The Shopping Coat

I can still remember the house. It was tall and wide, towering into the sky. Three stories of white brick reaching up and out. In recent years it had been sandblasted and converted into a lawyers' office. Mclntrye, McIntrye and Smith; the brass sign in the middle of the lawn shouted out the firm's name.

When I was a child, about ten years old, and scrawny like most of the kids who had lived in the area, my best friend lived in that house. It stood down at the corner of Pembroke and Dundas on the south east corner. Across the street on the south side was Norm's open Kitchen, and right across from that was another open kitchen of some name that I can no longer recall.

In the evenings all the hookers, drug dealers, and winos visited these kitchens for a cup of coffee. They sat around and watched each other like vultures waiting to swoop down on a piece of meat. Sometimes there were knife fights, or fist fights, or lovers fights. The cop cars were always there, their lights flashing; their sirens wailing a wake-up call to the rest of the neighbourhood.

My friend Geoff lived in the house with the rest of his brothers and sisters. When I would visit I could count on seeing his parents and their friends sitting around the living room with a bottle of wine being passed between them. The children would be off amusing themselves; somewhere else in the house, down the street or in the local school yard.

Geoff and I had met each other in the corner store run by a Chinese family. He said he was shopping, but I noticed when he left that he hadn't bought anything. This was to puzzle me for sometime until I had the opportunity of shopping with him.

One day Geoff invited me to go downtown to Woolworth with him and his little brother Harry. The store was at Queen and Yonge. When we got there, we made our way through the first floor and up to the second. Once there, we headed to the toy section, and eyed each item as if it were the one thing in the world we needed most.

The Shopping Coat - go to page 2

© 2005 The Shopping Coat is copyrighted and cannot be copied in whole or in part without permission from the author.