Stories from the City

IT’S MAY IN TORONTO and I’ve signed up to attend Swift Night Out without realizing that it’s half-day Friday at work. I have an entire afternoon to while away in the city. In her essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” Virginia Woolf uses the excuse of needing a new pencil to set off on a…

IN THE FALL OF 1942, with the Second World War raging, my father wanted to join the fight. But Doug Clark was six months shy of his eighteenth birthday and required parental permission to enlist in the Canadian military. His father turned him down flat. “Don’t even think about it,” Alexander Clark told his son.…

MEMORY IS A FRAGILE and malleable thing. How is it that we remember some insignificant fact or interaction for an entire lifetime, while other events disappear into oblivion, calved off like chunks of ice from a glacier, to float away and melt as if they had never existed? Most of our life experience falls into…

This is a work of creative non-fiction based on an incident that occurred in the early 1960s, shortly after my parents moved from downtown rooming houses (on Oxford Street market and Baldwin Street, respectively) to a flat on Oak Park Avenue in East York. The story is oft told by my mother, Maria do Ceu…

ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020, I WAKE UP and wonder how I’m going to spend the next two days. During the week, I normally wake up, turn on my work computer so my status is active, then get back into bed. On the weekends, I can lie in bed as long as I want, without…

EVERY FAMILY HAS A RICH AUNT. Mine was Aunt Sally. Living in an exclusive area of Toronto, so exclusive it didn’t have a name, she was what my mother called haikara (snob), a proud member of the Curators’ Group at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Music Director’s Circle of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and…