The Blind Man on Bloor Street On my second day in Toronto, buffeted by the wind, taking a morning walk, dwarfed and darkened in the shadows of the first tall buildings I’d seen in Canada, I came abreast of a strolling blind man. In dark glasses, well dressed in a camel-hair overcoat and scarf, he was sweeping a slender white cane ahead of him, feeling his way forward. What surprised me was his confidence, how he strode without hesitation. The sidewalks in central Toronto were very wide, but even so, this blind man seemed fearless. Toronto traffic was relentless, the streets jammed, and cyclists zipping among the halting cars posed a hazard to unwary pedestrians. The blind man was resolute but also wary.

I dropped back a bit and followed just behind him up a long block on Bloor Street, past a woman handing out leaflets—but conspicuously not to him—and past a partial obstruction: a homeless man snuggled in a sleeping bag, inert in the middle of the pavement where a grate emitted warm air. At other sidewalk grates—they were about a yard square—I saw more sleeping figures or else cooing pigeons, huddled and jostling in the rising warmth.

The blind man nudged the ferrule of his cane into the bulk of the sleeping figure, sidestepped him deftly, and moved on to the end of the block, a stoplight, heavy traffic, cyclists, big scary trucks. There we stood, side by side, the blind man patient, using his cane as an antenna, twitching it to gauge his nearness to the curb’s edge.

Walking and chatting with the blind man seemed to me the best possible introduction to Toronto, its temper, its welcome, its civility.

“Please tell me when the light turns green,” he said, and now close up I could see he was youngish, with an aquiline nose, and the slight underbite that makes a person look grim or meditative, dark—Pakistani or Indian. His lovely camel-hair coat and thick scarf on this cold day gave him an air of elegance.

“I’m quite okay.” And that sideways wobble of the head that means yes in the subcontinent.

He stepped off the curb without faltering, and we crossed the street together. I watched him poke the curbstone and mount it, to walk on.

“A little,” he said, still walking. “I have macular degeneration. Some peripheral vision, but it gets worse each year.”