I posted a little about my theory that there is a mythical Toronto that exists side-by-side with the real Toronto on ravelry yesterday (What? You haven't joined the group yet? Please do!) My musings garnered one response from a knitter in Edmonton who wrote, "Read your blog but couldn’t figure out what your “Toronto myth” is, particularly since I don’t know what the “Newfoundland view” of Toronto is. Being a Westerner for most of my life I smiled at the following joke. “How many Torontonians does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Answer: “One. He (she) stands there and waits for the rest of the world to spin around them.”
Ok, I smiled too.
That is definitely part of what I was trying to get at, and definitely a state of mind that I think New Yorkers suffer from also. But my Toronto myth is a little bit more than that too. It also is that Toronto is the land of opportunity, has streets paved with gold, etc.. Toronto was always where people in Newfoundland went for work (now that has largely shifted to Alberta) and there is sense of it being a foreign land despite being part of the same country. This last bit may say more about Newfoundland than Toronto.
Toronto takes on a mythical feel - a place where anything is possible and things happen that are incredibly good (become a millionaire!) and incredibly bad (never heard from again…) but where nothing ordinary ever happens.
What's your Toronto myth? Or are you completely grounded in the hard, cold facts?
Toronto was a fun place for me to escape to when I was first a teenager. Now it is the centre of the Canadian universe. When I'm there I'm horrified at the scale. I can't wait to get back to the manageable scale of Nova Scotia. However, I like theatre, art and some shopping so...
ReplyDelete