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Authors: Rabindranath Maharaj
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told me his name was Norbert and then he began his story about how he lived in a place called Cabbagetown. From there he had moved all over the place working as a salesman until he ended up somewhere called Brantford. He and the pretty lady were going to start some sort of Internet business to export Canadian medicine to the States. The lady didn’t say anything much, just smiling and playing with her necklace as Norbert talked a mile a minute and I wondered if she, too, was imagining this strangely named town as a place where cabbages rolled on all the streets like tumbleweed from old Westerns. And children playing cricket with the small ones and football with the bigger ones.
Norbert called out to me every evening and I soon joined the group of old-timers. From a distance they had always appeared like cows grazing and chewing their cud but I soon discovered that they had many adventures in their younger days, and had worked for a while on trains travelling through Canada. They had lived in England and other places in Europe before they landed here. I learned many other surprising facts. I discovered there were places in Canada where mostly Germans or Portuguese or Italian or Chinese lived. “This is what I like about Toronto,” Norbert told me. “Just cross the street and you are in a completely different country. Everybody’s here.”
The way he said this I imagined that all these people had come as visitors and liked the place so much they decided to stay. I pictured them leaving the ships and rushing straight for Cabbagetown, collecting a few of the vegetables on their way. I hoped Norbert would describe this strange town but Roy glanced up from his
Toronto Sun
to talk about a little girl who was killed while she was waiting for her friends at some nearby street. After this, everybody got quiet and Roy returned to his newspaper.
The next day I felt that he was continuing the topic as he brought up another shooting, this one between gang members. To tell the truth he made the city seem more dangerous and interesting than I had imagined. I remember Uncle Boysie telling me that Canada was so safe the policemen wore nice red outfits and rode on horses but according to Roy the country was like Gotham City with crooks around every corner. When he pushed the
Sun
before another old-timer and said, “Look at the faces of these thugs and see what they have in common,” I pictured them as shady Frank Miller characters with bulging muscles and machine guns poking out from trench coats but the photograph from the papers was of a group of boys my age. They kind of resembled some of my friends from Mayaro, too.
I soon realized this was Roy’s pet topic as he was regularly grumbling about subsidized housing and criminals who could never be deported and little children running around with guns. All these recent swarms of newcomers were congesting the place and inconveniencing people like himselfwith their welfare demands. Sometimes, when he went outside for a smoke I would feel that maybe he was a retired policeman who, on the days he didn’t show up, was chatting in the station with old friends.
Even though there were no sharks and manatees and smugglers the conversations were always more interesting whenever the group talked of their old-time days. I tried to imagine how Toronto would have looked before all the tall buildings and congested streets were built. Maybe it was like Mayaro with fields of cassava and plantain and coconut trees. Some of the stories were related by a really thin, trembling man whose name I never got. He was from somewhere called Friezeland in the Netherlands and during the war, he hid many Jewish people in his house. He talked sometimes about his move in 1951 to Canada to work as a cheese maker somewhere in Thunder Bay and then to Kitchener, where he had many run-ins with Germans at some annual beer festival. Later, the Germans became his best friends. A truck driver came in now and again to
Norbert called out to me every evening and I soon joined the group of old-timers. From a distance they had always appeared like cows grazing and chewing their cud but I soon discovered that they had many adventures in their younger days, and had worked for a while on trains travelling through Canada. They had lived in England and other places in Europe before they landed here. I learned many other surprising facts. I discovered there were places in Canada where mostly Germans or Portuguese or Italian or Chinese lived. “This is what I like about Toronto,” Norbert told me. “Just cross the street and you are in a completely different country. Everybody’s here.”
The way he said this I imagined that all these people had come as visitors and liked the place so much they decided to stay. I pictured them leaving the ships and rushing straight for Cabbagetown, collecting a few of the vegetables on their way. I hoped Norbert would describe this strange town but Roy glanced up from his
Toronto Sun
to talk about a little girl who was killed while she was waiting for her friends at some nearby street. After this, everybody got quiet and Roy returned to his newspaper.
The next day I felt that he was continuing the topic as he brought up another shooting, this one between gang members. To tell the truth he made the city seem more dangerous and interesting than I had imagined. I remember Uncle Boysie telling me that Canada was so safe the policemen wore nice red outfits and rode on horses but according to Roy the country was like Gotham City with crooks around every corner. When he pushed the
Sun
before another old-timer and said, “Look at the faces of these thugs and see what they have in common,” I pictured them as shady Frank Miller characters with bulging muscles and machine guns poking out from trench coats but the photograph from the papers was of a group of boys my age. They kind of resembled some of my friends from Mayaro, too.
I soon realized this was Roy’s pet topic as he was regularly grumbling about subsidized housing and criminals who could never be deported and little children running around with guns. All these recent swarms of newcomers were congesting the place and inconveniencing people like himselfwith their welfare demands. Sometimes, when he went outside for a smoke I would feel that maybe he was a retired policeman who, on the days he didn’t show up, was chatting in the station with old friends.
Even though there were no sharks and manatees and smugglers the conversations were always more interesting whenever the group talked of their old-time days. I tried to imagine how Toronto would have looked before all the tall buildings and congested streets were built. Maybe it was like Mayaro with fields of cassava and plantain and coconut trees. Some of the stories were related by a really thin, trembling man whose name I never got. He was from somewhere called Friezeland in the Netherlands and during the war, he hid many Jewish people in his house. He talked sometimes about his move in 1951 to Canada to work as a cheese maker somewhere in Thunder Bay and then to Kitchener, where he had many run-ins with Germans at some annual beer festival. Later, the Germans became his best friends. A truck driver came in now and again to
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