Rubble for Two // Zalika Reid-Benta

Zalika Reid-Benta writes about her connection to the World's Biggest Bookstore as part of our guest edited month exploring the theme of Urban Ephemera.

The year is 2013: I am not in Toronto. I’m midway through grad school in New York City, eating a dry grilled cheese sandwich made up of the heels of my bread loaf and the last few scrapes in the margarine container. It’s close to midnight and my mother emails me a CBC article: World’s Biggest Bookstore Is Closing Down. The sadness that rocks me is surprising at first; the tears I don’t shed feel irrational and silly until I remember exactly what the store meant to me for nearly two decades.

As a child, the yellow and red aisles were my playground. On Saturday mornings my mother and I would make our weekly pilgrimage to the store, walking south on Yonge Street from our co-op on Charles Street until we reached Edward Street; the excitement at being so close and yet still so far from that huge red and white bookstore propelled me to skip, my arms swinging, whenever the time came to turn the corner. Up the stairs we went and I had my pick of the kids’ section as long as I stayed in its confines while my mother stood an entire section over, on the other side of the escalator, finding books on Buffalo Soldiers or the Tuskegee experiments or whatever other grownup thing she was studying at the time. As a teenager, the store transformed from a playground to a gateway, an entry point to literature I hadn’t realized I’d been missing. On those shelves, I discovered Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, Gayl Jones and Austin Clarke. On those shelves I found my people on the page.

The day I left Toronto, the city had already begun changing bit by bit. Every neighbourhood I’d lived in, from Yonge and Charles to Eglinton West and Marlee, was drastically different from the last time I visited. The SkyDome had officially been the Rogers Centre for five years and Sam the Record Man had been nothing but rubble for two. Moose in the City had gone extinct: parks and sidewalks no longer housed those life-sized sculptures, and Yorkdale rendered itself un-shoppable, replacing stores like Stitches and Urban Behaviour with the likes of Michael Kors and Tiffany’s. The city was transmuting, slowly becoming sleeker, slowly becoming nondescript. Still, I held onto the belief that certain places were, if not sacred, then untouchable, that in the future when I’d visited, those seemingly sacred and untouchable places would still be standing, that they would still be around to welcome me back home.

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The year is 2014: I am back in Toronto, a brief visit home for my twenty-fourth birthday. The demolition of the bookstore was already finished—my mother sent me another article five days earlier. BlogTO this time: World’s Biggest Bookstore meets the Wrecking Ball.

But still, I have to see it. I need to turn off Yonge onto Edward Street and confront that gaping hole. Only then will I be able to grasp the new reality of this city.

No one really understands the urge.

The friends I have in Toronto now are friends I made in undergrad, people who lived in Brampton and Mississauga their entire lives, who never knew that once upon a time, the Toronto Police Department had a mini station attached to the Eaton Centre; that the now-defunct JJ Muggs used to be the Sunday brunch spot in the city; that once upon a time, Eglinton West was the parade route for Kiddie Carnival—children adorned in feathers and glitter would dance along the street while onlookers roasted chicken and corn on the cob on open grills. My friends know of the World’s Biggest Bookstore, maybe even visited it once or twice, but their awareness is more common knowledge than personal attachment. They can appreciate my sorrow but cannot understand its wounded tilt. My friends and I don’t share in a collective memory of the city and not being able to remember the same restaurants, the same stores, the same places almost makes me wonder if the city of my childhood even existed at all.

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The year is 2019: I’ve been home for five years. The city I grew up in has completely disappeared while the city of my adulthood never stops contorting itself and so never settles on a fixed or permanent state.

Now, my friends and I share in a collective memory of a Toronto that boasted the Air Canada Centre, all of us instinctively cringing whenever the words ‘Scotiabank Arena’ are uttered or seen; we all remember when Line 1 was the Yonge-University-Spadina Line or simply, the Yellow Line.

“Taking the train to Downsview, no wait, Sheppard West, that’s what they’re calling it now, right? Since we’re on the subject, who needed to get rid of metropasses anyway?”

It’s still hard to walk by Bathurst and Bloor, to not be greeted by the red and yellow lights that boasted Honest Ed’s like a theatre marquee. Some of us only survived undergrad because of that store.

“I don’t see the big deal, Zal, cities change, they evolve, nothing stays the same forever. I think you’re wrong, Toronto has a personality.”

I read the text as I near Yonge and Edward, my anger and sadness tempered by time but temporarily roused each time I pass that corner.

No, it has condos no one can afford to live in.

The year is 2019 and I’ve come to understand that comfort in familiarity isn’t something you realize you rely on until the familiar suddenly becomes alien.

ZALIKA REID-BENTA is a Toronto-based writer whose first book, Frying Plantain, has been recently published. In 2011, George Elliott Clarke recommended her as a “Writer to Watch.” She received an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University in 2014 and is an alumnus of the 2017 Banff Writing Studio. She is currently working on a young-adult fantasy novel drawing inspiration from Jamaican folklore and Akan spirituality.