It takes 40 seconds to cross Dundas Square on a diagonal. When it's not busy as a venue for concerts or a marketplace, it sits in its naked state, and everybody crosses it on a diagonal (hands in pockets, eyes to the ground) and everybody takes 40 seconds.
It's as though everyone who gets to its centre decides that, having devoted 20 seconds to getting onto Dundas Square, by far the best thing to do with the next 20 would be to get off.
There are exceptions. A man wearing a windbreaker emblazoned with the word "Security," runs across it.
It takes him 14 seconds to get directly from Yonge Street to Victoria Street, and it's not clear why. Perhaps he's doing wind sprints. Perhaps he's just bored.
Perhaps he needs to remind himself of what he might be called upon to do when the place is inhabited. After all, security can hardly be a very pressing issue in a public square that, for a great deal of time, has the emptiness of the Sea of Tranquillity as its most striking characteristic.
But I exaggerate. Actually, there's no end to the unusual discoveries that can be made on Dundas Square. There's a payphone, for instance. You don't see many of those any more, do you? And there is the man who walks backward.
It's remarkable, really, that in a city as big and as crowded as Toronto, Dundas Square can, throughout much of the week, have twice as many garbage containers on it as it has people. I have this kind of statistical information at hand because, so riveting is the ebb and flow of humanity on Dundas Square, I'm passing the time by counting garbage containers. I'm up to 11 when I notice the man walking backward.
You'd think a man walking backward would stand out. But that's the point. Stand out against what? There's nobody walking forward on Dundas Square either, and so, without any points of comparison, the peculiarity of the man's gait is not immediately obvious to me.
If you were to spend 10 years alone on a desert island -- an activity that has certain parallels to sitting in Dundas Square on a weekday morning -- and a rescue boat were to find you, the fact that it was approaching stern-first would not be the first thing you'd notice.
There are fewer pigeons on Dundas Square than there are garbage containers, but they move more. On Dundas Square we must take our excitement where we find it.
There is also, to the west, a giant poster for Jennifer Lopez's new perfume, Still. This advertisement is the most striking visual element of Dundas Square. The picture of Jennifer Lopez is about 10 storeys high -- as befits the shy and retiring nature of its subject -- and you can always pass the time required for a transsquare crossing by deconstructing the poster's cryptic message. The caption says: "In the eye of the storm I am Still Jennifer Lopez." And that can be read two ways. Either it means that "In the eye of the storm I am Still" is a statement signed by Jennifer Lopez -- a star with an apparent flair for the obvious. Or, if ever you have to spend more than the traditional 40 seconds on Dundas Square, you can amuse yourself by picturing an alternative interpretation: a beautiful but demented celebrity screeching at an approaching hurricane, "Don't you know who I am?"
There are not many things that have the capacity to bore me to tears immediately. Usually it takes time for tedium to make its way up my spinal column and drip into my cranium. It took me the better part of a morning, for instance, to realize that I could not possibly stay awake during any conversation that had to do with the merger of the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance. It took me at least a couple of hours to understand that I'd have more fun watching paint dry.
But on an empty Dundas Square the boredom sets in immediately. No sooner do I set foot on it than I can feel my brain waves levelling off and my eyes welling up. I've been on more architecturally engaging landing strips.
This a place that takes a bus shelter -- a bus shelter somewhere on the outskirts of Toronto, in February -- as its esthetic inspiration.
This is a place that has a stage that is really a disguise for an entrance to an underground parking garage.
This is a place that has six trees, one of which is dead. Not that a dead tree exactly stands out on Dundas Square. Au contraire. There's probably an architect out there who is plotting to kill the other five.
This is a place that has steel chairs and marble slabs of benches, and the people who have attempted to sit on them after Thanksgiving are the reason that Preparation H has had such an excellent quarter.
This is a place where nobody who spends 40 seconds crossing it -- mostly from the southwest to the northeast corner, in case you're interested -- ever looks up from their feet in order to contemplate their surroundings. Why would they? What's to contemplate? Skye Media's billboard for Skye Media billboards? The Hard Rock Café's guitar? The Bond Place Hotel to the east? The brown tile facade of Sears to the west? The 11 concrete columns that support a roof that covers the 11 concrete columns of Dundas Square?
In this life, there are more interesting pairs of Wallabies.