The Ex-Philes

I just spent the day at the Ex. I've been humming a Jory Nash tune all day; he's my favourite Toronto-area folk musician:

From the Prince's Gate, to the edge of the lake
The midway was shining
It shone so bright, it light up the night
It shone like a diamond...

And you held my head as the fireworks
bled up on over the horizon
and neither strength of sin nor a thousand men
could come close my eyes

The song is called "The Flyer", and it's about a roller coaster that used to be at the Ex. Here's a part of an e-mail I wrote about a year ago:

The main part of the song is about the Flyer, which was a roller coaster at the "the Ex", aka the Canadian National Exhibition -- a sort of summer fair that takes place at the CNE grounds near the lake in Toronto. The Flyer is gone know; disassembled and hauled away. Jory sings about that, too.

Not having grown up in Toronto, I hadn't been to the Ex until two years ago. Siobhan looked at me oddly and said, "you've never been to the Ex?" as if that were a glaring omission in my life experiences. I mean, I've been on the grounds for any number of events -- arts and craft shows, home and garden shows, food and wine shows. Just not to the Ex.

And so we went. It was one of those events that was sticky like candy apples, and crunchy like walking on popcorn. Circus rides made rusty, metalic noises like chains in a bicycle.

It was a blast. I came home today with an armful of stuffed animals -- a ladybug, a pooh-like bear with a pot of honey (that's not Winnie the Pooh, for copyright reasons of course), a frog (which I gave to Ldot), and a big teddy bear dressed as a bride. I figure if I give the bride bear a multicoloured necklace and a headscarf, it can be a Mambo bear.

We ate all the dreadful carnival foods. Sno cones and cotton candy and roasted corn. And there's a little place that makes tiny donuts while you wait.

And I noticed one place that had "Slushi", and it took me a long time to not parse that as "sushi", and I got to wondering what raw fish would be like on cherry flavoured ice. Horrible, horrible thoughts, and they wouldn't get out of my head.

We saw horses, and the international show, and as we were leaving, some singer was crooning out "And I think to myself, what a wonderful world..."

And right then, at that moment, it really was a wonderful world.