It’s our Danforth and nothing can take it away
It keeps getting closer, doesn’t it?
This time an act of unspeakable gun violence with no other intent but to kill innocent people came near to the top of our street, bullets piercing the front window of the Second Cup café, as a gunman opened fire Sunday night in a neighbourhood I’ve called home for 34 years.
While clear details of who the gunman is and why he did this have not yet emerged — he died in the melee — we know the wrenching shape of his carnage. There were two victims of his madness dead, an 18-year-old woman and a 10-year-old girl — 13 wounded, some seriously, and an entire neighbourhood left traumatized and heartbroken.
The Danforth may be a street that has some mythical properties for those who don’t live here — “Greektown,” “café life” “festive” — but it’s just the main drag to my family and neighbourhood friends, albeit a very lively one indeed. It’s where we grab a coffee, buy our books, eat Japanese, Thai or trendy when we don’t feel like Greek souvlaki (but oh how we love our Greek souvlaki.)
It’s where we treat ourselves to a gelato, mail a parcel, get our prescrip- tions filled and buy our booze.
Really, there’s so much on offer here there’s very little reason to ever leave the Danforth, although I’m still hoping they’ll reintroduce a movie theatre.
How do you characterize a neighbourhood that some say is the best and safest in Toronto? One that nurtures families, has bowed to gentrification but has still retained not only its Greek favour but a charming sense of modesty although one mightily challenged by soaring real estate prices.
There were two victims killed in a gunman’s Sunday night rampage, 13 wounded, some seriously, and an entire neighbourhood left traumatized and heartbroken
We take its vibrancy for granted. We lifers even make fun of its annual August street festival Taste of the Danforth, which draws a million or so day trippers to wander through our ’hood amidst what often is searing summer heat and overpowering grilled meat smells. “Waste of the Danforth” some snottily call it, although I would bet we will all be out in force this year, not only celebrating our street and its offerings but defying the very notion that anyone — madman, deeply disaffected or murderously armed young man — could shut it down by shooting at us.
Toronto has been in the grip of gun violence this summer, although if you check the statistics it’s still one of the safest cities in North America.
It’s also slowly recovering from a terrifying North York van attack last April that left 10 dead and many wounded.
These attacks permanently affect us, how could they not? They make us wary, or fearful, or just plain angry. I heard a lot of anger Monday.
I no longer think it couldn’t happen here. But I will never give up thinking it shouldn’t happen here — or in Kensington Market, Scarborough or anywhere else in our remarkable, diverse city.
We still have a chance to mainly keep it safe. We need to get the guns, tackle the social problems differently — new ideas anyone?
We need to practise what a security consultant friend of mine calls “situational awareness” meaning always look around and know who’s on the street or in a café with you, where the exits are, where danger might be and whether a sound like “pop pop pop” means you run as fast as you can. None of which protects any one of us from a determined random shooter.
How do his bile and his bullets affect us? Let us count the ways. I haven’t stopped wondering about every single one of my children’s rapscallion and endearing childhood friends to relatives who like us have chosen to plant ourselves here. Did we hear from them? Are they fine?
We are fervently hoping the rest of the victims will survive and heal. We stand with the families affected.
We also count all the possible ways it could have been worse even as we still send out emails —“you OK?” — to neighbours and friends.
And we worry about the wonderful service people who give our street its familiar lustre every day in all those cafes, bars and stores. Tomorrow, when we can go into those establishments again, we’ll hug and cry together.
Sometimes when I think of my millennial kids growing up here I feel it’s almost as if it was the Danforth that raised them.
My son as a teen worked in a candy store and learned to navigate the afterhour changes on the street as he took the store’s daily cash to the bank. He used to tell his sister, two years younger and a little more reckless “get home before 2 a.m. Nothing good happens on the street after that.”
This obscenity, this mass tragedy, this shooting happened at 10 p.m. A time, in the soft summer air for all who could be out strolling and enjoying the sense of conviviality and charm that is the Danforth.
We’ll never let a mass shooting take that away from us.
Will we?