Michael Farina

When I was four years old, my mother, (and I assume other parents at the time), let me play in the neighborhood unsupervised…

no babysitter, no Phyllis our hired help in the house accompanying me…I was remarkably set free. This would be unthinkable today. I learned early on to look both ways for oncoming cars, but really? I was pre-nursery school! Evidently, I survived. My outdoor playground was minuscule, but grand in my still-new, wide-open senses.

I remember the house address where I spent my early childhood. Circa 1956, Glencairn Avenue was quite rural. There was a wooded ravine, literally across the street from our house, a very dramatic gulley that must have been a couple of acres. You had to follow a narrow dirt path down to get to the creek below. It was dark and brooding. Old elms and maples. Chipmunks and squirrels and robins and blue jays and buzzing insects everywhere. My sister told me the place was haunted by Indian spirits. If I dug up holes every few yards, I imagined I would find pottery shards or a wolf’s tooth necklace…or maybe a burial ground full of Iroquois skeletons.

Michael Farina was my age and best friend. He lived next door. There were just three houses on our side of the street at the time. His was to the east. I remember after a quick breakfast I’d go outside, maybe 8 AM, and call out for him. It was a high-soprano, AHAHAHA two-note, very loud yelp. Michael, a scrawny kid with a shock of sandy hair and a broken front tooth, would immediately come outside to join me. He always allowed me to take the lead as we explored our one block territory, including another small rivulet behind Bathurst Street, but never the ravine across the street because it was just too scary.

At that age, our playground was always new and never boring. The pre-climate change of seasons at that time were always predictable. Fall colours with dazzling red and yellow maple leaves, February ice-covered branches after a snow storm, the spring melting of the deep snow, when the smell of frozen dog poo now unfrozen was deep and wonderful, ferns uncurling into new tiny leaves, summertime with ringed caterpillars, mosquito bites, frying ants with magnifying glasses, running away from hairy black and yellow, slow flying bumblebees. A tired phrase but truly never a dull moment.

As a natural teacher, I taught Michael Farina how to ride a two-wheeler with training wheels before I knew how. We watched a beloved neighborhood fat white dog die for hours. Michael was a true best friend, a brother I didn’t have. One morning, Michael did fall into the creek. The water was fast-moving after a thunderstorm, maybe two feet deep, so this was traumatizing for both of us. I must have pulled him out because we were both soaked. We ran home after that disaster, but a change of clothes from Phyllis and the same at Michael’s house and we were off again within half an hour. I remember the days with him more than I do my parents. I just spent more time with Michael Farina.

When we were six years old and in school, he was no longer free on the weekends. A long rope was tied to a metal post on his front porch. Maybe fifteen feet later, my friend was tethered by his chest. He could lean forward at the end, talk with me. We’d sit around awhile, but then I would wander the neighborhood alone, or with my sister’s friends down into the mysterious ravine.

As I got a bit older my territory expanded to several blocks in the neighborhood and I made new friends from my Jewish nursery class and the Glen Rush elementary school. David Goodman, Joanne Stock, Howie Rosenberg (still my oldest friend to this day, nicknamed from high school, “Duff,” the tenor sax player of a local would-be jazz combo), and others, leaving my thoughts of tied-up Michael Farina fading. I think perhaps he moved, but I don’t remember.

The Toronto of my early childhood was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) city of 1,200,000. Now, an international mega-city of over 4,000,000. When my family moved to 359 Lytton Blvd in 1960, I switched to the Allenby Elementary School on St. Clemens. Allenby went all the way to grade eight in those early years, and I was actually the very last valedictorian just before Glenview middle School was built for grades 7 and 8. My best friend at Allenby was Michael Woeller.

1968, I was sixteen years old and a flourishing wanna-be hippy kid at Lawrence Park Collegiate high school. The old Glencairn house, which had been torn down entirely years before, was replaced by a new one which was too big for the lot and ugly. Paul Reichmann, the billion dollar real estate magnate of Olympia and York, built a massive house across the street and the ultra-orthodox Shaarei Shomayim synagogue at the end of the block. The old ravine was now filled over and de-treed and the backyard of the Reichmann manse. The entire neighborhood was now all built-up for miles to the north. Thousands of houses adjoining franchise stores and plazas and malls. What was once Glencairn Avenue natural and rustic and wild, was all gone.

My friend Michael Woeller ended up as a major junior hockey player, but attended our rival North Toronto High School. We stayed the best of friends after Allenby. As a Jewish kid, I spent late Christmas mornings at his house, ogling the toys I never got. Michael’s father was a minister, and so very friendly and welcoming to me. My dad made up for my bereft Christmas presents, but that’s another story I will tell in his chapters.

One fall afternoon I was hanging out at Michael Woeller’s front yard. His cousin was visiting, shockingly Michael Farina, now 16 years old like me. It was unmistakable. The same scrawny kid, with the inimitable unkempt sandy hair. I introduce myself to him. He smiled, but only vaguely remembering. Something was not right.  I asked my friend about his cousin the next day. He told me that his cousin Mike Farina never made it past grade one. Deeply “retarded.” (In those days, we didn’t know the phrase, “mentally challenged.”) The boy stayed in a special home, no longer with his parents. “He’s still a sweet, loving kid, but doesn’t talk much at all,” said Michael Woeller.

When we were four, it didn’t matter at all. He was then my best friend. Thinking back, the little boy tethered like a dog, makes a kind of terrible sense. At sixty-eight as of this writing, I have to wonder where Michael Farina is now.