Living On The Edge (Of Town)

Every word I write takes me further from the city bustle. I’m on a York Region Transit VIVA Blue bus heading north on Yonge Street, formerly the longest street in the world (until it officially broke into two, Yonge and Highway 11). I’m not going to the end of the line—nowhere close—although it sometimes seems like it. I’ve always lived on the city’s outskirts. But I never imagined I’d live as far away as I do now.

Richmond Hill, officially. Unofficially, the ’burbs. The boonies. The sticks. The other day my fiancée and I were driving south on Leslie Street, north of Elgin Mills. In the distance rose a silhouetted metropolis. That’s probably the highrises at Steeles and Yonge, I said. No, Praveena said. Don’t you see the CN Tower? It’s downtown Toronto! Indeed it was, thirty kilometres to the south. I could visualize that iconic, somewhat stereotypical sci-fi image of the mushroom cloud rising over a doomed downtown core. (Seriously, though, my feelings on the burbs are nowhere near apocalyptic.)

In many ways, Richmond Hill isn’t so different from the big city. It’s certainly home to some odd ducks. On a VIVA Blue bus the other day, I saw a guy drinking a beer. This in itself isn’t so strange—I’ve seen people drinking beer on VIVA buses, as I’ve seen people drinking beer on Toronto Transit Commission vehicles. The weird thing was that this was at 6:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. Rather than coming home from an all-night bender, the drinker looked to be on his way to work. He wore green scrubs; I figure he worked in some capacity in the health-care industry. Just one seedy story from among the satellite city’s 185,000 citizens.

No, my adopted city is not sparsely populated. In particular, it boasts large Asian and Persian contingents. I get my hair cut by Persians and do much of my grocery shopping at Asian supermarkets. Seeing all the Korean and Chinese signage in these stores, I certainly feel far from the town where I grew up. Then again, coming home to Praveena every evening makes me feel right at home—more so, perhaps, than ever before.

Aesthetically and functionally, much of Richmond Hill resembles any bustling, North American metropolis: concrete and steel, asphalt and pavement, light poles and power lines, traffic and public transit. The place offers many of the same benefits of city living—maybe an American city more than a Canadian one, with its myriad strip malls and shopping centres rising on every other block. But the businesses dotting the Richmond Hill landscape are totally Canadian: Tim Horton’s, No Frills, Kelsey’s, Petro-Canada, Sporting Life. While items like clothing and groceries seem a tad pricier in the ’burbs, at least rent is cheaper.

Richmond Hill doesn’t offer all the same perks, however. In the absence of bike lanes, bicycles are best ridden (illegally, I might add) on the sidewalk, as roads such as Yonge Street function more like highways. They’re busier, with faster traffic; bicycle riding on them can be a life-threatening experience. Though compared to city traffic, suburb traffic isn’t nearly as bumper-to-bumper (although try saying that with a straight face while travelling north on Yonge Street around 6 pm).

Another annoyingly American quality of the ’burbs is how everything seems so far apart. “Next door” is a minimum five-minute trek. Even the roads are wider than what I’m used to. (Fortunately, my library’s but a seven-minute saunter from home.) Since no two points are very close together, an outing becomes “an outing,” and a trip to the city is most definitely a “trip to the city.” Consequently I spend lots of time travelling down to the city to work, to visit family and friends. But in taking public transit, I use my travel time wisely, reading and writing—like now, writing this. Alternatively, everything being so far apart is more reason to stay in with Praveena.

Maybe the biggest pleasure of living in Richmond Hill is its proximity to unabridged nature. Go a little north, to Stouffville Road, say, and you’re surrounded by fields, lakes, trails, wildlife, tree-lined horizons. My roots may have sprouted in the city, and no one will ever confuse me with Cartier or Brûlé, but I love exploring, stirring up rural dust.

Every word I write takes me further from the city bustle. Praveena and I may be somewhat isolated up here, separated from friends and family, but that just means we get to experience the joys of relying on each other for support. And we can spend lots of time together.

Bottom line? You forge your own life. It’s not where you’re living, but with whom you live, with whom you create your own experiences, discover your own pleasures, find your own solutions to problems, build your own memories. Make no mistake: living in the ’burbs is still living.

Remembering How To Live

What’s it like to live, I sometimes wonder. It’s easy to forget, especially when one takes living for granted, which many of us do in today’s world—The sound of suction drainage of a gaping wound resembles the guttural noises of a zombie protesting its infinite hunger—One gets caught up in the drudgery of existence: working a menial job, spending time on public transit, cooking meals, washing dishes and clothes and body parts, flossing and brushing teeth, etc. These things add up, and before you know it, you think you have no time for the simple pleasures.

Taking living for granted is like taking drugs. You do it more and more until you're doing it cuz it’s easy and convenient, at which point you’re not even choosing it. Rather, it’s choosing you. Drugs were my path for decades. In all that time I didn’t have to plan my day. It was already planned for me—Shambling zombie-like along a dimly lit hall in the geriatric ward, decaying bit by bit every day…Get that body to the morgue before it rots!—but of course that arrangement can’t last forever without serious atrophy of the brain, and a gradual deterioration of self-respect. Which leads to a gradual forgetting, or annihilation, of one’s self.

I’ve been clean for over a year now, and while my story isn't by any means unique, it's still my story. I’m gradually re-learning, remembering, who I am and how to live—Cancel Code Blue, cancel Code Blue—and how to treat myself with dignity and respect. I was lucky, though. I awoke from addiction staring into the beautiful face of a smart, sexy woman. And yes, I know, one must quit bad habits for one’s own sake, not for the sake of anyone else. But a smart, beautiful woman with a sense of humour and a sexy reading habit—how’s that for incentive to stay sober?

I’m a 43-year-old man who for eighteen years has worked a menial hospital support-staff job, roughly paralleling the time of my drug addiction. I don’t work with corpses, but it sometimes feels like I’m watching myself slowly become a zombie. It’s long past time to get out of this lame-duck job and get into one that’s been my passion since I was a sober teenager. I want to write and edit and work with words in an environment crackling with creativity. I am looking for a new job, but it’s taking much longer than I expected. (Nurse, how much longer will I have to wait?) I am prepared to persevere and endure the wait—and search—however long it takes.

In the meantime, I still occasionally wonder what it’s like to live—but not often. In the early days of sobriety, I would finish work and feel I had nothing to look forward to. No bottle tokes, no white Russians, no cigarettes. The longer I’ve remained sober, the more I’ve (re)discovered how to enjoy life, the more I’ve found things to look forward to—first and foremost time spent with my beautiful, smart fiancée.

Here are some of the things sobriety has taught me (Shift change! Time to give report): living is about filling in life’s cracks. It’s about doing all the things in a day, big and small, that make one feel one has used up the day such that it can be crumpled up and tossed in the garbage. Exercising, working, reading a book, writing, completing that long-neglected project, cooking and eating a meal, cleaning up afterwards, brushing one’s teeth, cutting one’s toenails, doing the banking, cutting the lawn, seeing a concert, going on a date, taking a vacation. Relearning to live is about remembering how to do these (and many other) things, and forgetting all the things that are unimportant or destructive in their extremity. The more enticements towards sober, moderate living one has—a beautiful girlfriend, a full daily itinerary—the easier it is to effectively grasp the practice of living. And the sooner one understands these things, the sooner one can start living again without taking life for granted.