Place sings through time.
The home I live in used to be a kosher butcher shop. The room where I sing, make love and sleep has been the most intimate space of so many passers-by, for years or days at a time. Molly once met the child of the Kensington Butcher, the boy now 90 years of age. Ghosts pass through the hallway where there once was a stairway. The father of my youngest brother (smelling of BO and patchouli) carved the furnishings of this home with his calloused hands long before either of us were born; he is dead but I touch the marks of his tools every day.
It is a sacred thing to call a place home. If Time is relative, Place is a relative; it makes you a cousin of all the others for whom this has been a home.
The Market has seen waves of people calling it home: its Jewish core, arrivals to Tkaronto from China, Central America, Ukraine and the Caribbean, punks, beatniks, self-styled gurus, rasta revolutionaries, rad queers, waspy hippies and jaded hipsters, anti-vaxers and conspiracy theorists, and those who were too weird to have found home before coming here. Even now, when the legacy of this place is leeched by head shops owned by ex-drug prosecutors, part of its weird soul persists. I’ve never been too weird for the market, thank God. As a quiet presbyterian trans kid, I’m often not weird enough.
I’m new here, as things go. But in this short life of mine, it’s the only place that has claimed me as its home.
Bruce is a historian of the market. I have a lot to learn from him about this place. I want to run my fingers along the metal of the pots my home-cousins used every day, I want to hear how neighbours greeted each other, to see how the streets have changed, I want to burrow beneath Kensington Avenue and find the ancient river there.
The ancestors of the market may not still be around, but the artifacts of their lives remain; buried just below the dirt or carved into the wood of a park bench or discarded in a forgotten corner of an alley, there are stories to be learned and passed on.
I have an idea, of which I’ll be posting about here. It has to do with unearthing some of these beautifully mundane objects and letting them sing.
Stay tuned.
xo,
Naomi