise. The only outward sign of her distress is the constant opening and closing of her lips, like she's sucking on an imaginary magic pop... and slits for eyes, of course. The slits of fury.
Now she is in motion, pushed along by fits of giggles and unseen hands, the little ones passing in out up down and through her vision in dizzying spells. And while the grown ones prostrate themselves next door, praying for her health and longevity, she sits starting at the line between two walls, everything dark, chaos doing summersaults behind her back. She is ninety-six years old and she has paid her dues. Boredom is a slow death.


untitled rant
Crackheads get a bad rap. They're just people with very visible addictions. Not like the rest of us, who fold our addictions neatly behind diplomatic smiles. Our brightly coloured abilities to chat and drink casually; attend dinner parties and complain about loved ones. Our emotional addictions hang from us nonchalently, if not proudly. Big fat gold star- we are connected. we are not alone.
There is no plastic seal with a crackhead. There is no politely nodding past their affliction. .. you can try but they will catch you. There is shame, sometimes just a feeling in the air, sometimes spoken in cryptic self-admonishments, but always with a look straight in the eyes... They know, I know. There is ackowledgement that they have wronged themselves; that they are putting you out although you can't explain how. This is the sober moment they turn against, make fire with their hands to forget. avoid mirrors and loaded conversation. i know, i know.... Don't ask.
Not today, today is payday. It's the first of the month and I don't have to worry about anything for the next 3 weeks. A few CDs will do for today. Maybe a book. The Spirituality section does not discern or judge. Christians sit with Wiccans, the Kaballah with the Koran. Rumi, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama share secret feasts between the pages, and always, always, they set a place for me.
Do you believe in the spirits? When I was young, my mother would wake me up and point to them. They were in the cobwebbed corners beside the gritted teeth of the rad. They were tumbling through the pipes under the kitchen sink. Mamma would take me on a tour of the spirits, in the dead of night. Sometimes, we would have to make emergency evacuations and sleep out on the fire escape. Mamma kept telling me not to be scared, but she wasn't very convincing, her voice rasped in shivers, her hand nervously petting my cheek. When i feel the smoke doing slow motion flips in my lungs, I go back to those nights with mamma, except memory now comes with that missing plug-in, and I can remember what I never saw. It's like someone's taken away that big black square that was always covering up what mamma was pointing at. Those beautiful women, their faces made of smoke. Their hair flowing in perfect silky spirals. And the man who looks like recycled pop cans, swinging a hatchet through the fog, slicing through the silky soft of their faces. Now pop can man is staring at me, with his dented metal smile and his hatchet dripping cloudy tears. I am under watch. and from within the haze I feel a hand brush my hair back and mamma's voice whispers "Don't be scared, honey. The spirits are here."

I travel a lot. And I've been to some pretty piss-poor countries, so I'm not really a stranger to, say, being chased by a flock of beggars. Having said that, I've never developed a strategy that jives with my conscience. While I was in India, I realized that, comparatively, Toronto's poor are so goddamn polite. They suffer quietly, and for the most part, we don't dig. We're happy to be cradled in our own ignorance; we learn how to look through people. Well... you know how in the first episode of Six Feet Under, how everyone wanted Ruth to stop crying at the funeral because it was embarrassing, and how Nate just stood up and told everyone to just let her be? To let her cry and scream and wail if that's what she felt? Well the neighborhood around the bookstore's kinda like that too. There's no quiet poverty here.

High Time...
Went to the No Frills for a lunch buy today. There was a native woman standing at the doors, screaming "Get Out! Get Out!!" She doesn't seem to be able to say anything else. It's clear that she's not high or drunk, just that she's mentally ill and has been left to fend for herself. There's nothing for anyone to be afraid of, save for the affront of acknowledging how pitiful the situation is. She pauses as people enter and exit, with an outstretched hand and an imploring look. When they look past her and walk around her, she resumes her screaming, "Get Out!! Get Out!!" She is like a lyrebird, or a recorder stuck on play. Repeating the last phrase captured; the last point of interaction she's had with anyone; the last thing anyone has bothered to say to her.
When I leave the supermarket, she's moved away from the doors. She's a little further up the street coming towards me, screaming "Get Out! Get Out!" She pauses on cue in front of me, her hand outstretched, gurgling sounds but not words, intonated in a "please". I hand her the orange in my pocket. She smiles- this wide, surprised, warm, beautiful smile. She says "Thank you" and continues on her way.

