With that gorgeous sky above us, the kids and I set off for supper at our second favorite Korean restaurant, Don Valley. It's an underground restaurant with very little ambiance, but they have high chairs with which to imprison the monkey boy. The quality of the food doesn't matter a bit if you are too busy chasing a crazed 3 year old around a restaurant to actually eat it.
As we waited to cross the street near the restaurant, I noticed this scene.
The woman sits on this corner a lot. Pretty much every time I pass. She looks clean, but I'm fairly certain she's homeless and I'm positive she suffers from mental illness. Half the time, she is joined on this corner by an equally ill, but also well washed foreigner.
But this was different. The man sitting with her in the birthday hat was very typically homeless. Dirty, foul smelling, missing teeth and dignity.
But she had a little spread of food and was feeding him bite after bite with her hands. She would pop in a bite, then carefully, gently, maternally wipe his mouth. She poured him a cup of makkoli, a milky, sweet rice wine, then handed him the bottle to have him pour her a drink. In Korea, you don't pour your own drink. It's rude. I loved that he took the bottle and proudly poured her drink, with the birthday hat on his head and a toothless grin on his face.
The scene was just so tender and sweet, I felt privileged to have witnessed it. I discreetly snapped a photo as we walked by.
Down to our kabli and rice we went. We gorged on our Korean favorites as we shared stories of our day, giggles and belly laughs galore. I paid the bills and we marched up to street level with promises of melon ice cream bars luring the children out merrily.
When we reached the top of the stairs, we saw that the blue skies had retreated and the monsoons had struck. The world was dark, cold, and wet. Very, very wet.
We aren't taking about a little rain here. We are talking about those big fat drops that soak you through in seconds. And a lot of them. The streets were already ankle deep.
And I had made the rookie mistake of not bringing umbrellas. No rain jackets, either. We were trapped with no way home but through the wet.
As I stood contemplating this new dilemma, the man with the birthday hat approached. He got into the face of an older lady who shooed him away. That's when he noticed us.
Gone was his birthday hat and his happy demeanor. He was intoxicated and angry and I was standing alone at the top of a very long flight of stairs with four children. Easy pickings for a pissed drunk with an unpredictable mental illness.
I kept the kids busy talking of the rain while avoiding eye contact with the man. He got right into Roman's face, but Roman knew well enough to look away and not engage him. This isn't his first ride at the crazy rodeo, after all.
The man then leaned into me to force our eyes to meet. I, instead, looked up at the great gray above as it unleashed its weight of water and threw my hands skyward as a sign of love and adoration.
That was enough for him. He must have thought I was crazier than he. He stepped back, then forward again like he was going to touch Iryna's hair. Before he got a hand close, I cackled loudly. He looked at me again, then horked a big loogie and stomped off.
And that's when I remembered the emergency ponchos I had in my purse. Just three. But better than nothing. We threw them on and started off toward home.
By the time we got to the hotel, we learned that those emergency ponchos aren't really better than nothing. They're just about the same as nothing. We were drenched so badly, we had to wring out our clothes.
Even a monsoon veteran can make a rookie mistake. Next time, we all take umbrellas. And birthday hats. And maybe some makkoli.
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