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growing up in Toronto during its change to a multicultural city |
I tramped my early time in Kingsway roads so said by names of kings and queens and princes, grown among the Humber flow, ravine side scrambler, adventurer, salamander hunter, clamberer of my dangerous heights, now but a shoulder high, a distance to hoist and hug. I tramped along the unlocked time to pass the open doors and linger for the bread man’s basket at the back, for the laundry strung by patterns placed, for the milk man’s bottles, thick cream on top, for the front flung open, the delivery calls. The world came in – my world went out. Now doors there are to touch, but just by keys, to close behind. I tramped with the horse clomp’s end of wagons pulled, by finished war delayed, the sound made soon to power’s noise, packed and wrapped by glory chrome that bragged by curves and glint and gathered neighbors homage round to greet the new, and speak expert each of specs and speed and style. Now good sense is seen as best with regretted loss of innocence. I tramped among the unknown voices of other places poured upon our grid, their tastes and smells combined, their soundings sensed around, of changes charged to leave behind my own English Irish city’s start to be this now boundless blended flow, from streets of new arrival drifting in our current’s daily tide that casts us all in chorus by Ontario’s side, now making other cities strange, where no faces but like my own arise. I am a tramp, wearing ragged jagged time to rummage places where past is present, finding changes my forbears feared have wrought alive my love of all the difference that makes us same in this city huged in my drifting days, coloured, touched and made from universal unbounded rays in fond and unexpected ways. |