March 15, 2024

Routine Interrupted

This message is coming to you from outside of routine in a variety of ways, the first being that it’s not due until the end of the month, but I’m spreading things out so that, going forward, my Pickle Me This Digest (a monthly compendium of my blog posts) arrives in inboxes mid-month, my essays come at month-end, subscribers don’t get end up forgetting about me, or getting fed up with all my newsletters arriving at once.

Because it’s not been long since my last Pickle Me This digest, this newsletter is shorter than usual, which is probably for the best since—also outside of routine—it’s March Break and my children are on holiday. I’m fitting my work into half-days and adventuring with my kids in the afternoons. We’ve been to see the Nature’s Superheroes Exhibit at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, to Leslieville for Queen East shenanigans (including a visit to Queen Books!), and to the Aga Khan Museum for the Night in the Garden of Love exhibit (it was so great—and so easy to get to on transit from the 100A bus from Broadview Station!). We also went to see The Mighty Ducks at Paradise Theatre. It’s been the perfect combination of low-key and FUN. (My specialty is stay-cation visits to places that are never crowded… ever since that one time I went to the Science Centre on a PA Day, a day that will live on infamy and that my daughters will be addressing with their therapists well into the next century…)

The most essential element of my routine being interrupted, however, is that I received this message in my email inbox last Tuesday:

It turned out that a light fixture crashed down from the ceiling over the pool deck, shattering glass all over the deck and into the pool itself. (Thankfully no one was hurt.)

Notices of pool closures “until further notice” have destroyed me in the past (as I wrote here, I blame that on a period of precarious mental health and having recently read The Swimmers, by Julia Otsuka), but I’m in a fairly stable place these days and also have a closed-pool contingency plan, which is the nearly brand new and incredible Wellesley Pool, just twenty-some minutes away from my house by public transit. That I’d be working half-days, however, meant I wouldn’t be able to swim during the day (which is my usual plan) and so I resolved to get up early and head west on the subway before sunrise*…even though this is the week the clocks have sprung forward so it’s even earlier than early. (I have never been a morning person.)

*Okay, about fifteen minutes before sunrise, but still.

I love swimming, but I’ve never had occasion to discover if I loved it enough to wake up before sunrise and take a ride on the subway. My usual pool is very conveniently situated halfway between my house and my child’s school, which means I pick her up every afternoon with my hair wet (this is why they invented hats!) and I don’t have to go out of my way to swim at all.

But it turns out that going out of my way, as I have this week, has not just wonderful, but even magical? Leaving the house while the sky is indigo (though it gets lighter and lighter with every passing day—the sun rose three minutes earlier today than it did on Monday). Getting on the subway when everything is still quiet, the city buzzing with a calm and quiet hum. All the most terrific communal aspects of public transit without the rush hour stress and fuss, humans at their most wonderfully human, today with spilled milky coffee spreading across the train floor like a Jackson Pollock painting, passengers engaged in a delicate dance to avoid it. And then a walk down Sherbourne Street, which is never dull, and arrival at a pool where anybody who wants to is welcome to swim for the free. The water is much cooler than at my usual pool, and it’s been refreshing, along with the swimming itself, an investment of energy that always pays back in dividends, the goodness I feel in my body for the rest of the day.

It has been wonderful and magical to discover a little surplus time in my day, especially during this season of daylight austerity; to realize that a little trip across the city is closer than I think; to connect with a neighbourhood and people who are new to me; to find out that I really do like swimming that much. I really do!

And I look forward to a return to my regular routine on Monday when the pool is scheduled to open again (fingers crossed) but I’ve enjoyed my time outside it very very much.