A Walk on the Sunnyside

We had a fun outing to Sunnyside Beach yesterday afternoon. Sunnyside is the beach on Lake Ontario closest to our house. Walking along this thin strip of beach in the summer always reminds me of the beaches I grew up visiting in California. People are sunning, playing volleyball, drumming, and eating pizza, ice cream and other junk foods.

Most of all, people are people watching. For the first time I noticed that lots of other new parents like us strolling the boardwalk, showing off their new baby (in many cases, much younger babies than Amado) and looking at other people's babies and their baby equipment.

There are two big differences between Sunnyside and the beaches of California: There are no waves crashing on the shore and no one touches the water, much less goes swimming in it. I've heard there are some places around Toronto where the water is clean enough to swim, but I've never seen anybody swimming at Sunnyside. That's too bad.

When I miss California it can help a lot to take long walk along Sunnyside Beach. Wendy told me that when her great-grandfather Larsen came to Toronto, he used to walk down to the shore of Lake Ontario with his red-metal lunchbox and spend the day looking longingly at the water, remembering the days when he was a steamship captain in Norway.

It's just a wounded lake and not the ocean, but it can still heal.