I left the Centre of Universe yesterday to spend the day at Brock University’s open house. I discovered just how much I loathe living in the Centre of the Universe and it was just not me. The Last Amazon and I went to St. Catharine’s with her adopted aunt and uncle. I cannot speak for the Last Amazon or the Kat but Ron and I were ready to pull up stakes, move and enroll in Brock.
It was interesting spending the afternoon watching the Last Amazon talking to the various professors. Quite a competition developed between Neuroscience and the Chemistry department for her attention. But I couldn’t get over how wholesome everyone appeared from the professors to the students to the parents. I did not see one young man with baggy pants. Not one. And it wasn’t just the baggy pants. There were no obvious tattoos, non-traditional hair colour/styles or piercing in sight; though, there was a high geek quota throughout the campus. The scariest people in the entire room were manning the nearly empty booth at the Women Studies department.
They suckered both Kat and the Last Amazon by offering chocolate and then they pounced. Luckily I saw what was happened and went to the rescue. It takes more than a few pieces of high quality chocolate to get to me. I am glad to see I haven’t lost ability to use my haughty and scary face. The claws were retracted immediately but the death blow to their aspirations came when the Last Amazon announced she thought a science was more her style than oppression.
We did a tour of St. Catharine’s after the open house and were amazed at the number of churches but we did find the Jewish community centre…on Church Street of all places. We teased the Last Amazon that she would be able to continue her good deeds there. Currently, she has been acting as a mentor/tutor for under priviledged youth at a computer lab at a JCC in Toronto.
Touring around St. Catharine’s I was struck by just how friendly and livable small town Ontario really is. I think those of us at the Centre of the Universe forget that. We may have high rises and bright lights but the quality of life is lost in the high cost of daily living and the stress of long commutes. Imagine living on a street where trees are not a sidewalk ornament? Sigh.
3 comments:
I know what you mean, but things look a little different when you're younger.
I grew up in a mostly Jewish suburb north of Steeles, that was slowly eating all the farmland around it. While it was safe as one could want, it was also a million miles away and a two hour commute from anything I wanted to do (read: go downtown).
The buses ran once an hour (and varied by plus or minus 15 minutes to their scheduled stop time), so if you missed your ride to school you had a 45 minute walk ahead of you. Since everything was all so unreliable, the 45 minute walk was preferable to waiting 30 minutes for a bus that may or may not have room for you when it arrived.
And forget about cultural institutions like orchestras, ballets and museums. They had just finished building the first arts-oriented high school by the time I moved south, into the city proper.
I enjoy city life, especially its cultural institutions (museums, performing arts, etc etc). And I'm fortunate enough to have won the real estate lottery and found a nice, safe neighborhood on the subway line that's a mere 23 minutes from work -- with every other necessity and convenience a 5-minute walk away.
But I totally understand that for the vast majority of the city, life's not like that. I don't know if that's the fault of the city, exactly, but yes it's hard to find the good, affordable enclaves.
For all the time, as a family, we spend going to these cultural insitutions, we might as well live out of town. No one can live at the museum, opera or even the ballet 24 hours a day.
On one of my mother’s annual visits she remarked to me that she couldn’t get over the expression on most of the men’s faces on the street. They all looked so unfocused and lost – rootless even, and she wasn’t talking about the homeless, addled or addicted men. I think she may have a point.
I don’t it is necessarily something which a city administration can fix per say. It is hard to remain rooted living in a large city. There is just something innately unpleasant living piled up onto of each other. Increasingly, children are raised almost as prisons, comfortable prisons, but confined nonetheless.
Even when I was young and at an early age I went literally everywhere as long as it was daylight. I would no more have given that same freedom for my children than I would slit my wrists.
Take bikes for example. Once the children were old and large enough to go off on their bikes by themselves, we stopped buying them bikes. We didn’t want them riding in the road. Not because we didn’t trust them to follow the rules of the road but we couldn’t trust the drivers on the road to follow the rules.
When I was young there was a great shame in not stopping your car at a crosswalk, and now, you are lucky if anyone stops without a police presence. It seems to be considered no big deal to bend or ignore this rule. A number of crossing guards in the area have more than a few close calls.
When I was young there was a great shame in not stopping your car at a crosswalk, and now, you are lucky if anyone stops without a police presence.
It seems to be considered no big deal to bend or ignore this rule. A number of crossing guards in the area have more than a few close calls. I think when humans live in smaller groups we are more cognizant in following rules.
I think the smaller cities in Ontario are an unacknowledged kind of gem. Personally, I kind of wish my husband and I had taken a good long look at other places to settle in.
For all the time, as a family, we spend going to these cultural insitutions, we might as well live out of town. No one can live at the museum, opera or even the ballet 24 hours a day.
I hear you. But then I'm at the ROM once a week for various courses, and at the TSO 3 or 4 weekdays a month, from autumn to spring, for concerts. It would be a royal PITA to haul oneself into town for these things (especially on weeknights) if we lived an hour or more out of town. Not to mention the increased hassle of daily commuting.
I readily admit bias though. In addition to growing up in a smaller town, my job doesn't really exist for companies that have less than 4,000 employees. So in order to do what I do, I have to be near the centre of gravity. And fortunately, I enjoy being there, too.
I think the small-town thing appeals to the parents (less perceived risk, less hassles), but just about every person I know who spent adolescence in smaller towns couldn't wait to get into the city.
The reverse is true for people who grew up in the city, it seems. I have friends who grew up in Toronto and couldn't wait to get out, and I have friends who grew up in small towns who moved to the city in their 40s -- and they insist they would never go back.
Chacon son goût, I guess.
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