The Roncesvalles Quiet Book Club #7
Socks convered in boobs, and offered to me by Rosy who knows my [loveforboobs] interest in the research on breast cancer
The Roncy QBC #7 was May 19, 2026,
and the night before, I had (finally) written a (2016-word) post about QBC #6 and pressed send. Then I woke up 4 to 5 hours later and had to decide between going back into Morpheus’ arms and finally writing a welcome speech to launch each QBC session. (I needed the Toronto land acknowledgement to be read instead of improvised every week).
So I didn’t go back to sleep (I wouldn’t have managed to anyway, not before 8 or 9 AM), and I proceeded to write way too long a welcome speech which took me 3 hours to write because I’m a writer, and I write with my own brain.
I had a fruit salad for breakfast (or whatever, can’t remember, writing this on May 31! Jeez!), it was around 7 AM. I took my antibiotics (for a nasty bronchitis the week of my big musical shows with Les voix du coeur), and finished the welcome speech. I tried to time it, then I tried to shorten it, but every time I deleted a sentence, I would add 3 more! Why am I like this? Why am I such a verbal hoarder? And I don’t even feel that I’m hoarding! As far as I’m concerned, each word and each sentence in that speech belonged there! Each was adding something new and valuable. Even the part where I presented myself as a "proud Roncesvalles villager". And those words and sentences were all friends gathering on a digital sheet of paper. Who was I to exclude a friend?
I had bought 2 new wooden crates (and a glass kettle) from a neighbor the Sunday before, so I transferred books from one large handwoven box to one of my new wooden crates, in order to use the large handwoven storage box as the official storage box of The Roncesvalles Quiet Book Club!
Thanks to the recap of The Roncy QBC #6 I had written the night before, I remembered putting some of my own books inside the QBC box, for Zahra who was interested in buying one of them. I put 2 of each: 2x Ah Sissi, il faut souffrir pour être française, 2x 9 Histoires lumineuses où le bien est le mal. I almost put one Italian translation, then I remembered I only had 2 copies and they were MY copies, not to be sold. But I could still brag about them, couldn’t I? Maybe another day, not today though. The 9 STORIE LUMINOSE stayed at home.
I checked the weather app to decide what to wear: I can’t remember what it said, but it was hot and sunny. Even though I was born and raised in an open-air hammam (aka the city of Douala, Cameroon), I don’t like summer-like weather and never know what to wear (clearly the only good outfit for such weather is your birthday suit).
I found a red floral silk shirt I have no recollection of buying, and some beige Carhartt cargo pants I remember exactly buying (down the street years ago, at a vintage clothing store that unfortunately closed).
I also wore a floral hip-hop cap I had bought from a gay dude downtown who was selling tons of caps, we immediately clicked and I bought half a ton, even the floral hip-hop cap, even though I don’t like flowers or hip-hop caps (The brim of a hip-hop cap is flat. I prefer it when the brim of the cap is rounded. Like my dad. Daddy issues. See? These are sentences I’m hoarding, aren’t they?)
As shoes, I wore a pair of light brown leather slippers I had bought in a souk in Marrakech 10 years ago and that don’t seem to age one bit. The floral shirt was missing a few buttons, so I left several undone as a nice décolleté and temperature-management device.
I was instructed by my roommate to leave the door to our apartment open, as construction workers would need to get in and repaint the ceiling of the living room. The timing was odd. That ceiling had always been that way all the years I’ve lived there, why repaint it now? I made sure to remember not to lock the door. I didn’t get to watch the time when I left my apartment, but it was definitely past 9:00 AM (i.e. the time SAVA opens and I’m supposed to be welcoming the first participants to the Roncy QBC #7!) With my thick-ass Ah Sissi novels, the QBC handwoven box was technically heavier than the previous week (when I tried using a small cardboard gift box), but it was definitely sturdier and more secure.
As I was rushing down Roncesvalles Ave, carrying my box with both hands, I zoomed past a father walking his 4-year-old son to school. The traffic light in front of me was showing the countdown before my light turned red. I wouldn’t make it. Or would I? No I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to risk walking any faster, losing a Moroccan slipper behind, tripping on whatever was on the ground ahead of me and that I couldn’t see because of the box. I didn’t want to risk losing balance and spilling the content of the new QBC box on the sidewalk, breaking the glass frame that carries my poster, watch the quote and vocabulary cards fly away in the morning breeze, land on the windshields of cars, causing life-endangering accidents; the earplugs donated by the Roncesvalles Welcome Guardian pharmacy would spread on the floor like brown marbles and I would spend 30 minutes to an hour trying to pick every thing back up, naaaaah…. Not in this super cute outfit. If my shirt lost one more button, I’d be put under arrest for public indecency.
