A socially active weekend: we were invited to visit Ernie, a friend photographer who recently bought a house just a short distance from the lake. For Torontonians "the lake" is always lake Ontario. Other, smaller lakes are not worth mentioning.
Ernie's house is at the opposite part of town from us, it took about an hour to get there even on a not-so-busy Saturday afternoon. As we approached Lake Shore Blvd in Etobicoke, the houses turned smaller, darker and in different stages of neglect. Some shady types loitered on the corner in baggy clothes which showed different stages of decomposition. They didn't look to me like a friendly neighborhood gang one would like to hang out with. Ernie's house was a narrow brick bungalow in the middle of the street. It's fairly deep and ends in a long backyard with a tipsy, half-rotten wooden garage which looks like it could collapse onto itself if someone as much as sneezes near it. Ernie is smart enough not to keep anything in it, especially not his new Honda. To reach the backyard there's a driveway Ernie shares with the neighbor. The rest of the yard sports a tree stump, a dying tree right in front of the house and a fairly healthy tree behind the tilted garage.
Inside the house is not as bad in terms of structural neglect. The problem inside is - Ernie. He is a self-proclaimed slob, and lives up to that well-deserved reputation. Nothing in the house is in its place, nothing even has its place. A glass dining table is surrounded by leather chairs which are in disarray: three are crammed at the narrow edge of the table, other three widely spaced around the other end, one to each side. Under the glass surface, right in the center of the table lays a glass bowl full of metallic sand. Bursting with pride, Ernie rolls a fist-sized magnet ball over the glass surface. When it rolls above the sand bowl, the ball stops abruptly, pulling the send to it through the glass. Some of the sand sips on the floor. That explains fine grains crunching under our feet. When the magnet ball drops under the table and is immediately covered with fine blackish sand, Ernie picks it up and rolls it again on the table top over the plate. And that explains how the sand got on the table, where Ernie now serves the food.
After the meal of croissants with goat cheese, fried onions and peppers, which Ernie calls breakfast even though it's 2 PM - his first meal of the day - we have drinks in the front part of the long room which is the dining and living room combined. A sofa and two comfy leather chairs are facing the bay window. The sofa, which stretches across the length of the narrow room almost from wall to wall, effectively separates the sitting area from the carnage of leftover food and drinks we just left on the dining table. To the left is a small kitchen with cabinets dating approximately from pre-WW1 era, which Ernie managed to mess up so it looks like a storage room with kitchen cabinets along the outer wall. By the wall opposite to the cabinets there's food mixed with laundry, dishes among the magazines and other papers, all spread over the many shelves of an IKEA wall shelf suited more for a laundry room than a kitchen, with its metal frame and raw wooden shelves. Back through the living room, behind the dining area is a tiny triangular hall which three sides open to a bathroom and two tiny bedrooms. One of the bedrooms actually serves as such, with Ernie's unmade bed and clutter of socks, underwear and other clothing items which, along with newspapers, books and magazines lay crumpled on the floor. The other room is filled with cardboard boxes in many stages of unpacking and items which were previously in those boxes now are everywhere on the floor. Both bedrooms have windows looking on the backyard with its leaning garage.
After drinks, Ernie takes us for a walk through his dilapidated neighborhood. I admit, the vicinity of the lake is a nice thing, but would never change my neighborhood which looks like from a Victorian-era postcard, for Ernie's. He can keep the nearness of the lake or the downtown for all I care. Of course, I don't tell him all that. Hypocrite that I am, I congratulate him on his house (which costs him more than our house for a third of the size!) and the neighborhood he is so obviously falling in love with. Finally back home, I feel like running through our house in celebration of all the space Ernie will never have.
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