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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 30, 2005
The big fire
No one was killed in the big fire, that started in a dollar store in Toronto's Parkdale, early Thursday morning. I could see the flames blazing at the head of Jameson Avenue on my way to Mass that morning. By the time I came out, and walked up to Queen Street to join the gawping crowd, it was just a lot of smoke belching -- and two firemen atop high ladders pumping water down into the heat. One fireman was sent to hospital from heat prostration and smoke inhalation; refugees from adjoining houses were being sheltered on transit buses.Queen Street was blocked by 20 fire trucks, and according to reports, the power was off the streetcar wires all the way to Spadina. Traffic was also snarled on the nearby Gardiner Expressway. The local high school, Parkdale Collegiate (where my grandpa went, before quitting to sign up for the Great War), had closed for the day. The smoke, thick and smelling of oil, was flowing out over Lake Ontario. The entertainment-to-tragedy ratio was thus quite high. This is often the case in Parkdale, the urban neighbourhood I love most in all Canada. Once very grand (in the days before the expressway cut it off from the Lakeshore), dotted still with a few rambling sandstone mansions (now converted to sprawling dives), it presents a wonderful spectacle of rise and fall. It has today the most complicated mixture of ethnicities in our largest city. No single group have the numbers to prevail, though the plurality are probably still the poorer native-born white folk who constitute Toronto's "entirely invisible minority" . A melting pot -- but don't tell anyone. The ethnicities are gradually converging out of the shopkeepers' need for customers. Since you can't pay the rent on what you can sell to just your fellow Serbians, or Gujaratis, or Tibetans, the grocer looks into alternative cuisines, the video-renter for new lines in ethnic cinema. People meet and mix; neighbours struggle with each other's unpronounceable names, and young lovers cross parental front lines. It is all such a wonderful departure from the unofficial apartheid policy, that delivers voting blocs to keep the Liberals in power. The beauty of a true multi-ethnic hodgepodge, is that governments at all levels tend to leave it alone. No one group is large enough to clamour for a pay-off. Welfare is collected, catch as catch can, but the great majority become reconciled to working for a living. There is plenty of crime in Parkdale, but most of that imported, chiefly from the vast nearby "mental health centre" that is constantly discharging the insane it has collected from across the province into the poorest adjoining neighbourhood. Or from the halfway houses that have collected here, from NIMBY politics in more respectable places. Parkdale is simply the dumping ground, for social engineering projects that are advancing elsewhere. Every neighbourhood has "community centres", the formal or informal places where strangers are likely to meet. Here, they tend to assemble around the yellow police tape at crime scenes. The fire, Thursday, likewise provided an important community event, and speculation about all the banknotes that might be burning in the back of the Money Mart, a useful conversational ice-breaker. I was myself struck by the very manliness of the fire fighters -- all, so far as I could see, big tall men, in defiance of equal-opportunity recruiting schemes. During 9/11, the effete office-workers of lower Manhattan were suddenly impressed by the bravery and heroism of so many guys for whom they would normally feel only a slight twinge of social condescension, if they noticed them at all. These were the guys who, without hesitation, had sacrificed their lives for their "betters". My thoughts were with a specific Toronto fireman I know -- a rather talented artist who took up with the Canadian Forces, then switched to full-time fire-fighting when he realized there was no point to soldiering for this country any more. He is a handsome bachelor, who eschews marriage, having noticed what happened to every single member of his truck crew. Each, having suffered the humiliation of being discarded by a faithless woman, then lost access to both his kids and his own income through the operations of Ontario's man-hating family court system. Each had been reduced to the rooming-house life. Yet there they had all been, dashing into the flames, at six a.m. of a Thursday morning; proving, as only they could, that there are still a few men around. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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