So I didn’t run. I didn’t beat the red light and I stopped on Roncy and Fermanagh, which is a one-way street, even though there were no vehicles driving on that street and I could easily walk through that red light. I stopped for 2 reasons:
1) What if there were a police car hiding somewhere, waiting for me, one of the rarest Negroes in the neighborhood, to cross the street at a red light? I had to be careful for my fellow Negroes. Wherever THEY’re hiding.
2) I can’t cross the street at a red light in front of the 4-year-old I’ve just walked past and ruin all the good habits his father has tried so tirelessly to instill in him. I shouldn’t give this young white clearly-athletic dad the opportunity to teach his son that some grownups are uncivilized hooligans who act irresponsibly and cross the street even when they’re not supposed to.
Not in this outfit. Not today. That’s why I stopped.
And who do I see walking past me as I’m waiting for the pedestrian light to turn green, like a responsible citizen? The dad and his 4-year-old kid. Seriously, dude?
So fck the red light, I crossed the street too!
I arrived at SAVA Crepes & Coffee after avoiding physical touch and eye contact with a large group of high-schoolers waiting for the streetcar. I found my friends Rosalind and Colleen, and the Japanese employee was working the front desk that morning. I uttered a speedy "Ohayo gozaimasu" without really looking at her, I was just wondering what time it was. I asked Rosy before I even said hello, and she replied: "Nine eleven". "Another world record", I said, refraining from any comment on « nine eleven ».
Ann arrived shortly after me, and she sat with Rosy. I asked about Zahra, her friend who visits her from the east end when she comes over to the QBC, and I heard that she was not feeling so well that morning, so she was not coming. That’s too bad. My books will remain in the QBC box as long as they have to.
Rosy and Ann ready to get this party started
Behind Ann and Rosy’s table, I noticed an older white woman in a wheelchair wearing a thousand masks, so I approached her to ask if she was there for the Roncy QBC too. She replied with a long string of words that I had trouble following. But I gathered that she had heard about the book club at the public library across the street, but hadn't brought any book with her. So she was going to listen to scientific journals on her phone. She also mentioned her Rastafari friends here and then, who allegedly gave sound health-related advice. Her name’s Danni. I forgot to dance a welcome dance for her. I’m realizing it just now. I wonder why I forgot. I filled out the sign-up sheet for her because her arms were always shaking and she could not use a pen.
I knew something was off when I didn’t see Buffy coming. But I brushed any anxious thought away, and thought she deserved a week off the Roncy QBC from time to time too! So today, we were a small gang of 5 clubbers (yep, that’s what I call us, it’s staying), and because Danni was a new clubber, I had to read the longer version of the welcome speech. I think it took more than 5 minutes, it was pretty awkward. I’m gonna need to shorten it to 2 minutes tops.
The Roncy QBC’s quiet time started on time, if not 2 minutes early. Everyone had filled out the sign-up sheet except me. Colleen had left the question "What are you reading/writing today?" unanswered and that bugged me a little, but I didn’t dare bringing it up. I don’t care about the answer, I care about the fact that there is one. My answer, for instance, is "ASSS". An answer only I can understand (the initials of the title of my play). The idea is to come with a goal and write it down, even though no one else knows what that goal is. Maybe I should say it next Tuesday.
Colleen and her top-secret task of the day
I reminded the gang that there wouldn’t be any Roncy QBC on May 26, and that they could still show up and have breakfast if they wanted! But I had also just realised that on Tuesday, June 2nd, I had a neurology appointment at St Joe’s, and I had been waiting for it for almost a year! That’s two Tuesdays in a row, I was feeling terrible! Ann said she’d still show up to SAVA, as it was now part of her routine. So I asked her if she could host the June 2nd gig, telling her I’d come as soon as my appointment was over. She agreed to the plan. I would either give her the QBC box during the week, or leave it at SAVA the evening before, I’d figure it out. It was nice to know that if anything happened to me, I could count on somebody to keep the show going.
(But then, a few days later, I received a phone call from St Joe’s postponing my appointment to the end of June, Ann would host another time. That postponement was the best news I had heard that week, you'll know why soon.)
It was too hot to sit under a blanket, but I did anyway, and I kept writing my play, following the voices in my head, being surprised by where they took me. Rosy read THE COURAGE OF BEING DISLIKED by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (as an audiobook or ebook from her phone, I can’t remember). Clearly a book written for people-pleasers.
The book I need would be called THE COURAGE OF CHARGING YOUR B2C SERVICES.
Or THE COURAGE OF THROWING A BDAY PARTY FOR YOURSELF.
Or THE COURAGE TO TAKE YOUR HAND OFF THE HANDLEBARS TO SIGNAL THAT YOU'RE TURNING.
Rosy didn’t share any quote or vocabulary, but here’s one I found online:
"All you can do in regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in."
