My earliest memories of Toronto as a child were gathering along with other little urchins behind the truck regularly delivering blocks of ice to homes on the inner-city street where my parents rented a flat, to keep the interior of ice-boxes cold enough to preserve perishable foods; back then refrigerators were not yet common in most households. We children would beg for slivers of ice from the deliveryman and sometimes he would oblige. Otherwise, in his absence, we would scour the thick wood, slivered floor of the truck as far as we could reach, for slivers on our own. Even scooping some up off the road, careful to bypass those too close to the balls of excrement left by passing horses, including the one pulling the iceman's cart.

In those days, in the early '40s, roads were shared by horse-drawn carts and motorcars. Gas-powered vehicles were enough of an anomaly to children that when one was parked by the side of the road it caused a bit of a sensation, until we finally became accustomed to seeing them more commonly and took their presence for granted. And gradually there were no more horse-drawn carts.

Our familiar neighbourhoods of mixed immigrant-stock and more established Canadians was an uneasy one in a sense. I was sometimes referred to as a "Christ-killer"; an epithet shouted at me by other children. Although Jews were plentiful in the neighbourhood my family then lived in I was still singled out as an alien, born in Canada though I was. By the time I was in my first year as a teen and working summers in a clothing factory on Spadina Avenue, perfect strangers on the bus would ask me where I was from. Canada, I would reply, and they would persist: where was I really from?

There's a vastly different population mix in Toronto now, a veritable international community of immigrants, all Canadians living together in a democratic harmony only occasionally disrupted by breakouts of discrimination. When, on the rare occasion we return to Toronto for a brief visit, all the old familiar places are still there and a feeling of nostalgia is evoked, but they're vastly diminished by the changes that have taken place, and high-rise construction is everywhere, dominating the scene and stifling the atmosphere.

As is the obvious manifestation of a country whose population make-up has undergone a vast change, demonstrated in the cacophony of languages overheard, culturally-inspired costumes, skin-tones and the appearance of exotic-looking houses of worship. This diverse community has come together in a mourning ritual of shared sorrow, with the recent vehicular homicide that took place when a profoundly mentally disturbed young man of Armenian parentage deliberately mowed down pedestrians along a busy intersection on Yonge Street. Coincidentally on the anniversary of the Armenian genocide that Turkey refuses to recognize.