My long romance with Toronto began in the late 1980s. For me — that is, on my part — it was love at first sight.
A magazine had assigned me to write a profile of Alice Munro. My husband and I flew up from New York and drove straight from the Toronto airport to Clinton, Ont., where I spent an enchanted day chatting about literature and life with an author whose work I venerated, and who couldn't have been more welcoming, generous — or more quietly brilliant.
It was early evening by the time we returned to the city, where we'd arranged to stay for the weekend. I remember thinking that the magic of the day I'd just spent had somehow followed us back along the highway and rubbed off on the cityscape. The buildings we passed seemed to glow with a sort of fairy-dust sparkle, and the bright lights of Bloor Street were like runway beacons guiding us directly to a safe landing at our hotel, the old Windsor Arms. Recommended by a friend who knew the city well, the hotel appeared to have been designed for couples, like ourselves, who had, for the first time, left their young children with grandparents in order to take their first stolen vacation alone.
Perhaps that fact has something to do with the aura of high romance that I have always associated with Toronto. But I'm not sure that my love for the city in which we spent that post-preschool honeymoon would have proved quite so intense and enduring if we'd woken up in the morning to find that we were in, say, Indianapolis.
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The next day, we went out to explore the city and to discover that we were definitely not in Indianapolis. I should say that those years were not New York's most glorious era, and I recall thinking that Toronto had somehow met the considerable challenges that seemed, at that point, to be wholly defeating Manhattan. Unlike New York, Toronto struck me as succeeding at the great New World multicultural experiment. A woman in an African head-dress sold us our breakfast bagels, a Sikh policeman in a turban was directing traffic and, at the Royal Ontario Museum, a group of schoolchildren appeared to have travelled from all over the globe to lie on the floor, on their stomachs, and cover giant pads of paper with charcoal sketches of a massive Chinese bronze.
The memory of that first visit remains sharply and ineradicably clear. We walked and walked until we were tired, at which point it took about five minutes to figure out the navigable and stranger-friendly subway system. We ate bowls of steaming noodle soup in Chinatown, marvelled at the Inuit art and the amazing Tintoretto at the Art Gallery of Ontario. We strolled along Spadina Avenue, detoured through the university campus, and wound up downtown, where we window-shopped for fashions we couldn't possibly have afforded. And on Sunday afternoon we left convinced (correctly, as it has since turned out) that we'd had time to appreciate only a tiny fraction of what there was to see.
Every time I've returned has been quite different from the time before, but I've never failed to have (I wish there were a more grown-up synonym for the experience) fun. The Harbourfront International Festival of Authors always reminds me of how much I actually like hanging out with, and listening to, my fellow writers, and I'm inevitably impressed by Toronto's enthusiasm for books. At the Harbourfront Festival, I feel like the lucky beneficiary of the kindness and politeness, the sheer niceness for which (for some bizarre reason) Canadians sometimes fault themselves. When a film was made from one of my novels, Household Saints, it opened at the Toronto International Film Festival, where I spent half the time staring (and trying not to stare) at movie stars, and the other half literally running from theatre to theatre, trying to see everything.
My only unfortunate experience in Toronto had to do with weather and climate — a surprise blizzard that nearly stranded me north of the border during the first days of November. Consequently, among the dark jokes we've begun to tell in our family is one suggesting that a consolation for global warming might be the fact that we can finally move to Toronto.
By now, each time I return to the city, there are places I revisit and rituals I observe: long dinners with friends, dim sum lunches at Lai Wah Heen at the Metropolitan Hotel. And each time I return, I make new friends and discover something new — a unfamiliar neighbourhood, a street I'd never taken, evidence of an immigrant group that has come to enrich the city. Last summer, I took my first walk through Cabbagetown, enjoyed my first visit to the Nicholas Hoare book store, and my first ride out to encounter the peculiar, haunting beauty of the Humber College campus, where I taught at the School for Writers.
Even though I'm still very much an outsider, I've come to know Toronto well enough to understand that, as in any urban metropolis, there are problems: rising housing costs, sporadic gang violence, those painful moments when even the largest city can reveal itself as a claustrophobia-inducing provincial town. And yet, and yet … the attraction remains undiminished.
Last summer, I met my friend, the writer Susan Swan, for drinks at the rooftop patio at the summit of the Park Hyatt Hotel. It was, Susan told me, a landmark bar, where many of Canada's most celebrated writers used to hang out.
It was a gorgeous evening, mild and tranquil. I felt profoundly happy. Perhaps it was a consequence of the martinis we drank, but again, I'd like to think that my happiness had more to do with my warm feelings for Toronto. We looked down at the leafy campus of the university and watched the sun set slowly over the city. And although I know perfectly well that no city is paradisical, I truly felt, at least for those few hours, as if I were in heaven.
Francine Prose is the author of many novels, including National Book Award finalist Blue Angel, short-story collections and non-fiction works on art and writing. She lives in New York.
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