The Upper East Side of Toronto

We are, all of us, children of wherever we're from. While I spent my earliest childhood in a neighborhood-name-free part of lower-mid-Manhattan, I mostly grew up on the Upper East Side. Why? For that, you'd have to ask my parents; I, as a 3-year-old, was, quite understandably, not consulted. But anyway, that's where I grew up, and I neither liked nor disliked it - it just sort of was. But it, and things like it, will always feel like home. It will always feel normal to me to be in a neighborhood where, for example, I can't afford anything in 99.99% of the stores. Where 99.99% of the women have had every square inch of their bodies somehow cosmetically attended to. The things that ought to be off-putting read as kind of comforting.

As an adult, I've never been drawn to living in such a neighborhood (although such places can be startlingly affordable, because of the uncoolness factor). But I do always somehow end up wandering around in them. In Chicago, what was it, the Gold Coast? In Paris, Passy.

I just now stumbled across Toronto's version of this. Yorkville, I think, if I got the borders right. Gone were the 20-something men with the undershave slicked-back-ponytail hairstyle and black flowing-robe minimalist clothing. All of a sudden, there were posh women everywhere. Waiting impatiently on line behind me at Zara. (Where, alas, the faux-leather pants didn't fit.) Then - because the ultimate in relaxation is a department store - Holt Renfrew, a palace of sorts, with signs about "privilege" in a positive sense in a shoe department I observed from a distance only because shoes, and where I tried on a discounted (but still, I ended up determining, out-of-budget) and not especially flattering pair of black jeans, while two women of a certain age (but really, aren't we all) assessed how a pair of jeans looked on one of them. Yes, I could tell that the staff had (correctly; is it the Eastern Mountain Sports backpack? or just the fact of a backpack?) decided that I was in the wrong store. I asked where the jeans were, and was told a list of brands of jeans, in a way that conveyed, I promise this is not some sort of neurosis, you are not J. Brand material. As stretchy-flattering as that material might be, I'll live with that.