Finch Station

The Kiss ‘n ride loop of Finch station was a designated area for parents to surrender their children to the forces of adolescence. Parents purchased iPhones and Blackberries in preparation for this moment.  It was an attempt to electronically revive the umbilical cord, mistakenly discarded at birth instead of preserved for leashing preteen delusions of independence.  Their reminders to “be careful” and to “remember that some people are bad” had no sobering effect, and parents knew this but drove them to the subway station anyway. Convincing themselves that it was possible to experience the world without eroding innocence, they kissed their kids good–bye.

Tweens often had only twenty dollar bills secured from suburban chores. A tween boy heads for the escalators, eager to meet a classmate and steal a first kiss.

Past the red and yellow hot dog stand, a Polish woman sells street meat while a homeless man becomes nothing but slaughtered meat on the street. He is weathered by taunts of rambunctious high school boys from downtown private schools. He has learned to instinctively filter out the speech of obnoxious pseudo urbanites who proclaim they know the streets of downtown Toronto. No one knows the streets until they have begged on them. He chuckles, feeling content that everyday will be like every other; conversations about God with a local Korean International student, chats with a boy about fasting during religious holidays. “I’ll pray for you” they all say. He felt kind of special being the main character of so many prayers by all the world’s religions. He thought that if there was a God out there, maybe they had reached him by now.  But like everyone else, from the religiously atheist to the apathetically agnostic, they spent no more than two minutes performing the same ritual.  Quantify the amount of good karma that needed to be accumulated, toss that amount into a coffee cup, and scurry off into the moving mass of people ready to escape the hazy summer slumber of suburbia.