This Russian doll is on a wild stagecoach ride to an unnamed destination!

Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Collage by Catherine Raine, 2012

Collage materials include colored paper, stickers, and a postcard.

Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Collage by Catherine Raine, 2012

Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Collage by Catherine Raine, 2012

Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Collage by Catherine Raine, 2012

Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Collage by Catherine Raine, 2012

There she goes!

Today I’m feeling so grateful for the end of two weeks of labour disruption at the Toronto Public Library. I hadn’t realized how much I counted on the libraries’ well-being for my own peace of mind. During these two weeks, I felt a vague sense of unease, disturbed by the darkened and empty branches. I’ve learned that for this nerd, libraries are one of my important existential substructures!

I last visited Goldhawk Park in 2009, and my original write-up included Steeles and Bridlewood branches as well. This time I’d like Goldhawk Park to have its own post. It deserves it!

Goldhawk Park’s most salient attribute is its restful park setting, and I loved how the library’s wide windows made the most of the views.

I was also very impressed by a group of elderly T’ai Chi devotees who were performing liquid moves in a courtyard on the north side of the library.

The indoor seniors were equally impressive. I noticed one man reading a newspaper with a large magnifying glass, soaking up the sun beside a window.

While the morning sun warmed the backs of senior readers, it scattered lattice shadows everywhere I looked. A quiet library transformed into a solar art gallery!

Even the books seemed brighter, and I enjoyed selecting volumes to model for Goldhawk Park’s multilingual collection.

Perhaps Smile

My second visit to this calming branch felt like an affirmation of sunshine and spring! Thank you, Goldhawk Park, for your trees, your light, and your peace!

I finished reading Maggie Helwig‘s Girls Fall Down almost a week ago, and I still find myself thinking about it. Girls Fall Down is a frighteningly plausible story about contagious fear and urban breakdown, but it’s also a beautifully complicated love story about two isolated souls, Alex and Susie-Paul, connecting and re-connecting with each other.

Helwig’s omniscient yet empathic vision of Toronto really impressed me, the way she brought to life an impersonal municipal geography by close observation of hundreds of personal details. Here’s an example: “The boy with the box of evil sat in the cafeteria of his high school, the box on the table beside him, eating a hamburger and feeling unusually cheerful. He . . . didn’t know that a security guard had phoned in an alert while he was on the (subway) train, though it would have made him happy to know this” (26).

For me, the most moving part of the book is when Susie-Paul finds her twin brother Derek living in a tent under a massive bridge. Derek is schizophrenic, off his medication, and starving. However, these facts are not the whole truth about Derek. Maggie Helwig directs our attention to the man’s “raw courage . . . . His hard-won choice to continue living, when so many possibilities to stop are offered at every hand, the cars on the highway, the trains on the tracks, an end to the daily loss. None of this represents Derek’s soul, scraped bloody, howling, fighting always to hang on, a solitary superhuman ordeal, unacknowledged by the world, unrewarded” (149-150).

When I see Derek through the author’s compassionate lens, I become a witness to his courage and his suffering. For this reason alone, I highly recommend Girls Fall Down. The book is also a fully engrossing read, all the more pleasurable for readers familiar with Toronto’s streets, and the Zephyr Antique Laid paper makes turning the pages a tactile as well as visual delight.

Thank you for picking a winner, Toronto Public Library!

Petunia is a souvenir of my recent trip to Nova Scotia, for I finished the detail work during some down time in the hotel. To make a cloth creature like Petunia, you’ll need a sock, a rubber band, a sash, some beads, some miniature crochet flowers, and thread.

Petunia doesn’t mean to be impolite when she sticks out her blue tongue at you. It’s just part of her ironic sense of humor.

Dancing Bird Woman, Collage by Catherine Raine 2012

Dancing Bird Woman is here to remind me to dance, be fiery, and enjoy wearing flares!

Dancing Bird Woman, Collage by Catherine Raine 2012

 Dancing Bird Woman, Collage by Catherine Raine 2012

To close the post, here is a bookmark that I think Dancing Bird Woman might like to pick up with her beak:

Coins and Flowers, Bookmark Collage by Catherine Raine 2012

My first visit to Richview Library in 2009 was a very different from my recent one earlier this week. When I compare the two, I notice that a rainy Saturday in October has changed into a sunny Monday in February, a blogger has expanded her skills to include photography, a new exhibit has arrived in the upstairs gallery, and 2010 renovations have brightened the main level.

As I was updating the original Richview post a few days ago, I realized that my light-filled pictures would look incongruous in a post that contained the word “rain” in the title. This motivated me to introduce Richview, the Sequel.

In addition, Creative Village Studio‘s vibrant exhibit for February 2012 provides a compelling reason to devote extra blog space to Richview branch. If I had added Monday’s photos of the exhibit to the first post, it would have been misleading, for I mentioned an entirely different artist in that piece. Richview’s gallery has even more layers of significance for me now because it was the site of my first public art exhibit last September, Maps of Loss: Rivers, Ruins, and Grief.

Finally, Monday’s visit yielded a new discovery, a blissful expanse of sun-drenched windowsills on the second floor. I really liked how a patron had converted this warm ledge into a newspaper prop, even though he blocked my view at first. Channeling his inner cat, the man rested his paper in a pool of sunlight as he read in a standing position. (I wish the library could invest in a team of cats to snooze beside these east-facing windows until midday).

Thank you Richview for offering a rich new perspective with every visit!