Rumblings & Ramblings

A couple evenings ago on my way home, I met a friendly elderly man. It was very cold and I was sick of being stagnant and waiting for the Parliament bus so I decided to walk towards Castle Frank station, at the very least moving to stay warm. It was just getting to be dark, and as I was crossing the street, a man, perhaps in his 70s dressed in a toque and carrying a rucksack on his back, looking like he was planning to travel far, approached me comfortably and asked if I was walking east, and if so we could keep each other company - walking with someone always speeds up the passing of time when it is cold - which always seems painfully slow when you’re on your own. I told him that I was actually walking towards the TTC station but would be happy to walk with him even for the short little while.

He asked me where I was from. I told him where my parents were from and where I was born. Since he had asked me, I asked him too where he was from.

“Nowhere,” he said with much indignantly, “I do not have a country… as the Americans have destroyed my homeland. Yugoslavia does not exist…”

And so we talked about American intervention and invasions, commiserating over world politics for perhaps 5 or ten minutes. I am not sure. It was just a short connection, one that felt so normal and natural. One that should happen more on cold blistery evenings as well as sunny warm ones. Ones I get to engage in regularly working outdoors in the neighbourhoods that I work in.

We parted ways when I got to Castle Frank, and I could not help but think about how communities are about connecting to the people that are around you, regardless of your tangible connections or not - whether they are the people you buy your apples from or pet food, or that man you see on the train almost everyday at the same time at 8:35 am in the third cabin. I thought about how although I live in the west end of the city, I have more relationships with people that live in the east end. And in that in many ways I still feel transient, and not particularly affiliated to a community.

I get nervous when I am asked what community I am from because I don’t feel like I have any concrete roots anywhere or feel rooted - this happens a lot especially in community development settings. Like last weekend at the Growing Food and Justice Initiative Gathering I attended in Milwaukee (more on that later - hopefully).

While I grew up mostly in North York after my family made the big move, I never went to school in the same neighbourhood I lived in, nor did I spend my summers in the same neighbourhood I lived in either - spending them at my cousins’ and aunts and uncles’ at Jane and Finch. I never made regular connections or formed casual relationships in the suburbs (or shall l I say peri-urban area?) to people. Moving downtown changed all that. I have my routine interactions in which I get to greet people “hello” and “goodbye” and have discourses over the weather, family, neighbourhood and other trivialities, but not so much where I live but where I work.

And so it goes that when the question comes up about the community you belong to and locality in general, what are the requirements? Is it where you live? Spend most of your time at? Feel connected to personally and/or culturally? All of the above? And those are just physical communities - let’s not even begin to talk about the communities that exist online.

I suppose the answer could be that we each (or just some of us) belong to multi-communities or whatever, multi-identities, multi-localities. I don’t know. I just know that when I am in situations where people talk about community as though it is assumed everyone is affiliated somewhere, it is determined, I get stuck on that.