In a city as big as T.O., it's rare to feel like you're the only one around. Early Sunday mornings are quiet, even the buses and streetcars sound hushed, and you can hear birds singing on busy streets like College where the traffic drowns them out at other times of the day.
I have Wednesday and Friday off for writing now, and last Wednesday I went for a run in the afternoon. Those lost hours between one and three or three-thirty, when most people are at work or school, are also very quiet. I ran in the melting slush through the narrow streets of Dufferin Grove, past grand houses whose stoops were speckled with salt, and through Trinity Bellwoods Park, misty and wet. The park is usually busy with dog walkers, joggers, kids playing soccer and people simply passing through from Queen to Dundas or the other way around. But as I circled the quarry, slopping through the melting snow, I could only hear my laboured breath and the far-off hissing of cars on Queen.
When I was a kid I loved having to leave school for dentist or doctor's appointments. Not only because I'd get to miss some class, but because I got to move in the world outside the schoolyard during the day, to see what everyone else did while I was learning my times tables. Oakville seemed like a different town, and I felt like a outsider among the moms with their strollers and the business men on business lunches, the sun high in the sky and daytime talk shows on the car radio. Even Tim Horton's was different. For one, there were a lot of old people there, and they were eating their donuts off plates and drinking coffee from real ceramic mugs!
I got that same feeling running last week -- it was a little extravagant, a little transgressive. Like I was skipping school or work, calling in sick to enjoy the grey winter day all alone in this grey winter city. I smiled at the people I passed and they smiled back. There were few enough of us that it made sense to greet each other instead of training our gazes ahead and passing on by. Maybe they were thinking the same thing I was -- lucky us. We're all alone, and together. And we have the whole afternoon.
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