We Ride the TTC

For the last two weeks, our car was out of commission with a part needing to be called in from afar, and so I’ve been on the TTC with the kids—sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three. Sometimes none! The various permutations of our life.

Needless to say, we are all appreciating what a huge luxury it is to have a car. I have a lot of emotional attachment to ours in particular, mostly because it’s been on an awful lot of adventures with us, and also because I spend a lot of time in the car schlepping kids and things from here to there. It is not without its flaws and ailments, some more expensive than others, but in lots of ways, we’ve set up our schedule counting on being able to drive from here to there. There’s one A to B that’s 7 minutes by car and an hour and fifteen minutes plus by subway/bus/walk.

But in any case, it has been wild, riding public transit heavily. Time moves on a totally different spectrum, both when you’re on it and when you’re trying to get on it. I’m checking the app to see when the next streetcar will come: either we catch one of the three that will come in the next six minutes, or wait another 27 minutes for the one after those. People with pants, people without pants, people with lots of pants on at the same time. People shamed by old women into giving me their seats (actually I have no need of a seat, but I supposed I give the impression of needing some sort of respite, as I herd my herd onto the streetcar). I assured Naomi’s violin teacher we could make it to her place in an hour via streetcar, subway, subway, walk, but on the first subway, there was someone on the tracks so we stood on the subway until the lights went off. We did not make it in an hour.

It’s a science fiction journey. The streetcar halts in a space-time continuum while we wait for police to come and assist, as they do. Old Chinese grannies are telling me about how their no-good grandson is vaping or how expensive the Chinese grocery markets are getting. One Chinese granny told me to only have one kid (gesturing at Junia) because kids are trouble and I nodded sagely. Someone possibly (?) is breaking up with someone else over FaceTime (??), and everyone else silently minding their own business. That lady doesn’t love her boyfriend anymore, mama? Naomi asks out loud what everyone else is thinking. Don’t get involved, Naomi.

Once someone tried to help me get my stroller onto the streetcar, which is not actually necessary now that the streetcars are all the low-floor kind, but then her back threw out on her while halfway up, and someone else tried to step in but got their coat stuck on my stroller’s bag hook. It was a dog and pony show for everyone already on the streetcar.

But actually it has been an interesting exercise in slowing down. Someone once told me that after the onset of Covid and work-from-home, one of the things she was surprised she missed was her commute, because that was her reading time. There was nothing else to do, and it was 45 minutes at the front and back ends of her work day: to clear her mind, to escape, to decompress. And after starting to work from home, she went straight from breakfast into Zoom, into multiple senses of the word.

And it has been fun for the kids to pack their books to read, and, and if there’s space and it’s just the two big kids, to continue our bedtime read-aloud in the sunny daytime world. How funny that here we are, a quasi-Chinese family riding the streetcar through downtown Toronto, reading about hunting dogs in the Ozarks in the 1960s. Naomi, in all of her innocence, is not ready for how the book is going to end. Actually, I don’t think Caleb is either, but he’s definitely going to handle it better.

In any case, the TTC has been an adventure, and when the weather is autumn, and you’re not in a rush, there’s something nice about just taking your time to get to where you’re going, someone else at the wheel.

Toronto’s TTC is ailing in its own way and we’ll take what we can get, even if it is a glimpse of the future, terrifying and close.