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Weed

The photo that got away:

A woman in an electric wheelchair, carrying two small children on her lap while a third child walked beside her.

I was walking by a store selling nothing but purses and heard…

Clerk Come back soon!

Customer Oh, you know I’ll be back. I’m the Imelda Marcos of purses, thanks to you.

Sunday morning I headed out to hunt wild photos. I stopped at The Bay for some longjohns, gloves and a hat, and I don’t know why I seem unable to remember how much I hate that place from week to week, but by the time I’d bought a pair of longjohns, tried on twenty hats and hated myself in all of them, tried and failed to buy a pair of gloves without a price tag, gotten Jingle Bells in my head, and sweated like crazy in the overheated windowless depths, I was a big ball of grumpy frustration. The photos I’d managed to get so far were few and far between, and I knew the light was fading.

Even so, I consoled myself with the promise of a piece of chocolate cake at a cake and coffee shop I knew was just around the corner, but when I went around the corner and backtracked, and then went around two other corners, it wasn’t there. (Fourth corner would have been the charm.) No worries, I told myself, you can go have pizza in the basement of the Eglinton shopping centre. Which is when I started to get the low-blood-sugar stupids; even though I’ve been there time after time, I went to the right instead of the left, and wandered around for a good five minutes before realizing my mistake. They were closed Sundays, of course. So I heaved a big sigh and stomped upstairs for some sushi. (I know. My life is so hard. Don’t you feel sorry for me?)

I’d intended to go home, photos or no, after eating, but once my blood sugar had been shored up I felt cheerful and inspired. I headed to Chinatown and had some really good photo luck there, then promptly got lost. My notoriously bad sense of direction has been helped by picturing the Toronto subway map in my head whenever I’m not sure where I am. It works beautifully, unless I’m near University Street. Every subway stop, except those on the University line, are named for the road they sit on. So I spent a good twenty minutes looking for St. Patrick street before I remembered that it’s the name of the station, not the street. I did get a giggle when a guy sitting in a doorway called, “Spare some change for a bag of weed?” as I passed by.

The second you get home!

Demain