We can sit around and wring our hands, that everybody but Canadians is getting the vaccine. Or, if we want to socialize, we can get outside and join friends for a physically distant walk. 

On a recent Sunday, with a blanket of fresh snow coating the city, my wife and I, and our dog, joined friends at a park in Rosedale to walk down to the Brickworks and stroll the Beltline Trail. Le Tout Toronto had shown up; one impossibly lithe woman had staked out a wooden platform, in full sun. With the temperature steady at a balmy -2C, she had stripped to yoga gear and sat twisting herself into glorious shapes, bathed in the noonday sun. Families sauntered past, a parade of skiwear competing with wool coats and fantastic fur hats.  

These walks are a function of the pandemic; in normal times we would have gathered for brunch, or more likely a boozy meal. This year I have explored my city on foot, and shared walks with friends, more than at any other time. This is a positive side of Covid-19.  

A chance encounter on Grenadier Pond this morning renewed my faith in the City of Toronto bureaucracy.

I had laced up and skated onto the ice at about 11 a.m. A thin coat of overnight snow covered the smooth surface.

Then I saw a man coming towards me, sensibly dressed in a Canada Goose parka. The man led a procession consisting of  two impossibly tiny tikes in matching new green jackets and flourescent orange toques.

The man knelt on the ice. With a long ¾” bit attached to a cordless drill, he punched a hole in the ice. Then he dipped a metal rod into the hole, pulled it out and lined the rod up with a metal ruler. He typed into his smartphone.

I finished Moby Dick. Not that many people have.

That’s hardly surprising: you need stamina to read the book; it’s the K2 of novels. Sample sentence: “But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.”

This goes on, in my edition, for 536 pages.

I bought the book innocently at the Madoc Book Worm, a used book store, for $1, which was more than the cover price, 75¢, of my Signet Classics edition, printed in January, 1962, about six months before I was born.

It’s nice to meet your neighbours.

Carlos has a long history in my neighbourhood. He began work as a teen at the Neilson chocolate factory nearly 40 years ago. The factory is now called Cadbury.

Cadbury is our neighbour, kitty-corner to our front door. St. Anne’s Road, on which we live, once led to St. Anne’s Church. At some point Cadbury bought the right-of-way and put a gate across the road, painted purple. Purple is a Cadbury colour.

So a lot of people are kvetching about the year that is ending. Good Riddance 2020, reads the headline on the National Post this morning. Below is Gary Clement’s cartoon, entirely devoted to the travails of the pandemic: toilet paper hoarding, Zoom calls, endless working from home. How depressing.

I just can’t feel bitter about the year that is ending, though. I feel the urge to celebrate all that Covid brought to us that we did not have: the good, unexpected sides of 2020.

I have just come from the home of a friend. Toronto is in full lockdown, so there is no question of me going into his house. I brought our dog, and we stood, in full winter gear, on his front porch.

The pineapple was buried in the snow. I didn’t see it at first.

What I noticed, on my morning walk with the dog, was a stop sign converted into a memorial. The sign sits at a lovely corner of Dufferin Grove Park, where the land dips down from Dufferin Street and a wooden staircase leads up into the park. On the sign post, mourners have tied dozens of bouquets of flowers.

A fresh coat of overnight snow transformed the spot, adding beauty and mystery to the colourful tribute.

A friend and I went for a walk the other night after dinner. He doesn’t have a dog; we took ours.

It was dark. It gets dark so early in December. Some houses in our neighbourhood, in Toronto’s Little Portugal, have Christmas lights, which twinkle and cheer up the urban gloom.

We walked south and crossed King Street into another part of town. When I moved to Toronto in the 1990s, this was a nameless redoubt of old factories. For one of my first stories at the Financial Post I wrote about the succession at Irwin Toy, a toy factory that had, for most of a century, filled a lumbering red-brick industrial building here. On that day in the late 1990s, I saw the machine that transformed coils of wire into Slinkies. (Irwin Toy also built table-hockey games in the building).

A woman dressed as a human-sized banana sat breastfeeding a baby, dressed as a bumblebee, next to the little kids’ play structure at Ossington-Old Orchard Public School. Nearby a scavenger hunt unfolded – princesses, pirates, a Super Mario, gathered around a guy dressed in a green leotard that did not quite flatter his body, with his green eye-mask pushed up over his forehead.

Under a maple tree a family sat eating burgers.

A group of Brits played cricket with tennis balls behind the Catholic school. Three guys stood chatting in the field, one nursing a can of beer; the batsman hit a fly ball and one guy stopped talking long enough to catch the ball and casually toss it back.

Paul, my father, liked to build furniture from cedar; mostly from Western red cedar driftwood he collected on the beaches of Vancouver Island. He built a chest out of cedar. Like most of the stuff  he built, the chest has no right angles. It’s made from hand-hewn slabs of cedar knit together with pegs. A single hinge runs along the entire back of the lid. Twisted driftwood makes up the handles. He put casters under the chest, and used to roll the chest back and forth from under his tall bed, in the strange little shack on a farm in eastern Ontario where he spent his summers in the last decade of his life.

Chests, as an archetype, hold the promise of riches. Pirates bury treasure in chests. A chest, by its very nature, keeps stuff safe. A chest’s owner might lift the chest onto a stagecoach, or a galleon; therefore, the chest must be durable.

My father was in many senses a nomad – often on the road, and owning nothing that anyone would call a house. Yet he built a chest that does not travel well. My father died in the summer of 2018. After my father’s memorial, in October, I put the chest, heavily loaded, in my car, took it to my farm and put it in the barn. The sides came apart a bit during the chest’s travels.

Years ago in the National Post I wrote a series about my childhood. My father helped me with the research. He produced photocopies of dozens of letters both by him and to him, during the period he spent in prison in California, in 1969, 1970 and 1971.

When my father died about two years ago, my siblings agreed that I could have a chest full of his papers. Paul, the chest revealed, kept hundreds of letters and drawings from his children. He also preserved a remarkable trove of letters written by himself, which the recipients apparently gave back to him over the years.