Tag Archives: Pride Month

Why Walking in the Rain Is Underrated

No, this post isn’t a reference to any of the old, classic songs about walking in the rain. I actually hadn’t heard of Johnnie Ray or The Walker Brothers before I googled the title of my post to see what others were saying about the idea of taking a walk on a rainy day.

This past weekend saw Toronto celebrating the end of Pride month with a street festival and series of parades for the LGBT+ community.

The weather at the end of June can be unpredictable here. Usually, it’s hot and sunny during Pride Weekend, but every so often it’s rainy and cool for the festivities. This was one of those years when some people wore light jackets to stay warm and I’d wager that nobody ended up with a sunburn.

Streets that are normally packed with so many people you can barely step a foot in any direction while Pride events are going on were actually half-empty this past weekend. I could walk up and down the street without accidentally being jostled into anyone, and this was even more true once it began raining harder than it had been earlier in the day.

As I wandered around looking at the various booths, I realized just how much I like walking in the rain for a few different reasons.

Moving Slowly, Paying Attention

Cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians generally all slow down when it rains. While Toronto’s streets are looked after pretty well in most cases, rain can make even the nicest street unexpectedly slippery if there’s been a motor oil spill or if it’s precipitating heavily.

My city is normally such a busy, bustling place that I relish it when we all get the opportunity to move a little slower and notice things on a street that I might not have picked up on before. There is something satisfying about exercising your body and mind at the same time through walking and paying closer attention to your surroundings than the average person might on a warmer and drier day.

For example, the sides of certain buildings in Toronto are decorated with massive murals or other works of art. Some of it was either  high-quality graffiti or was specially designed to look like that style of art. Other paintings were probably officially commissioned by the city due to how long they’ve been around and how visible they are from the street.

No matter how long I live here, I continue to be occasionally surprised by the pockets of art that can be found in the most unexpected places. It makes me smile to notice something new while out on a long walk.

It’s Quiet and Peaceful

Rain seems to chase people away from the outdoors more than almost any other type of weather. I understand the desire to stay indoors during a violent thunderstorm, but I’m sometimes surprised by how even a light sprinkling of rain is enough to keep many folks from enjoying a park, Pride festival, or other outdoor activity.

The streets are so much quieter when it’s raining. Areas that are generally quite busy on a clear day are much less crowded on a rainy one. I’ve noticed that the ordinary sounds of city life – from a door slamming to the distant sound of someone loudly listening to their favourite music without headphones – seem to be muted as well.

There is something incredibly peaceful about walking around in such a quiet environment. I don’t normally notice the background sounds of city life unless something incredibly unexpected and loud happens, but it’s refreshing to see just how quiet an area can be when there are fewer people milling around and when sounds seem to carry for shorter distances.

The World Looks Different on a Rainy Day

This might be the fiction writer in me peeking out here, but I’ve long thought that the world looks different from normal when it’s raining outside.

The colour of a building often darkens when its wet. I’ve noticed this the most with structures made from wood, stone, or other natural materials. To make this even more interesting, I’m not the sort of person who typically pays a lot of attention to architecture or design. It’s only when a house or building has had it’s exterior changed in some way that I’ll be more apt to stop, pause, and pay attention to the way it was put together and how it looks different when it’s wet.

Clouds change the way an area looks as well. For example, a thick enough patch of fog can appear to erase buildings entirely. There have been times when I’ve looked out the window and been unable to see what was on the other side of the street due to how foggy it was here in Ontario. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve no doubt seen an occasional reference to this from me. It makes me smile every time it happens.

There’s something a little magical about walking down the street and not being able to see the top of a skyscraper or tree. If the kind of magic that exists in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings were to suddenly appear in our world, I’d like to think it’s first act would be to play around with what we humans can and cannot see when we’re outside exercising on an overcast day.

Even if you stick to what is currently possible in this world, it’s still cool to notice all of the changes in an area when rain, clouds, fog, and other natural weather phenomena change what we can see, how far we can see, and even how quickly we move.

How do you feel about walking in the rain?

