Click: images that capture the imagination.

A homeless man in a wheelchair sits most days at the corner of Yonge and Eglinton with a small transistor radio in his lap, playing a tambourine in time to the music, which is usually incongruous pop sung by billionaire nineteen year old girls, but when I walked by the sound blaring from his lap was good old fashioned country, the kind with mournful twang and hard drinking at a ripped leatherette barstool.

Although there were television cameras just behind him, they were filming a giant white inflatable dog instead of what looked and sounded like the beginning of a really, really bad Hallmart Hall of Fame movie about a plucky homeless man who took to the streets after losing his tambourine playing gig with the bar band Spilled Whiskey when he tongue-kissed the singer’s wife just before they played their cover of “I Been Roped and Throwed by Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral”.

I overheard a teenage girl using her cellphone on the bus.

I didn’t start with him, he started with me. No, totally! I would have done the same thing…yeah…yeah…you’re just going insane. You haven’t been out of your apartment in like a month. I’d be insane. You okay there? Ha ha ha but I love you. Yo. That’s like me and snowboarding, but without the car. I don’t know how to actually stop – there’s a way to do it but I just plant my ass in the snow. … Snow tubing? I was supposed to go in January but Diane wouldn’t take me to Montreal…he’s only taking two girls, though. … Because they have nice bodies…What?…You said, “But why, they’re so ugly,” and I said, “Because they have nice bodies.” …No, no, no. I’ve never heard that song. I love you!…Yo. Sexy, eh?

Before going into Canadian Immigration to apply for a social insurance number, Todd, Paul and I stood on the edge of the Niagara River and looked across the water at the American side.

Paul That’s evil Sauron’s land.

Sage Um, don’t say anything like that to the people at Canadian Immigration, okay?

Todd In fact…just don’t talk to them at all unless they ask you something.

Welcome to the Compassionate Care Nursing Care Caring Centre for Aged Felines, We are dedicated to providing excellence in physical, emotional and spiritual support for the cats we serve to optimize their independence and quality of life in a place they call home.

Hi. I’m Sage, and I’ll be leading you through a brief tour of the facility.

On your left, you’ll see twenty three pounds of Ludo. He’s only seven, but he takes medication every day to aid his constipation problems. On your right, twelve year old Karma, who eats special food and has receives IV fluids twice a week to retard his kidney-related dehydration. Sleeping underneath the covers with Todd, you’ll find fifteen year old Shelly, who appears to be suffering from senile dementia. Sleeping in that large pile of papers we keep meaning to go through, thirteen year old Harriet, who is and always has been in excellent, buxom, full-figured health – so excellent that we secretly suspect her of systematically eating the souls of cats long gone: Jay, Cilantro, Anita, Claire and Habanero. And, finally, Peter, who at two years old is incapable of understanding that no one wants to play with him, and they just want to be left alone to wax nostalgic about the Sixties and their Little Duece Coupe and defend their 1987 transition into a financial sector Republican, but Reagan Republicans, not the Fundamentalist Christian kind, and no, I don’t want to talk about the war, I want to talk about how my Bristol-Myers stock is doing today, and did I tell you that my Ford Escape SUV is a hybrid?

I mean, imagine a 24 year old mountain climbing marathon runner being forced to live completely inside with a shy, middle aged man with washroom troubles, a 64 year old who can eat nothing but brocolli and spends his days lurking next to the refrigerator in the hopes that someone will feed him a piece of grilled salmon, a slightly older demon soul eater in the pink of health, and a lady in her late seventies who is quite convinced that any food the staff gives her is poisoned with drain cleaner and runs away from her dinner plate every night in terror.

That’s what it’s like in our apartment, the Compassionate Care Nursing Care Caring Centre for Aged Felines.