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Yes, I was on transit during a pandemic. It was late, it wasn’t crowded, and it allowed me to capture this at the front of the SkyTrain.
Story #1: While driving softball teammates home after a game, we stopped at a highway exit. Out of the blue, our friend Al, one of the shyest guys ever, opens the back window and asks the driver beside us “Can you tell me how to get… how to get to Sesame Street?”. With a completely straight face! I felt it appropriate to drive ahead of this car after, while all 4 of us had a huge laugh about this crack, for some reason. The driver was actually about to answer. As it turns out, our part of Toronto did have a Sesame Street, although I’ve yet to find it. Maybe I should have stayed for the answer.
Story #2: It was our high school graduating year and we all passed around our yearbooks for friends to sign, even if we weren’t close. For one of these, one friend asked me to write where I’ll be in 5 years. It was a little thing, but it made me stop, and wonder why I didn’t have the same courage to elevate the art form of the typical “See you later” sign-off in our yearbooks.
Story #3: In the library of my art college, OCADU in Toronto, I was taking a mental break with the Globe & Mail cryptic crossword. On rare instances when people actually respond in any way to me doing this, the usual response is that they don’t do crosswords, especially if they know it’s a cryptic. This interaction was quite the opposite, as a student who was in one class with me noticed, and actually chipped in to help. She showed me the anagram hack of writing the letters in a circle to help unscramble, which I still use for cryptics and in my Scrabble game. Among other things, I’m a little blown away with how much verbal teamwork we were able to do in a library…
Posting this at this time, I’m sure you could smell the thinly-veiled common thread: these were all black people who crossed my path. These came to mind over these past days. They’re fairly small and innocent, but I find often that the small and innocent in our lives can be more telling of deep inner truth than we often realize. For whatever reasons, these little things have stuck with me. I feel they’ve helped make me the person I am today.
I wanted to be clear what this isn’t meant to be:
Black lives have mattered in my life. In remembering these little events, and all the black people who’ve come in and out of my life, I’ve wondered now what kind of discrimination they might have faced.
Many of us wonder where we go from here, with a sense that going somewhere different is good, right, and long overdue. I hope that sense is right, and that that sense (perhaps guided by a wise comment or two here) guides me and our family to a suitable response to working towards a better future for us all.
One action I’ve seen suggested is to say the names. Sharing them in this way, from an article reporting on the BabyNames.com response, seemed like a good way to have these names included with my thoughts here.