One Book: Our very own moo-cows

Editors Note: Spacing is pleased to be participating in the Toronto Public Library’s One Book program again this year. This month the library hopes the whole city will start reading Loyalty Management, a poetry book by Glenn Downie, set in part in the Junction neighbourhood. Throughout the month Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book. 

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Let there be cows!
beneath the CN Tower

heaps of cud-chewing cows
blocking access to Eaton Centre

meandering bovines ignoring the signs
in the Skydome parking lots

– Farfard’s cows take Toronto

I love cows. I mean…I really love cows. Few things give me more pleasure than being allowed to touch the warm, rounded side of a cow at the Royal Winter Fair. I have fallen for otherwise completely unexciting boys because they have mentioned, or been willing to take me up on a conversation thread relating to, cows.

Joe Fafard’s cows are a gift, and their placement is a crucial part of the offering. They say: oh, it does appear that we’re a somber bunch, but we don’t take ourselves as seriously as you thought we did. They do not moo, or poop on the grass. They look noble.

Toronto has, like any number of cities, plenty of statues of kings, queens, and founders. We have Victoria, Edward, Churchill, George Brown, John A….the usual posse of important heads of state and benefactors. Toronto also has a delightful array of less formal statues which are so well integrated into the city, one can sometimes forget they’re there. The non-famous-human statues are a delight because of the way they don’t announce themselves as representatives of something greater than themselves. They are without pretense, humble, but they add something to the scene. Like cows!

For instance: the dinosaurs along the Lakeshore at the bottom of Parkside.

or Edgar and Judith, the guardians of the Lillian H. Smith library on College east of Spadina:

And then there are the incredibly weird (some would say crazed) fans popping out of the sides of the Skydome Rogers Centre ( apparently this is how we behave). Just some angry golden people, clawing their way out:

These fans are the work of Michael Snow, who also brought us one of the Eaton Centre’s few redeeming features, Flightstop, the flock of geese coming in for a landing near the south entrance:

Finally, I give you an admittedly famous human: Pope John Paul II, just hanging out, being gold, having heart shaped eyeballs on Roncesvalles at Fern:

Cow photo by newyork808. Dino photo by torontodailyphoto. Library photo by Striatic. Snow’s fans by Daryl Fritz. Eaton Centre photo by Tom Cochrane. Pope JP II by 416style.