We are all entitled to joy

If the exhibit had been smaller I don’t think I would’ve had the necessary time to reflect on whether or not I wanted to play with it.

I had already passed a row of multicolour prisms, glistening in the afternoon sun on Sainte-Catherine, as the sun set to west and hung at about two o’clock in the sky from where I was standing. People were spinning them — slowly, not slowly. The prisms on the other side of the street were greyed by shadows. I assumed that the sun would have hit them from my back in the morning but who knows? Maybe they were installed wrong.

Having passed people spinning these 8-foot columns about 15 minutes previous, I had already been primed to want to do some public art. But the dominoes exhibit greeted me in the same way that the prisms did: with distance and detachment. Each domino emanated a sound. I passed a row of, I don’t know, maybe 30 that ran alongside the sidewalk and they hummed at me.

Uninterested in testing them out, I didn’t realize that the bug was already placed in my ear (ear, as the regulator of balance rather than catcher of sound). Because when I came upon a row four times as long, stretched perpendicular from the sidewalk, I couldn’t resist.

It was cold and my bag was heavy. Regardless, I started lining up these oversized dominoes anyway.

Dominoes are what they were but they didn’t exactly look like dominoes. Imagine large, plastic rectangles, maybe about two feet long and one foot wide. They were attached at the base like the old domino run games that you could buy. I started lining them up.

I had timed my walk from the bus station to my hotel room such that I wouldn’t get frostbite on my thighs, but I didn’t account for stopping for the dominos. Each time I stood one up, it sang a note in suspense. The notes together created tension; they needed to fall (as a musician, I should be telling you here that the notes formed a perfect fifth or minor third or were in unison but I forget. I think unison).

I got more than half way down the line and I lined up a shaky blue domino, one that wouldn’t hold itself up very well. I balanced it the best I could and then continued to line up other ones.

Of course, this shaky blue tile fell over, triggering a row of dominos falling to their right, aka away from me and away from the end of the row where I was expecting to declare victory over the dominoes. Defeated, I left. But not before a woman could look at me and say well done.

I passed McDonalds which told me that the temperature was -2 degrees celsius. It was more like -15.

The next day, I walked back along pedestrianised Sainte-Catherine to the bus station and workers were removing the prisms. But this is Montreal. They’d be replaced with something soon.

Two nights later, I was walking along Yonge St. Everything about the City of Toronto exists to remind you in no uncertain terms that Toronto is not Montreal. When I was 19 and I’d get a midnight bus from Toronto to Montreal, I would emerge at Sainte-Catherine, just as I did last Tuesday. It would be early. I’d go to Chez Cora (it was still a novelty). Once, there were 60 cops in there eating and drinking coffee and being cops.

Anyway, Toronto is not Montreal. But it does have public art, I guess, like the giant red pole with a big mess of red twisted metal held atop that I passed by. I’m sure it means something important but I couldn’t unwind the mess of metal, nor could I climb the pole or spin it. I couldn’t look at it and see my reflection either. It didn’t sing.

I heard music not too far later. I was on Bloor almost at Avenue. A man was playing I Wanna Dance With Somebody on a steel pan accompanied by a speaker. It was -25 degrees. My second thought was that it’s nice to see the city pay for street performers like him. My third thought was that I was an idiot to think that the city would be paying this guy.

The next day I found out that his speaker broke the law. Buskers aren’t allowed to use amps.

I passed McDonalds again, though there was no temperature sign on the one in Toronto. I passed it at the same time as the one I passed in Montreal. But outside, this one was alive. It was busy. It was mini-Amsterdam on the sidewalk out front, where the invisibilized bike food delivery workers left their bikes to run inside and pick up the big macs, fries, milkshakes and pies that strangers ordered online. (I’m prepared to be told that McDonalds hasn’t had pies in more than two decades). The food will be cold by the time they arrive to their orderers — it’s -25 outside remember — but the orderers have accomplished something. They successfully gathered their late-night snack or supper or breakfast thanks to the felicity of technology, a small delivery fee and this army of cyclists who, for two minutes, make me forget about the city called Caronto.

While both cities suck in their own ways, I was struck by two things: Sainte-Catherine is calm. Each time I walk along the street, I’m amazed by the lack of traffic. Maybe it was pushed somewhere else but who cares. Queen Street traffic could be pushed somewhere else too, if only to give the people some room to breathe. Yonge could use a car diet as well.

The other thing was this.

When I was 18, I had to decide between Concordia and Ryerson — would I go to Montreal and have the side effect of going to a decent school to become a mediocre journalist or would I go to Toronto, a city I already knew well, and go to the school that promised to turn me into a serious journalist? I chose the latter, though the hype I don’t think was very fair.

I was back there on Friday and the doors were locked.

Toronto Metropolitan University — the school that lives and breathes downtown Toronto — has locked its doors. Cards are required to get into any building. “They turned on the card access at the start of the pandemic and they never turned it off.” When you do get someone to open the door for you, a security guard is standing there, an older man who looks like he’s a million times better than this job and who copes by imagining being in a million other places than this one. He’s just there. Waiting for something to happen. In case the castle walls are breached by the untouchables who litter Toronto’s streets. Certainly, they have no access to this institution, paid for by their taxes too. But neither do the neighbours who put up with the noise of students and nonstop construction. The tourists. The office workers. The wayward library chasers. Those of us who did a fuck of a lot for the school and who were told that we’d always be welcomed back after graduation. Locked. Tight.

But at Concordia, where I never went though have had the privilege of being invited there over and over these past years, the doors are open. Maybe they aren’t open everywhere but they have been opened where I have been going. A simple gesture. Maybe symbolic because people are still kicked out for loitering, I don’t know. But unlocked.

I know that we are a society in decline, whether Toronto or Montreal or Ottawa or Moose Jaw or RR2 wherever. But just because we’re in decline doesn’t mean that we must lose our humanity, our creativity and the small amounts of joy that being alive entitles us to. Freedom from traffic on a bike. An open door and a warm corner in a university library. A steel pan on a cold winter’s night, paid for by passersby who still have pocket change; a man who instead should be drawing a full-time municipal salary for his talents and generosity.

Let people happen upon a row of dominos to line up; let them ignore it or decide to race the next gust of wind off the Saint-Laurent that will knock over the broken blue piece and cast down their labour in a hum of clacking, falling pieces and dozens of reverberating notes.