ONE SUMMER IN CANADA
In Toronto there is a very large mall, very tall, and very crowded. Four stories. Many escalators. Many sets of stairs. In this mall a mother and her seven year old daughter will go shopping one summer day in June. They will be tourists. They will be looking for something "uniquely Canadian" to take back to their home in Alabama. In this mall the mother will buy a trendy watch with a black leather band from an oriental girl at a kiosk on the third floor. The leather band will be decorated with ten small silver rings that look as though they could be connected to something, like a chain, or a leash. The mother will like this watch very much. She will come to think of it as an external symbol of her internal clash. She will later leave the watch on a beach at Lake Ontario, accidentally buried in the sand by the daughter. The daughter will buy a "Hillary Duff" mystery-detective book that she will never read. Later, the mother will remark that neither item seemed very Canadian to her at all.
Across the street from this mall there is a fountain that shoots singular jets of smooth water straight out of the sidewalk from roughly twenty different holes in the cement, each jet forming roughly twenty singular fountains in two rows of ten, each row being roughly twenty feet apart, each row then being in a straight line, one row standing guard against the other, both rows forming a kind of temporary arched water-walkway. This fountain will be irresistible to the daughter, she being just seven. This daughter will coyly tell her mother that she will not go into the fountain, but she will. The mother of this seven year old daughter will be too tired to argue, having walked all morning through that very tall mall, looking for something Canadian.
In a week the mother will return to the mall and buy a Canadian t-shirt from Old Navy. She will like the red maple leaf in the center of the shirt. The t-shirt will be gray. She will buy a matching t-shirt for the daughter. The daughter will lose her t-shirt before she returns to Alabama; she will cry. The mother will then give her Canadian t-shirt to the daughter.
When the mother and daughter stop at the fountain to rest, this seven year old girl will say that she will only run through the fountain when the water falls back down, that she only wants to splash around in the puddles left behind once the water has drained back in the cement. But everyone knows that a seven year old girl cannot resist lolly-gagging, walking through this fountain just slowly enough to "accidentally" be caught by the water when it once again shoots back out of the cement and into the sky. It is a waste of breath for the mother to say, "Do not get wet. I do not want to ride the subway with a wet, shivering daughter." But the daughter will not listen. She will get wet.
In fact, the daughter will stand in the fountain long enough to soak her shoes, her shirt, her jeans, and her pink "Hello Kitty" socks. The daughter will laugh. She will think this is very funny. But then the sun will go down very fast, and the air will become cold, colder than a seven year old girl from Alabama has ever felt in June. Her lips will turn purple. She will begin to shiver. She will complain that she is very cold. Her mother will say, "I told you to bring your jacket." The daughter will shiver some more. The two of them will run to the subway, it is close by. They will pass through an intersection. In this intersection there will be a pedestrian walkway, with an electronic "Walk - Don't Walk" sign that chirps like a parakeet. The mother will ask a handsome Canadian man why the sign chirps. The Canadian will tell her it is for blind people. The daughter will spend the rest of the week looking for blind Canadians.
The mother and the daughter will then find the subway entrance, somewhere near the chirping intersection. The mother will stop before going in, and look for her daughter's book of subway tickets. The tickets will look something like the S&H green stamps her own mother used to collect from the Piggly Wiggly grocery store in hopes of one day earning enough points for a set of pink Fiesta Ware. The tickets will look something like a sheet of American postage stamps, only not sticky on the back, but worth roughly the same amount of money, even with the exchange rate.
The mother will find the tickets at the bottom of her purse, inside her checkbook, next to the driver license she thought had been lost in the library across from the Internet café. The daughter will complain. She will be cold. As the mother reaches for the tickets, a gust of cold Canadian wind will blow through, pick the tickets up, and sweep them out of the mother's purse. The mother and daughter will stand at the top of the subway steps and watch in disbelief as the tickets swirl around in the the air above them, high above the pedestrian walkway, and the intersection. High above the street signs and the traffic lights and the fountain and the four-story mall. Higher still than the rising Canadian moon and the red and white June summer sky.