"Oh boy": we heard the familiar voice, a refrain, not so much a complaint with a specific object, except that, perhaps in that moment, the sugar was all that mattered. "Oh boy, oooh boy". the Ohs grew longer and more desperate. People began to stare. They said nothing.

"Can you spare a nickel or a penny or a quarter or a dime or a dollar?" An auctioneer somewhere on Bloor Street, usually in Koreatown. He never looks you straight in the eye and his posture belies uncertainty. Perhaps he's not called to this. Perhaps he's not an auctioneer, he wonders as the people pass him.

This woman sings, always in Italian. She has not washed in days, though her dress shows signs of an aspired-for glory and glamour. She is a reincarnation of Maria D'Avalos. She drinks her coffee and for a moment seems to be in Toronto rather than Venosa. Maybe she is lost or dead.

Disjecta membra: "Spare change? Spare change? Spare change?" Incessantly, persistently. No legs. Occasional disjointed remarks: "Happy holidays!" in the winter. "Watch out while crossing the street" at other times of the year, should you say hello or otherwise acknowledge her. She smiles beautifully through her corner of Bathurst and Bloor face. She spends most of her life on this square metre. Most feel weighted down by her persistence, her routine.

So comfortable in these repetitions -- they all are. And yet when we see them we shudder a little without always knowing it.  A nervousness and mildly obsessive-compulsive quality under the surface lurks beneath for all of us, it is common property, and when we trip over the same step again, or worse, over another step in the same manner, we know that our stumbling is the constant, the repetition. Do we step out of it ever? Ah, but that's precisely where we always stumble!