In the abstract, retirement is not such a difficult concept to embrace, especially for someone in her late sixties who has worked hard for decades.
On the ground - or, more specifically, on the patterned hardwood floors of a grand old mansion on Jarvis Street - things are not so cut-and-dried.
The stately red-brick corner house is not only home to Ida Angelini, 69, who lives in a spacious suite upstairs. It's also where she worked for 25 years, serving plate after plate of classic Italian cuisine in her main-floor restaurant, Angelini's, until she sold the business in 2006.
Now, after a year in which new owners failed to make a go of the renamed Gooderham House, Angelini's is back in business, its owner picking up where she left off.
"I did not expect this would happen; I had a trust they would make the place a success," Ms. Angelini said this week, her voice still flavoured with a rich accent despite four decades in North America. "But I still have a mortgage to pay on the house. It's a huge responsibility, and I thought the best thing would be to re-open."
Serious as that sounds, mention of the re-opening also draws broad smiles from the diminutive woman, who is by turns tough as nails and tender as gnocchi (still her favourite dish to prepare). Retirement from work is one thing; retirement from the satisfied bustle of feeding long-time customers in the same house where you live is apparently quite
another.
"When you reach a certain age, you want to have a relaxed life and you want to travel," she said, "but you miss your customers and you miss the activity. Plus, I love my house."
Relaxation was the plan in early 2006 when Ms. Angelini decided to sell her business, but continue to own the house and live upstairs.
Bret Snider, a Toronto businessman, Conservative Party activist and descendant of the Gooderham distilling clan that built the house in the 1890s, leased part of the house from her and opened Gooderham House soon afterward, but ran into difficulties and closed in July, after 16 months.
A rookie restaurateur, Mr. Snider had opened with an experienced partner, Gerard Caleo, owner of the Metropolitan Restaurant and Bar on Victoria Street, but disagreements led Mr. Caleo to jump ship and sell his share to Mr. Snider last December.
"It was a good start, but for other reasons, I just wanted to sell out," Mr. Caleo said this week. "I wasn't really happy with the way things were going there."
Attempts to reach Mr. Snider for comment were unsuccessful; messages left with family members went unreturned and his former business, the York College of Industry & Technology on Jarvis Street near the restaurant, has closed.
For Ms. Angelini, who took the struggling venture off Mr. Snider's hands when it closed, the re-opening is a chance to rekindle a life-long love affair with the hospitality business, and a route out of the boredom that had beset her.
"I went to Italy," she said, referring to the three-week vacation - her first in 18 years - she took upon retiring, "but after I came back, I felt bored without the business."
She joined the Y and enjoyed working out at the gym, but as Gooderham House faltered, Ms. Angelini thought not only of the lost rental income, but of all the times during her retirement that diners at the upstart eatery would come in and ask for her.
"At my age, what do you do?" she asked. "You enjoy talking to your customers; you enjoy being in your kitchen."
When she re-opened on Aug. 29, "I had business right away," she said, and the phone has been ringing with old patrons making reservations anew. "It's a very hard business, but as I say, my customers want to keep me alive."
As the youngest of 10 children who grew up in Cerisano, a small town in southwest Italy, Ms. Angelini never lacked for company, but she had no interest in her family's agricultural business or the chores that went with it.
"I was not a farm girl," she said. "My parents were very strict; I liked to have freedom."
In her early 20s, she travelled to England to stay with a cousin. There, she landed work in a bar, then as a housekeeping supervisor at the Dorchester Hotel, a luxurious London landmark, where she saw the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Kennedy.
She married a waiter, and in the early 1970s, they settled in Toronto, where her sister and brother lived. A few years later, they opened the original Angelini's on Avenue Road, then spied the Gooderham mansion and moved the business there in 1981.
Now single, with three grown children and a first grandchild on the way this month, Ms. Angelini faces the considerable task of rebuilding her business, but said she's feeling more than up to the job.
"I say, as long as you can carry on your business, do what you can," she said, "because it's worse to do nothing at all and miss your activity."
Asked how long she would continue working, she replied, "Until I can't. I'm old, but I feel stronger, more than ever."