ah, Toronto

I went downtown for lunch today for the first time in freakin’ forever. I used to drive along the lakeshore all the time… to my old apartment, to the studios where they shot Call For Help, to The Second City, just cause I loved the drive at night and it helped me think. The city has changed so quickly since I moved to Windsor for uni. So many former parking lots turned into semi-developed sites or even huge towering buildings already. I miss the old views. I miss the clear sightlines to the CN Tower and Skydome (it will never be the Rogers Centre to me). I hope that these new developments do help the city but who knows. I miss what I remember even if what I remember never really existed except in my own mind. I used to love getting on the subway with my great aunt and riding from Don Mills to the Eaton Centre and checking out the huge, to me, fountain and getting ice cream. I used to love wandering around the theatre district at all hours of the night. Nowadays the city has just lost the sheen I used to love about it. Etobicoke is my hometown and I will love it until the day I die and it doesn’t seem to have changed much (this is a good thing). Ok, outside of when amalgamation first happened and I was an employee of the City of Etobicoke and I went from making $14/hour running hockey camps to $6.75. That hurt and sucked. I still stayed on for another year since I loved the kids but when you had offers to work private camps that paid you your whole summer’s salary in two weeks, uh, you end up taking that job*.

I recently got into watching Street Legal on Bravo thanks to the magic of my DVR. I love it. Yeah, it’s nice to see Canadian actors ‘back in the day’, as well as plenty of 80s cheese, but I adore seeing the shots of the city back then. I vaguely recall life in Toronto before the Skydome but it’s great to see it on film like that. I know that everything is cleaned up for tv but the shots of the streets and the Gardiner and storefronts and Harbourfront and houses and apartment buildings match the images in my head. It’s beautiful to see ^_^

*It was actually a mistake to switch. When I worked for the city camps it cost families $60 a week and while the kids were rarely angels they were so happy to be playing and having fun. We also did tons of non-hockey activities and trips so it was an amazing deal. Also, Dr. Dodgeball is the greatest game in history. Especially when counsellors are allowed to play, mwa ha ha. This way even when you get a kid out — like one that thought pulling your hair was a great idea or the kid I nearly drowned saving his ass from the wave pool — the doctor can tag him back to life and you get to do it again and again. Not really. I swear I didn’t abuse my power. It also made the quieter kids look and feel like a hero when you somehow got in the path of their ball :) In the private camps you got a lot of rich parents with kids who wanted nothing to do with hockey but their parents made them play hoping they were the next great one. As a predictable result, these kids were miserable and their parents were angry and it was just a mess when one kid got named camp MVP over another.

Protip: in a mid-level camp like the one I worked at, it’s not just talent that gets the kid the award.