Impromptu Snowball Fight

In June, I moved into the neighbourhood I currently live in. I found a decent two-bedroom apartment that was about $200-300 less than any other apartments I’d been looking at since I’d left my wife in August 2010. While the block is about 110 years old and rough around the edges, it’s clean, cheap and vermin-free. The people who live there are also super-nice (or at least quiet) and the caretaker is a really cool fellow, and the block’s residents are carefully screened and is decidedly yahoo-free. When I shattered my ankle this past summer, he lent me crutches so I wouldn’t have to rent them. To be honest, I love the building’s old-style charm, original oak woodwork and hope to hang onto it as long as I can before it inevitably turns into another set of condos.

The neighbourhood I live is where most of the city’s hipsters (I mean that phrase in a neutral sense), bohemians, bon vivants, artists, musicians, and hippies, as well as regular working and middle class people who have grown weary of the trappings of suburban life, have congregated.  I’m sure every sizeable city has an area of town like this.  It fits in with me just fine, and I’ve absolutely loved the area thus far, even though I haven’t been able to get around too well.  Most of my neighbours have welcomed me and my boys with open arms.  I don’t drive, so it was important for me to live in a neighbourhood where most major amenities are close.  Downtown is about a fifteen minute walk away or five minutes by bus, and there is a big urban park across the street with lots of neat stuff for the boys to do.  There are dozens of neat little coffee shops, book shops, corner stores, clothing and thrift shops and various co-op stores.  The best bakery in the city is also a block away from me, although it is quite pricey and very rarely buy anything there.  There is also a sizeable amount of holistic and alternative medicine places, although I’m a scoffer at all of that, the people are friendly and welcoming and bring a pretty good vibe to the area.  The main drag in my neighbourhood used to be a pretty rough area of town, but has cleaned up in the last 15 years or so and a lot of bistros and lounges and live music spots have cropped up.  It has gotten a little pretentious, but not oppressively so where I feel out of place, and it certainly isn’t quite as pretentious as the folks living in the new developments.

It’s an area of town that was built and grew for the middle and upper middle class between 1900 and 1930 and the architecture reflects that.  There streets are lined with stately elms whose canopies touch overhead in the middle of the street, and large three storey houses, many of them well-maintained with the original woodwork.  The area slid between the 50s and the 80s and a lot of the homes were converted into boarding houses, but the large homes, low property values and the neighbourhood’s aesthetic charm began attracting young people back in the mid-90s, many of them living in the neighbourhood while attending university, which is about a ten minute walk away.

It’s probably easy for many to dismiss the area’s residents as shallow tree-huggers, snobby, exclusionary artistes, hairy hippe earth-mothers and weird, dread-locked spoon-benders.  And there’s a grain of truth to that, to be sure.  There’s a bookstore/coffee shop that I go to once in a while where there are more than a few people are there to be ‘seen’ reading Camus or be ‘seen’ typing away at that first novel on their laptops.  I take those people with a grain of salt… they’re young and trying to find their place in the world.  Being a snobby twat is part of that, I think.  Get through the 20s and most of them will be fine.  If you’re 40 and still trying to be seen reading Camus in a coffee house and you’re officially pathetic.

Really though, there’s a lot less of that sort of wankery in the neighbourhood than people think, and personally I believe there’s more condescending snobbery in the suburbs.  That may be an unfair assessment, and that is only my opinion.

On the weekend as I was walking home from an antique store.  Across the street was a young 20-something couple walking hand-in-hand.  They were walking along the big park that is across the street from my apartment.  All of the sudden…

SNOWBALL AMBUSH!

Three kids pop out from behind the bushes and start pelting them with snowballs.  Instead of freaking out or getting angry, they take refuge behind the trees on the boulevard and start returning fire.  A few more kids who were in the park get in on the act and then two young women from the condos beside my block start tossing snowballs from across the street. 

What the hell…

I hobble to the shelter of an elm tree and start making snowballs before I get pelted in the back of the neck (the WORST spot to be hit, by the way) by Karly, my next door neighbour’s 10 year old daughter running away, squealing with laughter.  “You little bugger!” I yell after her, laughing.

This was like something literally ripped out of a movie.  And it was happening right outside my door.  We battled for about 10 minutes before it broke up and we went our separate ways.  I’m convinced this wouldn’t have happened in any other neighbourhood in the city.  And that’s why I’m glad I’m here.