Meeting Sterling and Mr. Swipey

Robert and I were going into town to stay with his sister and her boyfriend. It was the weekend - Robert was off work, and I had a couple of flats to see in the city. We went together to a flat viewing I had on the east side of town (it was nice, seemed pretty good but I'd rather be in the west end), got some Turkish pizza at a skeezy joint on Gerrard Street (the pizza was out of this world), and headed to Runnymede station to be picked up by Robert's sister, Sarah.

Sarah is a vet student, and as we drove through to Etobicoke she told us about these baby snakes she'd found in her garden and the worms she had been chopping up to feed them (she chopped up the worms because the snakes - and I've seen these snakes - are smaller than the worms themselves). A dog crate sat in the back seat, which was empty but belonged to Sterling, their Border Collie. I had been briefed several times about Sterling, who had a reputation (or perhaps more of a notoriety) that preceded her: "yeah, you see the dents here? That was Sterling… she's bitten the steering wheel, she's bitten the seats… she's pretty much bitten everything in this car. I told Matt to stick her in the bedroom, so she can calm down before she meets you," Sarah was saying as we pulled in to the drive. As soon as we stepped in the door I could hear the howling. Upstairs, I walked in to the living room - it was open plan, a kitchen, office and sitting room were all in this one big space. I exhaled with awe, "your place is so cool!"

The walls and floor were charcoal grey, and hung up beside the bedroom door (which was being scratched and howled against by Sterling, very Hound Of The Baskervilles) was a collection of animal skulls. Sarah talked me through them: the shark jaw, my Dad brought that back from a fishing trip in the Caman Islands; the deer we found on our family trips up by Arthur; the horse one I found when I used to ride -  they took the old horses out into the forest to be eaten by coyotes, I waited a bit and cleaned this one up, I had to saw it's head off!; that's a piece of whale cartilage from a beach; that cow my friend found for me from the roadside… There were bookshelves which spanned underneath the TV console, and were filled with titles such as, Japanese Fairy Tales, The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, and had books on anthropology, atheism, anatomy… the lot. I thought the place was a cave of wonders.

After a few minutes of settling in, we opened the door for Sterling to come through. She bounded through and began a circuit of the room - under the coffee table, over the sofas, by the window, past my feet, round the kitchen… then did the whole thing several times more for good measure. Eventually she stopped by me and wiggled herself, paws up on me, enthusiasm with no boundaries whatsoever. Good thing I love dogs, I thought, because this one is crazy.

We ordered Chinese, piled up our plates with food and read each other our fortunes (playing the classic game of adding "... in bed" to each fortune - oh, the hilarity!). The conversation butterflied between a plethora of subjects ("you know they fertilise food with people poop, right? No, no, I'm not saying this as something I saw on Youtube, I'm saying because I was told this by a guy who's been farming for 33 years, ok?"), sometimes interrupted by Sterling seeing a squirrel/dog/car/man/moving object outside and barking her wee paws off at it.

I showed Sarah and Matt the Tinder app that I had been using recently. "It's like a dating site but much more accessible," Robert explained, "it takes your Facebook profile pictures and connects you with people nearby."
"I don't know, I was just bored so I downloaded it," I said, as I gave a demonstration of how it worked. "You see, you just get these photos of guys, and if you don't like them, for example, I would swipe… this way - oh, oh no, oh God, wait, no!" Everyone laughed as I hastily tried to correct the "yes" swipe I had just given a balding 27-year-old from Toronto.

We listened to Cat Stevens and John Frusciante, drank beers and then, one by one, all drifted into a sleepy silence. We all prepared for bed - Robert and I had a sofa each in the living room. That night, I don't know if it was the heat (because Sarah had turned the gas way, way up to prevent any night chills) or what, but I had mad dreams. I had found a flat in Edinburgh, but I was freaking out because I was living in it alone and couldn't find a way to lock the front door. "I can't lock my front door!" I said, as I ran out on to the street and approached the nearest person, "Help me!" The man came in to my house, and before I knew it, was wielding a baseball bat, trying to swing it at my head. Jesus, this was just the kind of thing I was trying to prevent, I thought, as I grabbed a bottle and smashed it over his skull, then stole the bat and tried to pester him out of my flat. The keys to lock the front door were on the table in the hall all along, it seemed (what does it mean, Freud!?).

I woke up, still trying to de-stress from the brawl which had just occurred in my head. I felt groggy from the sofa-sleep and the Chinese food. Today I had to see another flat, and plans to meet someone that I had been talking to on Tinder for lunch. I was semi-apprehensive about meeting this guy, but he seemed nice (he knew how to use an emoji, I tells ya!), and what hurt could a little lunch in the city do?

