storytelling

One of the first things I noticed during my first few days in Canada was just how friendly everybody is here.

I would be walking to the convenience store near the main road, or waiting for my bus under a tree...and all of a sudden, a stranger would smile at me and say, "how're you?"

For the first two months we lived with the family of a woman my mother had known from work back in the Philippines. I asked her about this, and she said it was fairly common; people here did it out of habit. "It's like 'hi' and 'hello' here. They ask you 'how are you?' and you reply with 'good, and you?'" She gave me some advice: even if I wasn't particularly feeling all that 'good' - even if I had a terrible headache, or had just gotten fired, or was soon to be deported - I had to say "I'm good, and you?" I saw it as a silent, mutual sense of courtesy: if you go out of your way to ask me how I'm doing, it's only fair that I don't bore you with the messy details of the latest catastrophe in my life.

This was all new to me from the get-go because, back home, you never talk to strangers. Never ever. The most you can do is inquire about the time, or ask for a light - and even that is sometimes pushing it! But here, everyone is asking you how you are, even if you're going opposite ways on the pedestrian lane - there is no time to look back, but there is just barely enough time for an exchange: "How are you?" / "Good; yourself?" / "Good, thanks for asking."

And then there are those who don't just stop at polite one-liners. They engage you in conversation while waiting in line, or in the grocery aisles. They don't even ask for your name, and they rarely offer theirs - they start with a smile and the weather. From there, anything goes. And while this has happened to me countless times, it is extremely rare in the Philippines; it's not every day you have an old lady walk up to you on a snowy Thursday morning and ask you if this is your first winter, after which she then describes how she had felt when her family first migrated from Poland (it was December, sometime in the 1950s.)

I wasn't used to it at all, so at first I merely listened. But soon I grew to welcome these little one-time conversations. They still pop up every so often nowadays, and when they do I now try to drop everything else and really pay attention. These people never ask for my name, nor do they offer theirs; they are usually gone by the time the light changes, or my bus stop comes up, or when somebody's takeout is finally ready. And then I never see them again.

But in the back of my mind I know that the woman who would wait for the 19 North bus still has three young children in Jamaica. That the pizza delivery boy is struggling to make it as a musician; he plays the drums and is getting better, he swears. That the old Chinese man who transports live fish and other small pets in his truck - he can play a mean game of chess. And on and on...every time a stranger talks to me out of the blue, I feel as though the city itself is telling me a story.