When to say “Whoa”

The planets have aligned, the gods have smiled, the souffle has emerged from the oven miraculously unsunken; Allison and I are once again on the prowl in Toronto. Despite the somewhat frigid temperature - hey, coming from Singapore, anything below 25 degrees is cold - it was soul-warming to be here in this fair city, the afternoon spread out before us not like a patient etherized on a table, but rather like a banquet set on a velvet covered sideboard.

Since I had been gushing about the place for months, we decided Morning Glory would be the perfect venue for our triumphant return to the interweb. There is something so charming and cozy about this tiny King Street breakfast nook, its church pew benches and open plan kitchen (okay, so there’s nowhere else for it to go in the one room space) evoking tea cozies and prairie summers and kindly grandmothers smiling to themselves while they doze. You don’t need direct experience of any of these things to be smitten - though if a tea cozy does not feature prominently in at least one of your drunken escapades you should seriously reconsider the direction of your life - and indulgently overlook the sometimes uninspired quality of egg and bacon sandwiches.

And, since you’re so close, why not take a stroll around Toronto’s Historic Distillery District (I always laugh at the sign on Lakeshore)? The area could use more development - as Allison remarked, every time you go there it’s exactly the same experience, like brushing your teeth before bed - it is a pleasant way to spend the afternoon, particularly if you have long, important conversations at Cafe Uno, where one man bravely battled the hordes of caffeine and flatbread-seeking wanderers.

It is good to be back. You know all is right with the world when you have friends who listen when you tell them about something you read in the paper that morning, barely able to utter words because you’re laughing so hard:

Vance Packard had grown up in a different world, in a Methodist farm family in Pennsylvania during the 1920s. Automobiles were still a novelty. Packard’s biographer, Daniel Horowitz, reports a family story about how his dairyman father once tried to stop the family car by shouting “Whoa!” rather than braking and crashed through the wall of his garage.

Mark Greif, “The Hard Sell,” NYT Book Review

Okay, so that has nothing to do with Morning Glory or the Historic Distillery District, but it does have to do with indulgence and good friends and laughing because you can. So Happy New Year to everyone; wishing you the prescience not to stop your car by yelling at it as if it were a horse and the good sense to laugh at yourself just in case you do.

-Andrea