Don tightens his grip on my hand as we enter (the) PATH after our dinner out, sometime around 9:30. Though the lights are still on and there are no signs telling us we can’t be there, the place is eerily quiet and deserted. Maybe we just imagined the mid-day hubbub of quick-striding suits and high heels.
“Be alert! Are you alert?” he whispers before he shows me how to dart my eyes in different directions and angles. “You have to be ready for anything down here at night.”
“If it’s so dangerous, then why did we come, Don?”
“Shhhh…do you want to die?!”
After 10 days in Seattle and a lot of laundry, Don and I repacked our bags and headed back out – this time to France, via Toronto. The side-trip was hatched as a way to avoid the rather elevated U.S. fares. We could fly AirCanada, explore a new city, and spend much less than it would cost to buy a coach ticket from Seattle to Paris. If there was ever any doubt that we could get our travel groove back, it was put to rest the minute we got off the plane. Having survived the 7 am flight, we could take our sweet time figuring out how to get from the airport into the city. We had two days to do whatever we wanted.
I have often wanted, but not known how to retrieve, a sense of play that could balance all the duties and responsibilities of adulting. Then I travelled with Don, a grown man who, in wonderful ways, still sees the world as an energetic 10-year-old who constantly improvises fun and games, no matter the situation. After taking the train in and following the map to our Air Bnb, we were handed a key to an apartment on the 66th floor of one of the high-rise buildings that soar above downtown Toronto. On the elevator ride up, Don pointed out that we’d really “get some air” jumping on the way down. But he forgot this idea as soon as he opened the door to #6606 and dropped his bags to run over to the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“This window actually opens! Come see.”
“Wow,” I offer after glancing down, mentally noting, I won’t do that again.
For the next two nights, I had to try and forget the dizzying effects of that view and my need not to feel the building swaying in the wind. Sixty-six floors is a long way up, and the vulnerability of our perch was confirmed the day we left, when security used an invisible intercom to tell us to “stand by” while the fire department investigated an alarm that had gone off way below us, on the 37th floor.
As the opening for this entry suggests, PATH was the coolest thing ever, especially since we didn’t even know it existed our whole first day in the city. For one thing, it solved our problem of having no warm clothes. Don had insisted that we not pack any more than we absolutely needed on the Mediterranean, so that left us a wee bit underdressed for the 50 degree weather. Was it starting to rain? No problem, we could just get on the “PATH.” That night, I had already assumed that purposeful walk you use when you’re a little scared. Don, though, saw and seized the opportunity to channel Jason Bourne evading capture. As we tunneled our way beneath the city, Don showed me how to relax my arms and “Gumby” my legs down each set of stairs. Having toggled between our pied-a-terre in the sky and this 19-mile-long underground city of shops and restaurants, we were suddenly masters of the city’s vertical axis.
On the horizontal axis, we walked above ground to Kensington Market, finding a lunch that Don dubbed the “healthiest” he had ever eaten (later that afternoon, our churning stomachs reminded us what “healthy” does to your digestive tract). We’re hip to “only plant-based proteins,” but Don went all out, ordering macha tea on top of vegan soup, seed, bean, and raw vegetable salad, and a non-gluten brownie made from a combination of non-wheat flours and essences we’d never heard of.
The Art Gallery of Ontario
After lunch, we strolled over to AGO and walked innocently enough through a side door that put us on a balcony where we could watch a school full of children doing art. The next day, we found the front door and paid to get in (after Don confessed our transgression to the woman in the ticket window). A lovely docent took us to see several 19th-20th century paintings and directed us to an exhibit of photos and films (by Man Ray and others) shot in the 1920s and 30s. The black-and-white experiments in solarization, light and shade, and photo montage were fascinating, as were the artists’ shared obsession with steel and sense that machines were speeding time up. I just finished Ian McEwan’s new novel Machines Like Us, which plays with this question: Are humans becoming like machines, or are machines becoming human?
Our other venture into the arts was buying tickets at the last minute to The Brothers Size, by Terell Alvin McCraney, at Soulpepper Theater. Like the screenplay for Moonlight (which McCraney also wrote) this play is intimate and intense, all about a brother’s return home from jail in the Deep South and the crisis of identity that follows. The soul music and the actors’ graceful, dance-like movements were beautiful.
We found our inner child again at Ripley’s Aquarium, where we ran around doing every single exhibit: turning the crank to simulate tsunami waves in the tank, rewinding the video to see the shark seize the seal in its mouth over and over, dipping our arms into the water to touch the rays’ slimy backs and have our fingers “cleaned” by the shrimp, staring dumb-struck at the nurse and sand sharks that sliced the surface of the indoor tank with their dorsal fins. After this great field trip, we sat outside drinking 8-oz beers at the brewery at the old railyard. Who orders an 8-oz beer? We did, and we laughed about it.
For dinner our last night, we found two seats at the bar at Momofuku, David Chang’s hot new restaurant for Asian-American cuisine. It was a blast to have front row seats to the production. We watched the young chefs tend the wood fire, grill the beef and escarole, and meticulously plate the food: brie and beef drippings served with round loaves of flatbread; grilled beets with chick peas on hummus; trout with cabbage and butter sauce. Don and I critiqued each dish mimicking the expert judges we watched several times on a cooking show in Australia.
Today is Sunday, a day of rest, croissants, a walk around town, and grocery shopping. Tomorrow I start my classes with an oral exam first thing (eek!), while Don finally gets some concentrated time to write. The transition from Toronto to Paris to here was hard, due to bad mattresses, the 7-hour flight in economy class, rain and cold, and waking up during the night. But we have landed well and are so excited to be in medieval Sancerre (two hours south of Paris) for the next two weeks. Love to all!