When I have a little time off work, I like to give people directions. I walk around Toronto on some largely invented errand; say, finding an obscure Mexican cheese – because when was Monterey Jack allowed to become the default cheese of fake Mexican food, anyway? And when I see people studying tourist maps, or turning around and around under street signs, I ask them what it is they're looking for, and tell them how to get there.
After I've mapped out their route for them, I ask if there is anything else they want to know about Toronto, and give them the best answers I possibly can. Then I tell them them, sincerely, that I hope they enjoy their visit to my city – which I know they may have heard is really unfriendly.
My giving directions to tourists may be the point where sincerity and passive aggression meet, but I've lived in Toronto town for many years, been at this giving-direction game a long time, and there's something in this for everyone.
Tourists get the name of a good ramen restaurant, or maybe I recommend that, after the Art Gallery of Ontario, they visit the excellent but often overlooked Textile Museum of Canada just a few blocks away, and I get to be a bit player in someone else's day or drama for a few minutes, which is a new perspective, its own kind of holiday. Shoutout to the man looking to have "a quick whisky," but not more than three blocks from Sick Kids Hospital, and to the woman who had just come from China to settle her daughter into the University of Toronto and wanted very much to buy her a dustpan, as though her child's success depended upon it.
When I walk with my children, they now instinctively stop when they see someone who looks lost, and wait while I go over and do my not-job. When I've been out walking alone and get home, sometimes they ask me how many people I guided while out that day, and if there were any unusual requests, or was it "an all 'Where's the Eaton Centre' day?"
Usually, my flock will number somewhere between three and nine, depending on whether I walk on Yonge Street, which is the first place lost people go when they hit Toronto. When I go to Yonge Street, I feel like I'm cheating.
The only problem with my little hobby is that, when I go on actual holiday, I feel useless, and there's a gaping hole in my life.
Looking for existential panic, are you? Here, let me help you with that. It's with me in New York this week. Once again, every time I see a tourist-wife waving a little map at her tourist-husband, or a tourist-husband trying to look authoritative while turning his phone upside down, which will not help you, sir, I step forward eagerly and offer to help, even though I know I can't.
I'd like to say sorry to everyone I have "helped" this week in Manhattan. I did live in New York briefly, and visit fairly often, but I am not qualified to give directions here and, while I'm at it, I admit I do it in London as well, on an unavoidably limited basis.
When in London, I tell people how to get to the British Museum or the British Library, regardless of what it is they're actually looking for. People stop me a lot and ask how to get to … well, somewhere they want to go, and I say to them: "Have you been to the British Museum? You really can't miss that. It's just up the road here …"
In Paris, people also stop me for directions. They clearly think I am French, and so speak very slowly and very loudly, in English. To avoid admitting that I have no idea where I am, I answer in the only French I ever learned, all of it picked up in Grade 7. "Pitou! Pitou! Donne-moi le poulet! Donne-moi le poulet!" I will say, authoritatively to my inquisitors, maybe adding: "Je ne ... speak … Anglais" and something I think means, "Help me! Help me! My car is very sick!" – a line that did get me to a mechanic once when my rental broke down in the country – and then I storm off.
I may be the rude Parisian of legend.
I'm trying not to give directions in New York this week. I really am. I catch myself stepping forward, saying, "Can I hel…," and then I stop abruptly. This likely makes me look like the crazy-New-Yorker-wandering-the-street of legend – and why, I wonder as I step back, am I even here if I can't get people there, wherever their there may be.
As a fallback, I resort to photography. I branched out to that a few years ago, when I realized Google Maps would likely soon make my direction-giving skills obsolete.
These days, I see a couple taking pictures of each other in front of an iconic city landmark, and I ask them if they'd like one of both of them, and then wonder for a block or so afterward how that shot I took will look to them, and with whom they will view it, in years to come.
Sometimes it's a whole family lined up in front of the big civic thing, and I end up taking the shot that granddad is in. I watch the family laugh, wave him over and raise their arms from one another's shoulders to fold him in. He shrugs as he joins them, but sometimes runs his fingers through his hair to tidy it. Maybe, that picture will be the one shot from the whole trip that will prove he was there, when events cause someone to check.
I take my role very seriously; I go out every day, trying not to look like someone who will steal your iPhone – and I'll see some of you lost or loving souls out there, I hope.