I was walking out recently, being a flaneuse on the Danforth. A flanny on the Danny.

At Pape, a pigeon flew down from a store awning into the path of people heading for the subway. Turning, it flew close to the face of one woman, who didn’t even flinch, before winging around the head of a serious-looking young woman in glasses. I don’t think she even noticed the pigeon, which had calibrated its trajectory neatly and canted around the back of her head, flapping onto another awning to settle.

Holy Name Church. Two men, maybe 20s, pushing bicycles, were calling as they walked passed a woman maybe their age sitting on the church steps. They were laughing as they said goodbye, and as they pushed their bicycles towards me, one man said to the other, “She’s a wild thing. She’s a Sagittarius.”

Further on, I felt happy to see neighbour and writer Paul Quarrington coming toward me in the distance, his distinctive walk, remembering an instant later that Paul had died quite a long time ago. Six or seven years? Lung cancer. He had a rolling barrel walk and this man did too, although once he got closer I could see that he looked nothing like Paul, and called out in Greek to someone walking a little behind me, which I knew because the other man answered almost directly into my back. I figured that’s maybe that’s why I registered this non-Paul person, not just the walk but the fact the man had been looking in my direction, seeing the man behind me. Maybe he’d looked up when he’d noticed his friend and the movement caught my eye.

I found myself thinking of a story by John Berger called Lisboa in which the narrator sees an old woman walking toward him while visiting a city that’s not his own. He recognizes the way she walks as being very like his mother’s walk, although his mother has been dead for years. Then they meet, and he finds it really is his mother. The dead don’t stay buried, I remembered her saying. She says or implies they’re just sent to another place to live.

It’s been years since I read the story, but I’ve kept thinking about it, our dead not staying dead, not as long as we think we see them on the street and carry them in our hearts. Then there are the crowds of people around us, people we don’t know, and maybe they’re the dead of other people and places. They’re dead to us, empty of connection.

Since reading that story, I’ve always felt surrounded by both the living and the dead—maybe I was of the age to start thinking that—and resolved to pull Berger’s stories off the shelf when I got home. Meanwhile I had a happy idea of Quarrington living in Lisbon, or maybe raising a glass of retsina in Greece, that cheered me as I walked on…

Passing two little schoolgirls who looked like sisters, the elder dressed in a Catholic school plaid skirt, the younger saying plaintively, “But I don’t want to get hit by a car.”

Further on, there was a fruit store where a kid walking a little behind someone who looked like his grandmother ran his hand along a display of packaged raspberries, knocking a line of packages to the ground and spilling some of them. A Teacher Voice said from somewhere, “Whoops, look what happened,” and the grandmother turned and stopped to pick up the packaged raspberries before starting to put the loose ones back in the packages, saying, “I don’t know what to do,” while the boy looked sulky. 

I was almost there when I passed a couple getting out of a parked car, the man laughing as he said, “I can’t go to your parents’ home again.” Calling, “Help me. Help me! I can’t do this!” And because he was Black and she was white, I thought of the horror-ish movie Get Out in which the man really shouldn’t have gone to his girlfriend’s parents’ house, and which is very funny.

Then I arrived at Book City, where I was planning to buy a birthday book for my husband. I went inside thinking it was too bad so many of the people I passed were plugged into their headphones or working their smartphones, looking inward rather than outward, although of course at many times in many of our lives, there’s a need for anaesthetic.

As I started browsing the books, I found myself hoping that none of the anaesthetized were would-be writers, anaesthetic not being part of the job description. At the same time I decided not to look for John Berger because I was sure I had his collection at home, although when I got back, I didn’t. It had gone to live in another city. Or on a friend’s bookshelf. I don’t remember lending it to anyone but I probably did.

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel is Mad Richard from ECW Press. You can get it here.