Kite cures soul sickness after a year of difficult times
The simple sight offered peace after dealing with world tragedy and personal health scares
They were making a movie around the old Don Jail in east-end Toronto, but the real movie was in the night sky: a perfect deepening pink sunset making the city skyline look like a magic and benign abstraction, a place of twinkling lights and soaring ceilings, softening all the striving, failing, triumphing and simply surviving that goes on in every corner of our city during the day.
It was my birthday — another one, thank you, don’t ask. We had been out to a chic restaurant, a gift for the two of us from one of our children. There were “German tumbleweeds,” as the genial server described them, hanging from the ceiling, actually quite lovely but a satirist’s dream. The food was Summerlicious for sure, but really, a huge slab of meat followed by a strawberry shortcake dessert?
After it, stuffed, we had strolled in the intoxicating summer air up and around the AGO, disappointed that Grange Park was closed for construction. But we got to watch some awesome city workers chopping off branches from a tree resting on a hydro pole. The guy with the saw was in a bucket, and as it was electronically swiftly jolted up and down it reminded me crazily of the bride and groom on chairs — hoisted up and down, in jubilation — at a family wedding we had just celebrated.
I wasn’t ready to go home and be sucked into the grim news vortex — the Republican convention, law and order, dead cops, Turkish nightmare, the aftermath of Nice — so we parked the car on Broadview Ave. to watch the sunset from a bench in Riverdale Park.