Toronto

I'm still in Canada, and it's still cold-ish: a mere -5° today. I found it quite balmy, walking back from the corner stores this afternoon. People from Saskatchewan would be walking about in T-shirts at this temperature.

There's much that I could say about Toronto, the city of my youth. Let's start with the sheer size of it: The taxi ride from the airport to my parents' house was 35 kilometers, barreling down the highway known locally as "the 401" (eight lanes in each direction). In the German frame of reference, 35 Km is just short of the distance from Stuttgart to Karlsruhe. It would never occur to me to take a taxi to Karlsruhe, in fact the driver would probably refuse the fare. My parents do not live in the boondocks, they are surrounded by cinemas and bookshops and 30-storey apartment blocks, and you drive an hour from their house in any direction except south, before you see anything resembling farmland.

In the closing scene of My Dinner With André, one of my many most-favourite movies, Wally sits in a taxi and looks out at the (now strange and magical to him, as if seen for the first time) streets of New York, and points out its landmarks to himself i.e. us, like "That is the store where my father and I bought my first suit." Toronto always does that to me: There are ghosts on every street corner. I have lost touch with most of the people I grew up with, many still live here but I wouldn't know how to contact them. It makes me sad to think that the sixteen years I spent here can have left so few tangible remains.

Perhaps the elegy is the natural narrative mode of people in the second half of their lives.