Louise and The Men of Transit

New Approach

"It's not called a subway train, Marcia," Louise said to her cat sitting behind her on the coffee table. "It's a Toronto Rocket Cars." Louise adhered a little photo of the Bombardier-built Toronto Rocket Cars on her TTC wall map as rain smashed drops against her floor-to-ceiling apartment windows to her right. Thunder rumbled in the distance. White light flashed through the cracks in the roiling charcoal clouds. Louise hummed in her living room light as she selected a fat felt pen from the box on her TV's credenza on her left. She uncapped her pen and carefully drew over the faded yellow U line on her TTC wall map, making sure not to draw over her little picture of the front cab of the Toronto Rocket Cars. She extended the line at an angle past Toronto's northern boundary. The newly opened extension of the western arm of the U wasn't on the old map. She picked up the map she'd found at a local convenience store and checked her line against its line. Satisfied, she reached back and let the map drop onto her coffee table. She said, "Okay, Marcia, I have the Yonge-University line drawn in." Marcia mewed. Louise looked over her shoulder at her smirking cat. "Yes, I'm sure I have it. And yes, I know I was supposed to have started this before. But just memorizing random numbers last weekend didn't work. I'm trying a better way to learn. You'll see," Louise ended happily.

Louise returned her gaze to her wall map. Her eyebrows lifted up. "Oh, you're right, Marcia. It's Line One." She put down her amber yellow pen on the credenza and picked up some more tags as the pen rolled and rolled till its box stopped it. "I'd better stick number-one tags on it to remind me. The numbers are so simplistic. They're easy to remember. Why can't I, Marcia? I work at the TTC now; it's how we mind your space," Louise ended on a trill. "One. Two. Three. Four. Five," Louise recited as she pointed to each subway line on the map in turn — except for "Five." She couldn't find "Five." She peered in closer.

"Oh," she suddenly recalled.

"Five isn't on the map yet because it hasn't been built!" Louise declared. "We still allow Torontonians to call it Eglinton Crosstown. But it's Five." Louise nodded happily to herself as she picked up a tag, drew a circle on it with her amber yellow felt pen, scribbled yellow within the round line, and wrote a neat numeral one on it with a black pen. Picking up a small bottle of white glue from the credenza, she deftly dabbed glue on the tag's back and pasted it on to the bottom of the amber yellow U line. She continued this procedure with tag after tag until the U line had tags up and down its eastern and western north-south arms. "There," she said as she pressed firmly on the last tag. "It's yellow and one all the way up." Louise stood back and surveyed her work. "Now I have to do the same for the other lines. This one, the green one, uses T-one trains. Did you know that, Marcia?" Louise smiled at her over her shoulder then returned her attention to the map.

"Kaaahhkkk," Marcia replied and began licking her right front paw, digging her teeth right in between each toe, drawing her lips up to reveal her teeth's white sharpness as she pulled gunk out.

Louise squinted as she searched her memory. "Maybe Line Three uses the Toronto Rocket Cars. Or is it Two?"

Louise hummed as she continued her Saturday undertaking of recolouring each subway line on her wall map in their TTC given colours and sticking the appropriate number tags on them. She picked up a printout of the Eglinton Crosstown route, studied it, found Eglinton on her wall map, let the printout float back down to the credenza where it hit the edge and wafted on to the thin oak floorboards. Using a ruler to guide her orange felt pen, Louise drew a straight line across her map. The orange almost blended in to the amber yellow U as Louise drew across its two arms. It wasn't going to open until 2021, but she was going to be ready. Maybe she'd already be working her way up the promotion line by that day. "Five lines," she exclaimed to Marcia. "So colourful. Isn't that amazing, Marcia?"

Louise turned around to pick up her cup of tea cooling on the side of the table opposite Marcia. Her cat stopped pulling at her paws and stared at her. Louise blinked rapidly back at her cat, her lips quirking, her brown eyes lightening to tawny. She sipped her tea and put her cup back down. Her cat returned to her business of cleaning her nails.