Toronto, February 16, 2025
Union Station
A few days ago I was riding the Toronto subway. I got on downtown at 9:30 in the morning, heading north on Line 1. I was going to see the doctor. I sat on one of the bench seats that run along the side of the car. I was half-asleep.
Sitting opposite me, slumped over, immobile, face hidden, was a tiny crumpled figure in a hoodie. I didn’t pay much attention, just a glance or two. The sight wasn’t particularly strange or interesting. You see all sorts of things on public transport in a big city. Sometimes the whole world seems to be on board the train or streetcar or bus. The good, the bad, the ugly—they are all on the move, going who knows where (or nowhere at all—see Endgame #40 Jigong Geosa), doing who knows what, thinking anything or nothing. It’s best not to engage. Insouciance is required to travel in peace on public transport.
Subway stations slipped by as the train headed north. Suddenly the person sitting across from me jerked into life. It was a young woman, a teenager perhaps, with what looked like bruises on her face. She leapt to her feet and started roaming up and down the subway car, agitated, gesticulating, crying, talking loudly and incoherently. It was hard to make sense of what she was saying. She seemed to be repeating “I gotta go to Union Station.” Union Station was several stops to the south. She was going in the wrong direction.
People on the crowded car looked over to see what was happening. Quickly, they looked away. The common wisdom is that there’s nothing an individual citizen can do in a situation like this. It’s the job of government or a civil society agency to help the fragile and distressed. Sometimes the police must be called.
But one man sitting on the subway car, a black man of about fifty, casually dressed, with a calm and relaxed demeanour, did not look away. I’d noticed him earlier. He was reading a hardcover book, and you don’t see that much anymore. He put his book away, stood up and went over to the young woman, now standing crying near a door. “Do you need help?” he asked in a kindly way. This man did not seem concerned about the common wisdom.
“I gotta go to Union Station,” she said, over and over again, becoming more and more agitated.
“Take deep breaths,” said the man. “That will help you calm down.”
Another passenger, a middle-aged woman who had been sitting next to me, got up and joined the man at the girl’s side. “Can I help?” she asked.
“I gotta go to Union Station,” the young woman said again.
“I will take you to Union Station,” said the man. “When we get to the next subway stop you and I will get off this train and we will cross the platform and get a train going south which will take us to Union Station.”
“I will come with you,” said the woman to the man and the girl, taking the girl’s arm.
The train stopped at the next station. The three of them got out—the man, the woman and the girl. I watched them cross the platform and stand on the other side, waiting for a train going south, south to Union Station.
The next stop was mine. As I got off the subway, I wished for a moment that I had got off at the stop before and was going south to Union Station with the man, the woman, and the girl. In a hard world, fragility had met kindness, and to see it felt good.
*****
Some reader comments on Newsletter #96 (“The march of time”)
Bob Rae writes: “I wear an Omega Seamaster that my parents gave me... Have had it repaired a few times but it works wonderfully well. I wear a Garmin golf watch, and also a Swatch watch. I also have an Apple watch, but it gave me too much information, and I felt as if I was cheating on my Omega. So Omega it is. Keeps on ticking.”
From David Goldbloom: “There are points of intersection between ancestry and watches. At its ridiculous height, Patek-Philippe markets our mere custodial role in matters of horological inheritance, more important than knowing what time it actually is. At a much more sentimental level, cheaper watches that graced a parent’s wrist and guided them through their days have a different kind of value and sense of tactile connection well beyond their resale estimate. That said, I wear a Timex Expedition watch that cost me a cool $60 at The Bay. Although not engineered to synchronize precisely with the network of atomic clocks around the world, it guides me to appointments with sufficient accuracy. It also lights up in the dark at a boring play (more discretely than any mobile phone) if I need to know how much more of this I will endure. It doesn’t tell me how well I slept, who just emailed me, or my oxygen saturation level. It doesn’t require re-charging and the battery, easily and cheaply replaced, lasts for years. One of its few features that I actually don’t need is that it is ‘water-resistant to 50 metres,’ something that will be of assistance only to the coroner in determining my time of death. I doubt my sons will be fighting over this heirloom (or my complete S.J. Perelman collection). But even with this cheap timepiece, there is a romantic attachment to the past. In my childhood, the sonorous tones of John Cameron Swayze on TV narrated as Timex watches were subject to various forms of extreme torture, always concluding with the tagline that they ‘take a licking but keep on ticking’ - a great motto for life.”
A curious comment from Geoff Ireland: “This is the first of your letters I have read and it may be the last. Not because I did not find it entertaining but because you bring me too close to the frontier of my own mortality. I am 72 and fighting like hell to delay going ‘into that good night.’ I am in second year university, although I still don't know what I want to be if I grow up. I am hitting the gym two to four times a week and going hard and I wear a Fitbit to tell me all about it. Half of my old golf foursome have already shuffled off to the nineteenth hole in the sky. If I were to become a regular reader of your column and was to wake up one morning to see a message saying you were gone, or no longer capable of writing it, it would be a peek over the crumbly edge of the abyss. So, my dear sir, it has been a pleasure meeting you and I hope you live forever, but I just can't take the chance. Cheers!”
From Andree Crepeau: “I’m starting to think of your Substack as an ‘amuse bouche’….or the thoughtful tidbit... or maybe a thought worm as it always seems to follow me around as I go through my day.”
And, once more, the last word goes to David Wolinsky: “I started with a beautiful Movado, a gift from my parents to announce to the world I was on my way, and then proceeded through numerous brands, ending with my current Apple Watch. ...If I fall when I’m alone, it asks if I fell and need help, and when I reply that I do, it sends an ambulance. An interesting dichotomy. I started with a watch to announce I was coming, and end with one to announce that I’m going.”
That beautifully articulates what I was writing about this week. In a world where it seems like everything is negative, if we look up away from our phones there are incredible acts of kindness.
You cannot imagine how nourishing your subway vignette was to me this morning. Without moving, I suddenly find myself living in a cruel kingdom where the Emperor-God is systematically eroding compassion and simple kindness. Until someone shows him his stop and tells him where to get off, we can sustain ourselves with stories such as yours which can keep our humanity alive. Thank you.