‘All Our Swains Commend Her’ by Mitchell Toews

Nestor and I called her Ginger. She was the kind that tingles and burns. She’d been cadging coins down by the Country Kitchen every morning since this time last year. Loud and theatrical, Ginger was bigger than life. With a tin can for collecting money and a neatly lettered sign asking for donations, she’d escort slow-moving people on the crosswalk and always had a candy for little kids. It was Ginger’s spot. Live street theatre in a raggedy Winnipeg Jets jacket.

We saw her every weekday on our commute. She was a fixture, standing at the intersection, skinny as a light pole. Orange eyebrows crept out from under her toque, matching the long locks that escaped her cap to lie in curls on her shoulders. Hair that was red once but was now the colour of her much-faded Nike Air Jordans. 

Nestor asked her one time, “What’s your background?” Her eyes locked on his, then mine. 

“’Bout like you, I’d guess. Heinz 57, Manitoba style, as if I care, and you shouldn’t neither. Don’t you know? Multiculturalism is vested.” 

Comments like these made me think maybe her past was one of those that had a few zigs in it. Unlike mine, which had been straight-pipe middle class for generations. Nestor’s was a little bumpier — his beginnings were the proverbial “humble.” He had risen above his station, as he liked to say with a sardonic twist of the lip: he was loaded.