Friday nights on the C-Train are many-hued and noisy. Lovely Filipino nannies speaking Tagalog. Venerably turbaned old men speaking Punjabi. Young people of all sorts wearing the clothes and speaking the languages of whoever's in their headphones.
I, with my pale quiet skin, am probably one of the only people speaking English, just because I happen to bump into a classmate in the crowd (she with an aristocratic Nepalese accent).
We are here in Calgary for two years, to talk about social justice. Our program is predominantly white, with a handful of international students representing the upper economic reaches of their home cultures.
What would happen if we threw open the conversation? A Friday night social justice forum, on the C-Train!
Would we careen off-track, or find a better groove?
My confession is that I'm still afraid, most of the time, of what that better groove might be. What it might demand of me. I like my quiet neighborhood, and the nearby space of land and sky where I can go to escape the city. Deer there, and porcupines in abundance. Mountains in the distance.
The C-Train and its environs are okay when I need a gritty fix of the street, to remind me why I'm in social work. But could I move in? The only hint of wildlife there is in the skeletal heaps of shopping carts dumped under pedways.
Fresh air, maybe, with the wind.
