Oh! Annette Street. It has a one-and-only meaning for me. Don't know if I've ever been on it twice, but the one time I was on it was threading my way across town in the worst snowstorm I've ever driven it. I'd just started a job downtown near College and Bathurst, but I was living way out in west end Mississauga. One day in March, '96, a storm came through that just creamed the city during the working day. Forget Queen Street and the Queensway, forget the Gardiner. It was driving a car like a slow needle through the packed fabric of the surface streets.
Everywhere I turned the traffic just got worse and worse. Every choice I made seemed to turn out the wrong one. Somehow I ended up in the Junction, and turned onto Annette Street... and I remember it for the same reason as Lis -- old Mickey Mouse Club reruns. So that name, out of all the dumb street choices I made, stuck in my mind.
It was a strange trip. I had a cache of single-serving peanut butter and jam packets in the glove compartment that I'd gotten somewhere, and for some reason, I actually had bread in the car. Somehow, as I crept along, I managed to get the former onto the latter and at least eat something. Just a few days earlier, a friend had bought me a used CD of The Cars eponymous first album, and I played that thing end to end three or four times on the way home. It was what sustained me. The familiarity of the tunes just drove me along, and as I recall, I gave up on the radio and the traffic reports and resorted to the music around the time I turned onto Annette. I abandoned myself to my fate there. It was liberating. I kept my eyes on road, tended to the bread when I was stopped, and hummed along. It was one of the strangest three hours of my life. I think it stands out so oddly fondly in my memory for the best of reasons. I was young. It was an adventure. Everything was new.
That's Annette Street.