[URBAN NOTE] Waiting on the Platform

[rfmcdonald]

I walked up to the Bloor-Yonge station tonight, descending to the bottom level to take a westbound train on the Bloor-Danforth line at 9:28, only to be told at 9:35 as I paced about bored commuters that someone stopped the train at the Castle Frank station and that crews were responding. I shortly afterwards gave up and ascended to board a southbound train on the Yonge-University-Spadina line. People were talking, and acting.

• Someone was checking academic papers, goatee and all. "'I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott,'" I read on the third page of the essay. It wasn't printed on regular printer paper, rather on rich cream-coloured stock. He, in turn, used a purple-inked pen to make corrections, gazing down from underneath the brim of his tan hat.


• The young woman selling roses reminded me of the protagonist of Hans Christian Andersen "The Little Match-Seller", cradling a wicker cradle filled with roses and stems lying on a bed of newspaper, plastic foil covering the blue- and magenta-coloured roses and capsules mostly filled with water clipped around the raw bases of the stems. Perhaps it was her cheeks, faintly sunken; perhaps it was her youth and her short skirt. Imagine a reaction, then, when I saw a professionally-dressed woman talking to her about women's rights and the joys of this country. If you're curious, the rose-seller was white and her interlocutor apparently of South Asian origins.