TTC subway at a subway platform as seen by someone with poor eyesight
A recent murder and numerous assaults raise the safety issue about traveling Toronto’s transit system.
(Toronto’s public transit used to be called the Toronto Transit Group of People With the Authority to Operate Toronto’s Public Transit or the TTGOPWTATOTPT. Then a Toronto Councillor, with a high IQ of 47, said, “Why don’t we shorten the last part to Commission?” The other Toronto Councillors, with IQs in the single digits, agreed.
Thus, they renamed Toronto’s public transit the Toronto Transit Commission or TTC.)
The TTC is often an asylum for people with their bodies on Earth, but their minds touring the Universe. One of these people traveled the TTC the other day.
I was waiting for a subway on the westbound platform of the Spadina subway station. A thirty-three-year-old man walked towards me. He looked like Jesus on a bad hair and bad beard day. This Jesus look-alike’s dark clothing suggested it came from Dingbat’s Haberdashery, and he was talking to someone I could not see.
He walked past me. I thought he was gone, but not so. When the train came, he boarded the same subway car as I did but at the opposite end.
He started walking backward down the center of the car towards me. He was facing west, but walking east. And he was still talking to someone I could not see.
I was not in his way, but he turned to his left, banged into me, and walked on my shoes.
Everyone watched in horror. What was he going to do? Pull a knife, stab me to death, and then raise me from the dead?
Like a good Canadian, I apologized. “Sorry, sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
He turned and looked at me. Madness danced in his eyes. He said, “That is okay, my son. That is okay.”
And then he started walking forwards down the center of the subway car while continuing to talk to someone no one could see.
We, the passengers and the voices in my head, breathed sighs of relief.
I do not know what happened to the disheveled Jesus with clothing from Dingbat’s Haberdashery. I got off at Christie, and he did not.
I felt I had done my duty as a Canadian. A man bumped into me and walked on my shoes. And I, O Canada, apologized to him.
Will my actions get me nominated for an Order of Canada?
