With an extreme cold weather alert outside, and a good stock of leftovers inside, I enjoyed a lazy, bookish Boxing Day. Looking out the window, I realized that, every day of every winter, I keep a running check on the weather, to inform an internal anxiety meter: is today a day that weather may take the life of a fellow citizen on our streets?
This is an autonomic daily calculation. I never consciously decided to do it. How did this become a normal part of city life?
It’s hard enough living homeless in Toronto. More than half of the homeless people who died in 2017 were under the age of 50. But that any person surrounded by buildings can actually be killed by weather is shameful.
I don’t want one more child asking a parent why that person is curled up by the curb; not one more parent searching for an appropriate response. No more at-least-they-have-a-sleeping-bag thoughts.
There are plenty of solutions, but we need action.
I checked four times during the day; the grate by the laneway below my apartment. The man usually there was absent, save for a pair of mittens. I choose to believe he was brought in from the cold. I hope he was brought in from the cold.
He’d be better off if my anxiety meter set off my time-for-action alarm.