 

 

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My Favourite LGBT Books

Happy Pride month! Today I thought it would be fun to share some of my favourite LGBT-themed books in honour of all of the Pride festivities that have been and are still going on here in Toronto. Rainbow flags are popping up everywhere, and that’s always a heart-warming thing to see at this time of the year.

This list spans the range of everything from children’s stories to a biography to a historical novel. I’m the kind of reader who seeks out a well-told tale no matter what genre it’s from, so you’d be hard-pressed to get me to stick to one particular genre for this sort of post.

Feel free to share your favourite LGBT books in the comments below. I’d love to know which ones have caught your eye.

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.

Honestly, I could have spent this entire post talking about nothing but Sarah Waters’ books. She’s one of those authors whose stories are a must-buy for me, so I had to restrict myself to only mentioning one of the things she’s written today.

What I loved the most about Tipping the Velvet was the character development. Nancy, the main character, lived at a time when it wasn’t possible for a woman who was a lesbian to live her life openly and honestly. She didn’t even know the word to describe who she was until she became an adult. Eventually having a word for it didn’t make her identity any more accepted, and yet still she persevered.

The Kind of Girl I Am by Julia Watts.

The only reason why I discovered this book is because I happened to be browsing in the W section of the fiction shelves at my local library years ago and found myself intrigued by what sort of girl the protagonist might turn out to be. (Don’t you love it when that happens?)

Like Tipping the Velvet, The Kind of Girl I Am followed a character from her sheltered, rural upbringing to a life as an adult that she could have never imagined when she was a child.

I liked the fact that the storyline followed Vestal from the time she was a teenager until she was a senior citizen. There’s something rewarding about watching a character grow and change over the course of multiple decades.

My favourite part of this book can’t be discussed in detail due to how many spoilers it will give you about the ending, but I deeply enjoyed seeing how Vestal reframed and eventually came to peace with certain parts of her life in her final years. Her character development was excellent.

Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller.

As I’ve said before, I was one of those kids who generally enjoyed the classic novels we were assigned to read in English class. It was always interesting to see what our teacher had to say about the meaning of a blue curtain in a scene or why a character kept talking about something that eventually actually happened to them.

If I’d been born a few decades later, Patience & Sarah might have been an assigned read in one of my high school English classes. It had the same serious themes and foreshadowing of many of the other books we read and discussed in class when I was a teenager.

Santa’s Husband by Daniel Kibblesmith.

I loved this picture book’s cheeky approach to the Santa Claus myth. It clearly explained why it was reimagining Santa as a man who was in a same-sex, interracial relationship, although I can’t go into any more details about that without giving away the ending.

Should this be read by kids or adults? I’d say that it will appeal to readers of all ages.

Missed Her by Ivan E. Coyote.

Ivan E. Coyote is one of the best contemporary Canadian authors I’ve discovered so far. Not only does she have a beautiful writing style, her anecdotes are among the funniest ones I’ve ever read. She grew up in a small, rural community.* A lot of her stories are about what happens when she goes back for a visit and well-meaning, heterosexual friends and neighbours try to make conversations about LGBT topics with her without knowing what they’re talking about at all.

*Yes, this does seem to be something I gravitate towards when reading LGBT books. I suspect it’s because they’re similar to my own childhood.

Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag by Rob Sanders

If you don’t know the story of the gay activist Harvey Milk, this is the perfect place to get a quick overview of his life and everything he accomplished for the LGBT community. We wouldn’t even have something as simple as the Pride flag without him.

This is the sort of thing that I wish could have been covered in my public school history classes growing up. While we still have a long way to go, the world has changed for the better so much over the past few decades. Children – and honestly many adults, too – don’t always realize what their society used to be like or what it really takes to improve it.

Sometimes I think about Harvey Milk when I’m feeling discouraged about certain current, dangerous trends in the North American political climate. It’s easy to feel like you’re too small and ordinary of a person to possibly make any different at all over the longterm.

As Harvey Milk once said, “you have to give them hope.” I believe that knowing about the lives of ordinary people who did manage to make our world a better place is one of the best ways to give people hope when they need it.

 

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