Just remembered something nifty that tilted my world a bit this weekend.

NDG is currently the playground of a film crew shooting a movie called Wicker Park, as you well know if you’re an NDG resident and have been rerouted, or have been forced to find somewhere else to park because your street has been taken up by Star Suites and generators and eighteen-wheeler rigs stuffed full of equipment. On Friday around five PM, my husband drove me over to the Royal Bank on the corner of Sherbrooke and Hingston so I could cash a cheque and put gas in the car.

Except it wasn’t the corner of Sherbrooke and Hingston when we got there. It was the corner of two other streets. There was a US Postal box on the corner, and a City of Chicago trash bin, and a bunch of US newspaper boxes strewn about. That little triangular park had a new “Keep Chicago’s Parks Clean” sign up. And my bank wasn’t my bank. It had a huge green sign both out front and over the door, and it certainly didn’t say Royal Bank; it had a series of initials instead in gold lettering.

It certainly felt odd to walk up those steps and go inside. It was as if I had crossed some odd teleportation line, or passed through a twist in earth energy between my new apartment and the bank, and landed in Chicago. (Except Chicago is currently experiencing much nicer weather at nine degrees Celcius, as opposed to our minus ten. It’s March tenth; it’s more than time for spring. Damn groundhogs.) Anyways, it makes you wonder if there’s something odd about Sherbrooke Street – if you drive east along it from Cavendish to Hingston, you get Montreal; but if you drive west along it from Decarie at just the precise time on a Friday afternoon, you inexplicably end up in Chicago.

Fanciful, perhaps. Do remember that I worked in a F/SF bookstore for four years, though.