Low Time...
It's near close. A woman walks in shivering from the cold, her hands clasped in prostration. She says, "Please, I am poor. I would be really grateful if you could please spare a dollar". Her voice dangles desperately, holding back. She looks like she's afraid of me, she's trying so hard to tread lightly, she's ashamed to be bothering me. I hesitate, and she quickly bows to me, mumbles apologies and turns for the door. "Want an orange?" I blurt out. She reaches out to take it, bows profusely, backs out the door and proceeds to rip the orange apart, skin and all. Between mouthfuls, she yells "Thank you! God Bless You! Thank you! Thank you! THANK YOU!!"
I try to go back to my book as she stands by my window; as I'm showered with Thank Yous.
I feel terrible.

I recently started working for (yet another) used bookstore, this time in the East end of Toronto, at Gerrard and Parliament. Most people think everything east of the Don is too east, and so the East end remains a bit of a blank spot in the urban psyche. (I have a lot of friends that will contest that, so let me clarify that by "most people", I mean people who did not grow up in Toronto... myself included). Gerrard and Parliament is where Cabbagetown meets Regent Park. It's an interesting neighbourhood, a mishmash of gay yuppies and crackheads; organic fine food boutiques with 5 different types of maple syrup and old school diners where people order beer with their breakfasts. The class disparity has never been so blatant. I started working there this summer, and after my first day, I decided it was the fucking Twilight Zone, and that I loved it. I'll out myself here by saying that it's probably because I had a middle-class and largely priveleged upbringing in the suburbs, and while the burbs has it's share of crazy, it's really quite a different bag of crazy beans altogether.

I'm leaving the store soon, and am feeling a little nostalgic, so I thought I'd recount some stories. So here's how my first day went:

Morning
I have about 5 minutes before I have to open up the store, so I pop into a convenience store to grab a drink. There's a man hunched over the Lotto stand right at the entrance, and I squeeze in behind him to get through. I feel his back tense as I pass, and I become very aware that this man likes his space, needs his space and does not welcome my blatent invasion of his space. A few minutes later, as I'm opening the store, I hear "FUCK SHIT BITCH CUNT FUCK BITCH SHIT". I poke my head out to see space-needy guy standing at the corner, screaming his head off. He looks like a cross between George the Animal Steel and Sloth from The Goonies- bald with a somewhat misshapen head and maybe it's just my imagination, but he seemed to have pupils that dangled cartoonishly around his eyes, like loose springs.
"Good morning," I say to myself, and pray that he doesn't feel like shopping.

Afternoon
A man walks in, a little fidgety. Youngish, tall, blonde. He's got a mark on his face that I associate with drug use, but I try not to judge... or rather I judge, and then chastize myself for judging. He thumbs through the music section and pulls out a Johnny Cash biography.
"How much for this one?" he asks.
I show him the price. "10 bucks," I say.
He brightens. In fact he gets downright giddy. "10 bucks! That's exactly what I have!" he says. "I was gonna spend it on a hooker, but a book's much better, right?"
He hands me the crumpled bill, then looks at me earnestly. "How about a date?" he says.
I smile No and he walks out. Like hell I'm giving you a 2-for-1.

Evening
"Hi"
There's a girl standing in the doorway. She fingers the knob but makes no move to come in. She's got downs syndrome. It's hard to tell, but she looks young.
"Hello," I say.
"What's your name?"
I tell her.
"Where's Ron?"
"He's not here. He'll be in tomorrow"
"Where's the boy?" She holds up her hand to indicate someone at chin height. Andrew- the friend who I had taken over for at the store.
"He's gone. He left Toronto. He was my friend"
"Oh." She stares at me for a bit. Then says "My mom died"
... maybe I heard that one wrong.
"What?" I say.
"My mom. She's dead." Then she walks out.

