Crosstalk on the GO
June 12, 2023
As a fellow writer once said, you get some great material off public transit.
That statement was no more evident last week during a couple of trips to Pearson Airport on the #40 GO bus, a route I used for the first time.
For starters, there was a woman who I’ll call Nancy. She gave us her real name, but to protect her privacy, I’ll use the alias. Even though she didn’t care much about her own privacy.
Soon after boarding, Nancy got on her phone and called CRA. What better place than a packed GO bus to talk about confidential matters concerning your taxes? During the ride, I learned that Nancy was 53 years old and has a son who just turned 18 and has been blind since he was four. He gets the disability tax credit, but so does Nancy, since she has very bad cognitive memory. She also doesn’t have a lot of money, though she’s apparently got enough for the smartphone she was yakking on. She has no car, no savings and no RRSPs, yet she owes $2,000 on her return from three years ago after being reassessed again. She feels targeted and she’s disgusted about the number of times she’s been reassessed. She says she doesn’t make enough money to survive despite living in subsidized housing in Dundas. And that got her off on a rant about how Hamilton needs so much more affordable housing, something I’m sure the CRA rep really appreciated hearing. Back to her tax matters, they recently sent her a letter requesting more information about the money she paid to a woman named Frieda Smith (real name redacted to protect her privacy) to care for her son. She called about it three times before, spent all kinds of time on hold, and each time, after asking for the agent’s ID number, they hang up. It’s really crazy, she said.
Indeed.
Then later in the week, I had the pleasure of listening to a couple of girls, one black, one white, who boarded at Square One. In defiance of Metrolinx policy regarding eating and drinking on the bus, they each had a cold beverage from Starbucks. White Girl’s drink looked like pureed dog crap, while Black Girl’s choice was something that looked like diluted forest green paint. To each his or her own. But I digress.
Black Girl started the exchange by saying, “I was the one who, like, got left behind,” but then White Girl took over. She said she dreamt she was, like, pregnant. Then in her dream, she, like, fell and was so, like, scared. She said she, like, dreams a lot about being pregnant. Once, she dreamt that some character in a movie raped her. She attributes constantly dreaming about being pregnant to watching a documentary when she was younger about how, like, the Mongolians raped everyone. That got, like, ingrained in her. She thinks about being pregnant every day even though she’s never been pregnant. She’s in fear of it. Someone her own age she knows has kids and she was, like, so surprised by it. She doesn’t like dealing with kids because when they’re one year old they’re, like, really needy. She heard that, like, when babies get to be six months old, they’re supposed to double their original size. It’s worse with Asian babies, she said, because they’re so large.
After saying she wanted to visit Turkey, she said she recently got, like, sick for three weeks, then she almost died. She went on to say that she got accepted at York’s industrial design program, but she decided against it, though Black Girl encouraged her to apply again. But White Girl just wants to chill and become a trophy wife. And if anyone is, like, dumb enough to marry her, you deserve your fate. But again, I digress.
White Girl then talked about how her mother, who doesn’t drive, just, like, orders random food from places in Hamilton she finds on Facebook.
I’d undoubtedly have heard a lot more about their lives, but, like, I had to get off the bus.
The things you learn about people on public transit.
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