I didn’t hear any more details from Colleen’s mysterious project, but apparently it went well. It went well for Danni too, and Ann was my icing on the cake. She had brought a new book, TALKING AT NIGHT by Claire Daverley, and she had retired a quote that stood out to her:
"And the doctor is kind and well-practiced and reaches out a hand to touch her mother’s elbow, and Rosie notices how well-kept his nails are, so smooth and round and clean. She wants fingernails like that."
I like Ann’s sensitivity. She has an eye for beauty. Beauty can hide and she will still find it. Even in the distracted mind of a person who’s at the hospital, not worrying about her mother, not calculating the hospital fees in the back of her head, but envying the male doctor for his well-kept fingernails.
I showed Rosy what a legible handwriting looked like, by showing her Ann’s QVC. Ann flew to her rescue:
"Oh, that’s not nice".
ME: "Oh, I didn’t mean to be nice."
I had been annoyed by Rosy’s handwriting the night before, calling upon the ghost of Jean-François Champollion to help me decipher whatever she had written on her QVC the Tuesday before. And Rosy is my friend, not being nice is a privilege I only give myself with friends. I almost have to beg her to call me "fckface".
Haul of the week
I had plans to go to the public library for a Scrabble afternoon at 2:00 PM, so maybe I should keep writing until then? I couldn’t have any friends over (be it Rosy or Colleen), since there were supposed to be construction workers in my living room.
But every quiet book clubber seemed to have plans and they were ready to go. Ann was joined by a friend (whose name I would’ve remembered if I had written this 12 days ago instead of just now). He sat at Ann’s and Rosy’s table, we all chatted a little bit. Colleen left. I asked Rosy to take a picture of me with my sign, she did.
I packed my things and asked Rosy to please hold the front door for me. I thanked our Japanese server and the streetcar was at the platform when Rosy and I left the café. I would normally walk home (I live at the next stop), Rosy asked me if she should run to get the streetcar (she's going to the terminus, a 20-min walk away). My answer was an immediate no, but not just because I loathe sudden farewells: no one should ever run. That’s how you trip and fall and spill things and cause life-endangering car accidents.
But the doors were remaining open, I think the driver was deploying the accessibility ramp, so it was taking a minute. Rosy jumped on the streetcar, I asked her to hold that door too for me, I joined her on the streetcar, from the closest door, the very end, which is also the door that opens right in front of my building. I didn’t tap (come on), my hands were full with the QBC box (let’s agree that’s the reason). As the streetcar doors were closing, Rosy saw Ann and her friend leaving SAVA and eying the fruit displays of the neighboring store. She shouted their names from the silent wagon and waved at them. And I silently wondered: is it ADHD or extroversion? It remains a mystery to me.
I stepped out at the next stop and found my roommate at home, but no construction workers. My roommate told me that according to the painter, the landlord wanted the whole apartment repainted, not just the ceiling of the living room. "The fck?", I said. "What’s her end game? Landlords don’t just volunteer renovations. What does she have in mind?" My roommate shrugged.
I had lunch, took a nap, and then I went to play some Scrabble at the public library (first time since I was maybe 12, and first time ever in English, and I fckn won). When I came home, all proud and victorious, I was happy. Happy about the Roncy QBC, happy about my new Scrabble community, happy of my quaint life as a proud Roncesvalles villager. There were still no construction workers in our apartment. My roommate invited me for a chat in the living room emptied out for the painter, barely recognizable, like a hairless face after chemo.
She told me that she had broken the lease, she was moving in with her girlfriend of SIX MONTHS, they had plans to have a baby, and I had 2-3 months to find a new place.
I broke down and cried for 24 hours.
I haven’t shed a tear since, I'm sure I cried enough for the rest of the year.
It was an intense week for my choir, we had 3 (if not 4) 6-hour rehearsals, 2 long-a$$ shows at Jane Mallett theatre, barely any time to eat or sleep. Each day has enough trouble of its own, so I decided that my only trouble of the week would be acing the musical shows and treating my bronchitis. The job search would start on Monday 25.
Now the goal is to find a steady employment to convince a landlord to rent me a place, where I can live on my own this time, as a proud Roncesvalles Villager.
See you on June 2 at 221 Roncesvalles for The Roncy QBC #8! Doors open at 9:00 AM, I arrive when I do, quiet time starts at 9:30 AM, you read/write until 10:45 AM. Book your free spot through the link in the comment! (Donations are welcome)
This post has 2973 words. All keepers.
#FunnyBrainyRoncy #roncesvalles #roncesvallesvillage
This post was first published on Facebook on May 31, 2026.
All the books mentioned here can be ordered on anotherstory.ca or borrowed from the Toronto Public Library.
Book your free spot at the next Roncesvalles Quiet Book Club here (donations are welcome): https://www.eventbrite.ca/manage/events/1986008762671/