We all sat with tea, the morning news flickering on in the background as Sarah got ready for work, Robert worked on his laptop and Sterling hosted a staring contest with the whole of the outside world (often peppered with explosive bouts of barking at nothing in particular). I had a look at the baby snakes, they were wriggling sporadically in their glass box. I mused over a memory I had of when I was young and decided to keep a woodlouse that I'd found in the house as a pet (it was put in a dish and probably lasted a couple of hours before I got bored, turns out woodlice aren't very thrilling).
"Well, have you seen Sarah's Black Beauty?" Matt asked, pointing to a large black beetle, pinned down in a painted frame.
"She used to be alive," Sarah chimed in, "but now she's our Forever Pet."
"We're gonna do the same with Sterling," Matt joked. Taxidermy, I asked? "No, we'll just pin her down as well."
"Underneath we'll write, canis canis"
"Canis familiaris"
"Canis, but-your-face-is"

***

"…were you with Fresh Air!?"

I was standing in the hallway of the small flat near Bloor and Ossington, the last place I'd expect to bump into a Fresh Air alumna. One of the other prospective tenants was here with her friend, and turns out this friend had been the manager of Edinburgh's Student Radio Station at one point, way back in the early 2000's. We giggled at how small the world had turned out to be and exchanged information. "I host a storytelling night every two months, come on Tuesday!" she suggested. The two girls told me to add them on Facebook, it was so great to meet you!

I was still musing over the whole thing as I walked to the subway station to meet my lunch dude (Sarah and Matt had christened him Mr. Swipey, after the 'swipe' motion one uses on the Tinder app). I waited by the ticket machine, pretending to be nonchalant with my iPhone (tugging the Facebook news feed down several times to see the same story loading over and over, we've all been there, c'mon). I looked up and saw Mr. Swipey clearing his throat by the turnstiles.

Meeting people from the internet is always strange, you realise that the person you're meeting has mannerisms, a personality and an accent which you couldn't have conjured up yourself. I'll always remember meeting my friend Giancarlo off of Tumblr for the first time, only to initially think "but he sounds so… Glaswegian!" *cue shrieking violins* (I must say, I made peace with this initial shock soon enough, as he and his pals turned out to be pure dead lovely).

Yet Mr. Swipey was strangely just as I imagined he'd be. We got on like a house on fire, I found that I could do my usual thing of telling one story and accidentally ending up telling five all at once, and he could follow along. Most of our time hanging out was just chatting as we took streetcars and subway trains through the city. He picked up a discarded newspaper on one of the streetcar seats and we read our horoscopes. Mine told me to not consider anything that happened today as "just luck". Fate was working her magic, apparently. "That's the person I met from Fresh Air! That's no coincidence!" I said, smiling. As we rattled down Bathurst, Swipey imparted his knowledge of Toronto to me, telling me the good venues, pointing them out as we passed them on the street.

We got the subway from Bathurst to Runnymede and hopped over to the local Chapters (Canadian equivalent of Waterstones). This was a particularly special bookstore, as the building it was set in used to be an old vaudeville theatre. The stage and the ceiling were the same as they would have been during the theatre's heyday, and there were a few seats for ushers by the walls which still had their velvet covering. We browsed graphic novels and poetry, I waxed lyrical about Allen Ginsberg and came to the conclusion that I had quite forgotten what half of my fourth-year dissertation was all about.

I picked up Patti Smith's book, which had been highly recommended to me by my friend who was out living in Japan at the moment. We stepped out into the street, into the snow which was falling in thick, pillowy flakes and glittering as it settled on the ground. The buildings had sweet, semi-Victorian facades and every other tree was webbed with fairy lights. I could really love this city, I thought, as we walked to the subway station.

Was this real? Was this really my life, I thought, as I drove back home with Robert's parents who had picked me up from town. Am I really in my twenties, living in Toronto, buying Patti Smith's autobiography and talking about Polanski and Costello in a bookstore which was a converted theatre? Am I really walking down silent streets under twinkling lights through sparkling snow? Am I really making friends here? Is this honestly happening?

Eva Cassidy was singing a cover of John Lennon's Imagine on the radio. We were silently speeding down the highway in the dark, signs illuminated at various intersections and shopping complexes. A snow plough passed us in another lane, its metal scoop catching the tarmac, generating clusters of fiery sparks. My phone buzzed with news that I hadn't been selected to live in the flat on Bloor. Never mind, I thought. I sat back in my seat and thought about what a good weekend I'd had.