Closing Time
Here's a snapshot of the store's layout: I am on display. In the window, directly below the OPEN sign, perched on a stool, fitted for public consumption. All that's really missing is a flashing red light about my head, and a price tag.
So, I've sat through a "colourful" 8-hour day, and I'm combing through the last pages of a book. [I should add that it's a hot summer day, so I'm dressed unusually girly- tank top and short skirt. I should also say, that because I'm sandwiched in the narrow space between the counter the book shelves behind me, because it's a little awkward and cramped, because I have bad circulation, I am also not exactly sitting in the most lady-like fashion]. From my stool perch, I can see the outdoor sidewalk traffic in my periphery. I see a bike roll by very slowly. I look out in time to catch a woman's eye as she rides past. She looks me straight in the eye, then turns, and looking straight ahead, she says, "Put some fucking clothes on".

Epilogue
Bald-headed springy-eyed man came in a few weeks later. He stood at the doorway with a huge guffah grin, waving frantically as he asked me how my day was. Not a fuck, bitch or shit outta him. That's right- never judge.
The girl with downs has come back too. She tried to steal one of the records from the dollar bin, but saw me watching, then duely informed me that her mother was dead before walking out.

What Regent Park lacks in amenities (there are few, besides streetcar access), it makes up for in character. Along Queen Street, antique shops and design studios sidle up to the Brother Joseph Dooley supportive housing complex, while down the street from Nelson Mandela Park Public School, there might be a sex worker plying her trade in a faux fur ensemble. Still, there needn’t be a Starbucks on every corner for a neighbourhood to be desirable.

Toronto winter is all about confinement, guerrison mentality, mass hibernation. It's also the only 4 months out of the year that I am particularly intimate with the TTC. And though I miss my sunshine, hate spending the money and become almost savagely misanthropic, there is something about mass transit that is so quintessentially Toronto, and I kind of love it in a weird way.
Goodbye Toronto! Here is a mishmash of some TTC memories:

On the streetcar. There are several conversations happening, in seven different languages, none of them english. this is normal. this is toronto. outside the station, a hindi lady is haggling with a girl guide for discount cookies. inside the collector's booth, the TTC attendant looks bitterly claustophobic. the chimes sounds and someone always gets indecently stuck between the doors. There is a cluster of Japanese ESL students, speaking English shyly, quietly, but not once reverting back to the shared mother tongue. amidst the slumped bodies, the blank looks, the awake-but-not-awake glaze, in the deafening silence of everyone's cumulative 8-hour work day, there is always a kid, sometimes adding to the melancholic chord of the day with screams and wails; sometimes breaking out into songs sung out of tune, substituting real words for words she thinks are real.

across the Gateway stand on the Bloor northbound platform, up against the wall with the giant tinted window through which you can see (through which you're probably not supposed to see) a room full of monitors televising supposed delinquent, indeed possibly terroristic activities; next to the photo booth, a group of deaf-mutes gather everyday. Even in the clutter of rush hour, they are loud and boisterous, the slap of their hands sounds out their emphatic conversations.
On the opposite corner, girls wearing t-shirts no one bothers to read hand out ribbons to absent-minded passerbyers, with the surprisingly effective pitch "want a ribbon?" Imagine their surprise when they go home and realize they have complicitly lent their support to the "rights for rabid children" campaign.

out the subway doors (push agains the strange wind vacuum/temporary porthole to the netherworld). Past the condo construction, beneath the scaffolding, past the old folks home, past the old folks in their wheelchairs taking themelves for a walk, tentative steps of autonomy. let's do the length of the building before going back through the doors and relenting to the smothering of nurses. sometimes there is a baseball game on in the park. the hill is littered with lawnchairs and rowdy parents. say hi to the old chinese lady at the corner store, who tries to sell me a stale chocolate bar, (or perhaps an umbrella?) who can only get away with chasing me down the street because she knows I speak her language so in some abstract way, we are family.
Through the front door. If it's dark, I take 3 tentative paces and kick for the first step. If it's a full moon, the stairwell is lit by the skylight up top, and I crank my head to stare up at the ol guy, and sing a song I made up a long time ago: Hello moon, we're down here. Home.