Shaken And Stirred

Monday, the 23^rd, was brilliant, the first real spring day since the season was officially declared open a month ago. The snow and ice were gone and there wasn’t the merest whiff of windstorms or any other similar unpleasantness. The joy and excitement were palpable. Spring had finally sprung, and it was time to look forward to the next few months with anticipation to the weather that Toronto knows how to deliver. On that day, there was even the added bonus of St George’s, a day that is named for a person I know well.

         The only slightly discordant thing in this lovely tableau was that I had to attend at an out-patient clinic in a hospital called the Sunnybrook. It was a longer wait too, than I had anticipated, but that in no way disconcerted me. And while waiting my turn, I glanced occasionally at the flat screen TV mounted several metres away at ceiling level. As is usually the case in hospital waiting areas, the sound was turned off but then, from about 2 pm the hospital PA system scratched into life and began to make announcements at irregular intervals, “Code This” and “Code That”, identifying locations in the hospital where some critical event was taking place, and requesting relevant personnel to report. Meantime, the soundless flat screen began to unpeel a story that was occurring at a location in the city and which involved a white van. The screen was too far away for me to fully comprehend the pictures or read the chyron that was running along the bottom of the screen. “Chyron” is a word that I learnt recently prior to which, the only word I knew for the info-graphic along the bottom of a TV screen was “crawler”. But whatever it is called it was too indistinct for me to know what was really going on. No sound, no readable chyron. Meanwhile, the hospital PA repeated its crackling from time to time, requesting urgent attendance of staff somewhere in which the words “Emergency Room” featured. Nothing to be concerned about. After all, this was a hospital.

         It was not until after my business at Sunnybrook was over and I was back home and turned on the radio that I began to put together the TV footage and chyron on the one hand and the hospital PA soundtrack on the other, and get some appreciation of what had been going on: Sunnybrook, one of the main trauma centres in Toronto had been receiving casualties from the street scene that had been unfolding on TV at Jane and Yonge Streets, a dozen or so blocks north of where we live .

         And of course, by that time all the media were full of the story of how a young man, subsequently identified as Alec Menasian had apparently deliberately driven a hire van into pedestrians who were going about their business enjoying the lovely spring day I mentioned earlier.

We have no idea why Menasian did what he did, but a Toronto police officer, identified as Constable Ken Lam , made sure of the opportunity to interrogate Menasian by arresting him alive.

         Toronto has been shaken to the core by this event, reminding us that “Toronto The Good” is as vulnerable as any other modern world city. But the thing is, Toronto’s soul has also been stirred too, to reveal its essential decency that will never be extinguished.

Tell Fren Tru