Was Like Nightfall

Speaking of the Iliad . . . I first heard Bob Dylan’s album Blood on the Tracks in 1975. I was living on Sackville Street in a three-storey, comfortably old apartment building that, like a lot of comfortably old things in Toronto, is no longer there. The summer was hot and humid. Ditto, that apartment. Did we have air conditioning? Are you kidding? As I said: 1975.

There were three of us. “Guys” is the term. What windows we had (not many) were open on those hot summer nights, and because the cramped, sad cages of the old Riverdale Zoo were only a couple of blocks down Winchester, the last unhappy lions (waiting to be transported to the new Metro Zoo) were part of the muggy nocturnal soundscape.

I was a waiter in a downtown steakhouse that summer. The money was good, but the work was stressful in a way that other summer jobs had never been. The place — all barnboard on the walls and peanut shells on the floor — appeared to its clientele as...