Grai fields

Grai fields storefront, Kingston Road, Scarborough, ON

The Storefront on Kingston Road

I’m really sorry. I mean I have this little horsy tidbit, maybe not quite a full-blown actual carousel story with pictures and all but something in that particular neighbourhood at least. And it is something from the actual neighbourhood of my neighbourhood. Close by at least. And it happened months ago, likely at the end of summer. Sheesh. Like I said, sorry.

And I didn’t post it to the blog. I meant to, really.

Okay, my first excuse for not doing so is that I thought that I already had posted it. When I discovered that I had not, rather recently too, I thought that I had at the very least started to work out the storyline or blogline or whatever you call it in Word. I swear. I guess I should due more diligence.

Window full of horses

The second excuse is that this little episode or memory gap might have occurred during the infamous hard drive crash of 2012. That’s when I might have lost the file that I thought I had started work on. Maybe, I’m not sure, but I’m willing to use that as the excuse.

I’m paranoid enough with all my photographic files that I back them up regularly and burn them out to disc as well. And I do the occasional backup of my whole system too. I thought (what, again?) that I had recovered everything from the crash and, once the new hard drive and os had been installed, loaded everything back into the computer. But maybe I was wrong there. The story itself could have fallen through the gap between backups, into the lost data abyss.

Enough of excuses, I should just move on.

Okay, so this little story happened some time ago, we’ve established that. What I haven’t said is that it all happened because of my son Elliot’s craving for pizza.

Big horse, shortened head

I’m a divorced guy and I’ve been living in this same place for a number of years. I’m sure that somewhere on this blog I’ve done my Scarberia joke already. In case you don’t know Scarborough is one of the municipalities of Toronto. My son Elliot was living in Peterborough with his mom but has moved in with me while he attends Ryerson University in Toronto.

It’s great having him here.

So we were out one weekend doing chores, notably the grocery run, and had gone to this particular grocery store a little further away from the one closest to where we live so that I could pick-up some red pepper sauce (it’s really good) along with all the regular kind of foodstuffs that we like to cram into our gustatory orifices. Oh, and some khat food too.

Flowers in her hair

Having finished the shopping and now sitting back in the car Elliot chirps up and says that he’s hungry and what he’d really like is pizza. Okay, said I, and we headed out taking an alternate route back to our side of town along the poor man’s Don Valley Parkway, namely Kingston Road, that would lead to, you guessed it, pizza and home. On the way I happened to catch out of the corner of my little eye the flash of a storefront with what appeared to be a couple of carousel horses. Sacred feces. I couldn’t quite make out the name of the place, something field, but I knew just about where it was.

Looking out, looking in.

Okay, let me do the Reader's Digest version and abridge the story a little bit here. Got pizza, went home, stashed the perishables, grabbed camera, headed back out to the location of the store. I figured that if I didn’t make the effort right then and there then, according to that Murphy fella, the place would disappear quicker than meat thrown to a hungry lion, or maybe pizza to a hungry Elliot. Things like that tend to happen.

I got a bit of glare from the window but I think the photographs still look okay. I took a number of shots of which these are a selection. 

The gang in the storefront window

I never got to go into the store. It wasn’t open. There were two notices in the window. The first, the one you see to the left of the display, was an advertisement for what seemed a topically named daycare centre. The second notice, which you can hardly see because it had peeled away from the window (the vagaries of scotch tape) and was now resting on the rump of the big horse in the front, said that the horses were not for sale but might be available for rental from a movie prop house.

Oh, and another minor detail, there are no poles on the big horses.

And dat's dat.