Confessions Of A Soon To Be Ex-Torontonian

I came to Toronto, by way of Fort Erie and Ottawa, in the late 1960s. Almost immediately upon arriving and getting a part time job at a discount department store called Towers, I met the girl who would eventually become my wife.
I owe Toronto more than it will ever know just for that.

I went to Glendon College where I majored in philosophy, continued working for United Cigar Stores, where my philosophy education was put to good use (not), got married and finally got into advertising.
We have lived all over the city: Scarborough (a suburb), downtown in little Portugal, North Toronto, Rosedale (where the old money lives), and the finally 4 different locations on the east side of the city, in and around and area known as the Beaches.
But as of early January that’s all over. Because we’re pulling up stakes, cashing out and moving to St Catharines, Ontario, which is just a little over an hour away depending on traffic.
We have been contemplating this for several years. But last week, we found a house that fit us to a T and that was that.

Toronto Is A Great City. Period.

Toronto is the business and cultural capital of Canada, with Vancouver and Montreal following. Toronto, has, since I arrived back in the late sixties, spread out enormously. There’s very little undeveloped property east to Oshawa and West to Hamilton and Stoney Creek. In other words, it’s a megapolis.
Our desire to leave Toronto had more to do with us than it does with the city itself, which we both love. My wife is asthmatic and the cleaner air and the central air in our new house will be very good for her breathing.
For me, it’s a new city to explore on my bike, and a new market to tap for my communications business. It’s also about 20 minutes to the houses of my sister and my brother with whom we are very close.
It’s a short trip to Buffalo and upstate New York, where we can spend our almost worthless Canadian dollars and I can have great little American towns to photograph.

But the most important reason for deciding to leave Toronto behind is simply because we can.
We were both in need of a change. We have never lived in any one place for longer than 10 or 15 years, so we’re right on schedule.
We’re not running away from Toronto so much as we are sashaying down to St Catharines, which will eventually be part of Toronto the way things are going. LOL.
On our way down to check out the house we eventually bought, my wife said, St Catharines is like Toronto was when she was a kid. And I thought that was a pretty good comparison.
Toronto has grown and expanded rapidly over the last few decades. It’s gone from being a mid sized city to a big one, with all the attendant traffic problems, violent crime and impersonal-ness that comes with size.

The only thing we are leaving behind is our kids. But it’s not like were moving to Mars. We will certainly come to visit them often. And because our new house has a salt water pool, they will be strongly tempted to visit us too.
My clients, who are all over the world now, and most of the people I am close to are easily reachable by Skype, because a lot of them have moved out of the city as well.

The Why Of It

Where we will be living in St Catharines, relatively speaking, isn’t all the different from where we currently live in Toronto. We’ll be very close to both Lake Ontario and the Welland Canal.
But we are also smack in the middle of one of the most beautiful areas of Canada. This is wine country and the land around St Catharines is very rich and scenic.
Will we miss Toronto? A little at first I guess. But the Niagara Peninsula is where I grew up. And to my wife, it’s always been a kind of second home, considering the hundreds of trips down there we have made over the years. I know my way around. I’m ‘of’ that region of the country so to me, it’s feels kind of natural.
My wife was raised just about a mile from where I’m sitting right now. She has pretty much wanted to get out of Toronto ever since I have known her. But she knew that if I wanted to have any sort of a career in advertising, it either had to be here or New York and New York was not an option.
Today, my career in communications simply depends of a good wifi connection.
So here we go, leaving what is arguably one of the great cities of the world, for basically a smaller version of it, just a hoot and a holler down the good old Queen Elizabeth Highway.
It will definitely be an adventure. But what’s life without a little of that?

If your business has reached the point where talking to a communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.

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https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/

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All content copyright 2016 Jim Murray.

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