Friendliness is Magical!

A small snaphot of my city life on Valentine's Day '25

So.

Life.

Ai-yi-yi.

A wild, wild ride ... no??

For the record, I know I spend far too much time paying attention to it all. Too many Substack subscriptions!? Actually reading fewer & fewer of the postings as the days go by, though, as the pace of the chaos ramps ever higher...

But.

On Friday I was out & about in a messy Toronto - post-snow dump the night before.

On my way to a volunteer gig I was having rather mixed feelings about.

I trudged along the snowy city street (major slush at intersections), having some brief friendly exchanges with a few fellow pedestrians as we navigated our way along inadequately-cleared sidewalks.

Then, a friendly conversation with a woman at the bus stop as a steadily-growing crowd of us stood waiting for the increasingly-delayed bus to arrive.

Lovely! Of course I am the sort of person known to reveal my whole life story (almost) to strangers at bus stops....

Then down the street on the other side came a woman who crossed over to inform us that our bus was unlikely to arrive - given that the buses on the route were finding it impossible to get safely up & down the big hill & were having to detour.

Whoops. Shoot!

Quick change in the transit plan.

& then, abandonment of the plan altogether as the getting there part was becoming just too darn complicated.

Hopped off the streetcar I'd hopped onto, & did some errands on the walk home. Relief! I was overdue for a walk after a couple days of house arrest, weather-inflicted.

More friendly exchanges in one of the stores I frequent.

Then, I laughed out loud at another store when I saw a small sticker on the door that said "No bikes allowed inside. Sorry!"

As if anybody needs to take a bicycle inside a small store like that??

Shared a chuckle about that with the cashier.

& onto another friendly exchange in another store where I'm a regular.

As Kurt Vonnegut (one of my very favourite writers of all time) would have me say, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

What a bonus in life simple friendliness is!

The world is ... well, kooky as heck.

• chaotic

• unpredictable

• unstable

• kinda scary if one is inclined to go down that route (I try hard not to!)

But.

We can still walk about - at least in this big Canadian city - in my neighbourhood at any rate - & feel pretty darn good.

Sometimes. For a while, anyway...

Ahhhhh. 🙂 🙂

p.s. friendliness, I might add, is just a form of conversation. Merged with simple humanity. I've been known to say

- & I firmly believe this is true. It's so satisfying! What are podcasts, if not conversations? - & look how popular they’ve become!

p.p.s. my weekend pretty much went to s-it after that lovely interlude, btw. I'll spare you the details. No matter. At least I had that very pleasant pause from all the nonsense. And all the issues I've been dealing with (in my increasingly shabby, run-down, poorly-maintained apartment building) have been somewhat ameliorated too by friendly exchanges with neighbours. All the crap we're dealing with here feels a little less crapitacious, somehow - less onerous - because we have each other to commiserate with about it. That somehow helps!

p.p.p.s. this is just for a laugh. Just because I can!