Toronto, Gordon Lightfoot, and Me
Earlier in August, I took my teenage son Rob to Toronto. On our last visit, Rob was four, but it was a blur with two toddlers in tow and another baby on the way. This time, I had the luxury of exploring Toronto both as an adult and through the eyes of a teenager. I was only two years older than Rob when I first visited Toronto in spring of 1993. As I drove along Lakeshore Boulevard, now in the driver’s seat with my own teenager sitting shotgun, I looked at the skyline to my left and the water to my right with a sense of anticipation that mirrored that trip thirty years earlier.
Back in 1993, my dad flew me to Toronto for school visits and we stayed in his executive apartment, one of those places where one stays when traveling for work for an extended amount of time. He was relocated from the Philadelphia office of his company to Toronto, and my mom, younger brother and I would join him that coming summer. I remember the apartment looking rather stark, and my dad had stocked his fridge with nothing but a jar of pickles and orange juice. It was a short trip, midweek, with the clear goal of visiting two high schools and picking one to start my senior — or Grade 12 — or Grade 13/OAC — year. It was all a bit confusing, but one thing I knew for sure was that from there, my life would continue on a new path in a different country.
I was sixteen and had lived in the same small town in Pennsylvania for my whole life, and suddenly over the course of a few months, Toronto was my new home. I had never lived in a city before and had only visited Canada once. I knew no one — absolutely no one — in this new city or in my neighborhood. But as soon as I arrived on Douglas Drive, a tree-lined street in the Toronto’s Rosedale neighborhood, I loved everything about it and everyone I met.
Each house looked special and inviting, maybe the home of a new friend or a family to babysit. Summerhill Market and Rosedale Video became my little neighborhood nooks to explore, replacing my Blockbuster and Rite Aid in Malvern, Pennsylvania. We had an ice rink in the park behind my house. I thought that was absolutely incredible, until I realized that ice rinks are like basketball courts for Canadians. There were hidden railroad tracks and ravines for walks in the woods, all set against a backdrop of skyscrapers and a bustling downtown only a short walk or subway ride away. It was a magical place, and I walked so much in those early months. Then winter hit and I learned that nose hairs can freeze, so I dressed more warmly, laced up my new Doc Maartens, and kept walking. I made friends, and one of the kids I met on that visit to North Toronto Collegiate Institute the previous spring became my new best friend. Her name is Laura, and we rode the bus and the subway together every day.
I know parents aren’t supposed to be best friends with their kids, but my mom was my other best friend that year. She left her life and her friends behind, too, so we went for walks together all the time. My dad came along when he could, and on weekends, we sometimes went for long drives to see the rest of the city. On one of our walks, my mom pointed out a street and said she heard Gordon Lightfoot lived there. I may have said, “Who?” And shrugged it off, but my dad went on to sing an excerpt from the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I asked if Gordon Lightfoot sings that song about the lover in the grocery store, but no, that’s Dan Fogelberg. He’s not Canadian, they don’t sound alike, and I got the message that they should not be confused with one another. I probably confused them for a few more decades anyway.
I could tell my parents knew exactly who Gordon Lightfoot was and, for two people coming from small towns in Pennsylvania and Delaware, living near Gordon Lightfoot in our house in downtown Toronto was like getting a glimpse behind the curtain of Hollywood. My parents had never dreamed of a world full of the rich and famous — that just wasn’t them. Gordon Lightfoot, however, was a musician they loved and admired, and being just down the street from him was pretty cool. I think that’s how they described it. “That’s Gordon Lightfoot’s house. That’s pretty cool.”
I, on the other hand, was sixteen years old and pretty starstruck by this new city. While the kids in my class were asking me if American life was like Beverly Hills 90210 and if prom was how it looks in the movies, I could not believe that not far from our house, there was a television studio where Kids in the Hall was filmed. Some of the kids in my school knew people who knew people who were in Degrassi Junior High. Keanu Reeves had gone to my high school! Malvern, Pennsylvania was nothing like Beverly Hills, and as far as I could tell, I had been plucked from suburbia and landed in the center of the universe.
Once the initial wow of city life wore off, I cared very little about possible star sightings and more about the vintage shops, subways, beaches, and music stores. I loved the possibilities of life in Toronto, the way my family had branched out and settled in, the new friends, and the vibrant surroundings. We tried Greek food for the first time on a road called the Danforth, ate our fries with gravy, shopped at Club Monaco and Roots, and Laura introduced me to something called falafel. I rode street cars across town to go to outdoor markets, ice skated in the park, and visited friends at their homes where they spoke with their families in other languages. None of this seems like a big deal now, but at the time, I sometimes imagined I was on the set of a movie and I was the luckiest person in the world to have been cast as teenage girl living in Toronto.
We lived there for five years, and throughout that time, my mom was about the age I am now. Gordon Lightfoot was probably only in his mid-50s, still making music. I thought they were all so old — my parents, musicians from the 1970s, people with real jobs, all of them. Over time, I have come to love Gordon Lightfoot’s music, and as the years pass, it remains unchanged and timeless. He will always remind me of this shift in time and place, of that moment my parents, my brother and I came together and found ourselves completely at home in a new and unfamiliar town. For a few days after he died, I listened to “If You Could Read My Mind,” my all-time favorite Gordon Lightfoot song, on repeat.
While in Canada last week, Rob and I stayed with Laura, her husband Brad, and their three boys. We first spent a night at their lake house on Lake Erie, where Rob marveled at the vastness of the Great Lakes and we talked about the weather patterns and astonishing number of shipwrecks that have given it the reputation of the most dangerous water in the world. We talked about the Edmund Fitzgerald and looked up the lyrics — nope, that was Lake Superior, November 1975. I promised Rob we would also visit Lake Ontario while in Toronto, as he seemed blown away by the idea of these lakes as big as oceans.
The next day we went into the city, to Laura and Brad’s house, right on Douglas Drive in Toronto, a block away from her childhood home. The park in our old neighborhood has been redone and the ravine is now a destination called Brickworks with miles of trails, a snack bar, and an educational farm. Summerhill Market is three times bigger than I remember it, as is the Hockey Hall of Fame. I took Rob to the Toronto Islands where we rode bikes along the beach and through the residential neighborhoods of island homes, admiring this perfectly rustic urban lifestyle complete with artist studios, rowboats, and gardens overflowing with hydrangeas. The sites and smells took me right back to my first time there with my mom at sixteen. The water stretches on forever, but without the salt smell, the air has a distinct texture that sets it apart from my childhood summers at the Jersey Shore. Rob biked ahead of me as I watched the three decades between us disappear.
Back in Rosedale, on our walk home from the subway station, I paused at the corner of Beaumont Road and Glen Road. I almost called ahead to Rob, who had trouble slowing his long legs down to my pace, to tell him that we were right near Gordon Lightfoot’s old house. I knew what his response would be — “Who?” I just smiled to myself and kept walking with a tune in my head. If you could read my mind, there will always be a piece of me that belongs in Toronto. In that piece, there’s a light on a house where Gordon Lightfoot lived, and not far away is another house that I once called home.