What You'll Find in Toronto on A Fine Spring Afternoon

Still Dancing - Distillery District

Home-made hot sauce and Pan Am cheerleading Barbies for sale

Saturday April 18 was one of the first truly lovely days of 2015. So we strolled around. I took some sunny photos of things that appealed to me. 

More love locks - Distillery District

The Distillery District is an official tourist attraction. Everything there is predicated on the idea that it will be photographed. No surprise that the DD has become a prime location for engagement and wedding photos.

We found the home-made hot sauce and Pan Am Game cheerleaders in hand-crocheted outfits on Gerrard Street just east of Parliament. Not an especially touristy part of town. 

Still, the ebullient proprietress selling this stuff was welcoming and friendly. Because I took photos of her wares, I felt I should buy a bottle of hot sauce. She assured me it was not too hot. 

"Mild enough for a baby," she said. 

Sure, I thought to myself, your baby.

When I got the bottle home, I checked the label. The first two ingredients were papaya and scotch bonnet peppers.

I tasted as much as I could put on the thinnest end of a toothpick. 

Bruce thinks we might be able to use it to keep raccoons out of the garden.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Trust Me

The first time I got conned (that I'm aware of) was about thirty years ago. I was in La Guardia airport, heading home after a four day visit in New York with my friend Claire Fowler.

A young man approached me with a story about a lost plane ticket to Montreal. I forget his many machinations now, except for the one where he took pains to explain why the lost ticket form he showed me seemed so worn.

In all my life's experience to that point I'd never been given cause to believe that a person asking for help was being anything but completely sincere. I gave him ten dollars. 

As I watched him fairly skip down the long spare hallway, doubt grew.

That young man, of course, made it a lot harder for everyone who followed. I'm not going to say I've never been scammed since. But, the guy outside the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia ten years later with the tremendously detailed improbable story about having his car towed, well, I just walked away. 

These guys work hard for their money and they know their marks. They target tourists because tourists are already a little vulnerable, more ready to identify with someone in trouble and they carry cash. 

If anyone had asked me, I imagine I would have said that this kind of in-person scamming had disappeared beneath the waves of on-line fraud and more lucrative lines of exploiting human emotions like Russian bride scams.

So it took a minute or two before I knew what was going on last Saturday. I was walking along Gerrard Street, on my way to take some pictures of the new children's playground in the Allan Gardens. I was approached by a man, carrying a set of car keys in one hand, a cell phone and a five dollar bill in the other. He may have been in his mid-to-late 30's. Nothing about him was particularly eye-catching or odd.

I'm used to getting panhandled in this neighbourhood by any and all manner of people, so when he asked me if he could talk with me, I slowed and prepared to say "no, sorry" - I don't carry cash anymore. Then I got the smoothly pitched, improbable story with details popping up just when my face signalled to the man that I might need some help believing him:

"Can you help me. I'm not from around here. I'm from Buffalo. My name's Steven. My wife's water has broken and she's been taken to the hospital ... Scarborough General hospital ... there were complications ... a cab driver I talked to said he'd take me there for twenty dollars ... I spoke with a police man on Carlton Street ... I'm legally blind and I can't drive there myself..."

He lost me long before he finished, but I admired the many ways the story was engineered to both evoke trust and trigger an emotional response. The props he carried backed up his story and suggested I'd get five back from my twenty. He told me his name. His wife is having a baby! He's far from home! He knows the local street names! He's blind! He hopes I've never heard of Women's College Hospital three blocks away!

True story or false, I still couldn't help him with the one thing he wanted and pointedly did not ask for: cash. 

As soon as I made that clear to him, he was off like a shot.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Reading List

Lindsey Sterling

CREDIT ROB LOUD

This week's picture is a shot of Bruce and I at the Pemberton Music Festival in July last year. Sure, there's a lot of other stuff in the way: the fine violinist Lindsey Sterling, and a whole bunch of other people, but we are very clearly visible, just above the sun totem - Bruce has his hands folded over his chest and I'm standing on his left (your right) in a white shirt and orange pants. I think it's a good likeness.

We have booked our return visit to Pemberton for this year's festival. We'll be there after we partake of a family reunion in Qualicum Beach on the 11th of July and after three days of hiking and hanging around in Whistler.

Should be fun.

Just so I have lots of fodder for small talk at the reunion, I'm catching up on some of the reading I didn't do in high school. Subscribers may recall that I started that project a while ago with The Great Gatsby (TGG). Now, I'm reading In Cold Blood (ICB).

My experience reading TGG was that what they teach about the book in high school classes isn't what I think the book is about.

The same seems to be the case with ICB. Better written than TGG, ICB - so far; I'm about halfway through - seems to me to be about Truman Capote's powerful identification with Perry Smith, the half-Irish, half-Cherokee, artistically and musically gifted natural born killer. Smith's parents were rodeo performers but when that work dried up, the family broke up and what followed was a long unhappy story of group homes and social isolation until Perry joined the merchant marine where he was wooed and maybe raped by sailors.

The weirdest thing about ICB: Richard Avedon's photos.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

As For Where I Am Right Now ...

While staying at the cozy and accommodating Ste Anne Spa (exterior shot of which featured above) a few things struck me as odd. The first was the zillions of gallons per flush toilet in our cottage. The second was the fridge in the cottage's common kitchen: a 1990's vintage bar fridge with a frost-furred freezer compartment consuming massive amounts of kilowatt hours all for the sake of keeping some cream pucks cold. Third and finally, I saw on the breakfast buffet a nice selection of high-carbon-footprint tropical fruit from Chile, South Africa and Mexico - pineapples, melons, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries - incomprehensibly labelled as "seasonal fruit."

While I was supposed to be at Set Anne's to decompress after my whirlwind tour as a spokes-target for the current government's ambitions about climate change, I still had the script in my head and all of these things stuck me as off-message.

So, when the owner of the spa sent me a personal e-mail after I returned home, I wrote him back, saying that if he wanted to get his 80's-style assertions of environmental consciousness up to date, he needed to do something about that toilet, that fridge and the fruit.

This is his exact response:

Thank you for taking time to write to me. I'm glad that you and your sister enjoyed your time at the spa. 

The Finch Room bathroom is slated for renovation in April and the toilet will be upgraded as part of that p‎roject. I will talk a look at the refrigerator as well.

It's a testament to the relaxing influence of my many lovely treatments at the spa that, right now, I feel under no compulsion to write him back and say, "thanks for the updates on the toilet and the fridge. Now what are you going to do about that goddam fruit?"

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen