Posted in Food, Life on January 18, 2011|
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I had kept an apartment on William Street in Kingston, where I had been living for just over five years; at first as a student and then, following my graduation, while working several uncertain and part-time jobs. Days were lazy and vague in the cloudy year that followed my convocation. Things had begun cheerfully enough in the summer with a contract at the university. I had been given a small office where there was a little square window out of which I could see children playing on a nearby hill. I used to smile to myself when I would see these children chasing after a soccer ball tipped over the edge of the hill, and gather such momentum that they would end by rolling down in the tall grass. I thought that I would be okay, there, with my bookshelves, the radio, and views out the window.
The friend I remember most from my time on William Street is Ida. Ida and I had not known one another well while we were students, even though we were in the same course. When we lived in residence, friends of Ida’s would sometimes ask me if I wanted to walk with them through the snow to get something to eat. It was in that way that we originally came to know one another. At dinner, Ida used to look at her food with great intensity, and one night Leila, a friend of hers, said ‘Ida: oh-my-god if you keep on playing with your food I’m going to think you’re, like, totally gross.’
The summer I graduated, I met Ida on the street and she said to me, ‘Sean! Eva told me where you’re living now and – guess what – we’re neighbours! We totally have to be best friends!’ Her eyes widened in a way that suggested she was half being ironic. Matching her tone, I said:
‘Oh my God! I know!’
‘Great!’ She said, ‘I love it! I’m going to call you!’
One evening that summer we made dinner together and ate it on the roof of her apartment. I climbed through the window above her kitchen counter and she passed food and cutlery to me. For a table cloth, we unfolded a blue and white striped bed sheet upon the black shingles of the roof and pinned it down at the corners with condiments and a salt shaker. We sat barefoot on the cotton eating roasted chicken and sipping cheap wine. At one point, I crawled down to the edge of the roof and looked at what was below: you could see the alleyway that snuck around the back of the old four-storey limestone building she lived in, and into the ground floor window of a building behind hers. There was nothing that you could see through the window, however: covering it were a pair of cheap, plastic blinds that had begun to crack and bend from having been pulled up and down too many times.
‘What can you see?’ Ida said, licking her fingers as she delicately handled a leg of the chicken.
‘Well, nothing, really. Nothing that you wouldn’t expect to see.’
‘It’s so beautiful here. Sean, let’s do this everyday,’ Ida said, and then she let out a short laugh.
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