This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving
and provides the inspiration for this story
As Maya Angelou says, the ache for home lives in all of us. Perhaps that was what was on my mind when I said I’d come home for Thanksgiving.
It was my first job and first time away from home. I obtained a position at the University of Toronto lecturing on the 19th century novel.
I felt the need to be independent, so I leased a cramped apartment near the campus and tried to get by on a meager salary.
I denied myself the luxury of a car, figuring I could use public transit.
My parents didn’t live far—they lived in High Park—less than an hour’s subway ride away.
But I wanted to assert my adulthood—make a statement—although I was already missing my mother’s cooking and our old, familiar, creaking house.
I was looking forward to the prospect of sleeping in my old room, enjoying home-cooked meals and walking in the park.
But Friday dawned cold and wet and as the day wore on, the weather became worse
I brought an Addidas bag with me, stuffed with clothes, and a copy of Pasternak’s poems, Sister My Life.
I kept an eye on the sky, but the low, dark clouds racing overhead, told me the storm would not let up.
Common sense might dictate delaying the trip until the Saturday, but I’ve always been a sucker for rainy days and the somber moods of weather.
I decided to get out my umbrella and head to College Street—I’d take the tram for nostalgia’s sake.
Toronto’s trams are affectionately called Red Rockets primarily because of their colours—mostly red with contrasting beige.
I still look back fondly to my freshman year when I worked in one of the TTC car barns cleaning trollies and trams.
I learned how to raise and lower the trolley pole if it came off the wires.
It was a scary using the rope to reposition the pole on the live wires and avoid arcing it and being doused with a shower of sparks
But, I always loved trams—ever since I was a little boy and my mom read me a picture book called, The Runaway Tram.
In the story, a little boy has an adventure on a runaway tram, meeting a girl with red shoes who later became his wife.
That began my love affair with trams and my romantic yearnings that so far have remained unfulfilled.
I walked down past Simcoe Hall to College Street and boarded a half-empty car.
It was dimly lit with yellow lights. Warm and dry, it looked like a ship, sheltered from the wind and the rain outside.
The tram started up, swaying slightly from side to side—the driver occasionally ringing the bell to warn motorists who veered onto his tracks.
At the next stop, a beautiful, brown-haired girl got on, wearing a black raincoat and red rain boots. She sat across the aisle from me.
Is this my girl? I jokingly asked myself.
Curiously, at that moment, she turned around to glance at me.
I hunched down in the seat and stuck my nose in my poetry.
Little did I know this Thanksgiving journey home would be my own version of The Runaway Tram and change my life forever.