My mornings start with a parade.

They’re my favourite seven minutes of the day, beginning the instant I yank shut the front door of the house.

Sometimes, my two children reach for my hands, flushing my heart with happiness.

Then we set off towards their school, three blocks away.

Four houses down, we are joined by the Schmiedchens — Jessica and sons Remy and Charlie.

At the first corner, Tanya and Lauren join us. Then there’s Immy, Moira, Will and their parents. The Silvers catch up from behind.

We wave, pat dogs, share morning anecdotes, comment on the weather, dodge out of the way of racing scooters.

When people talk about community: this is it. I feel the neighbourhood knitting together on these short walks to school.

My kids go to Gledhill Junior Public School. To get there, we have to cross a fast stretch of Danforth Ave.

There is a street light there to protect them. And there’s Ray, the crossing guard.

Sometimes, Ray crosses to the middle of the street to greet us. More often, he makes it three quarters and lunges into a starfish position — legs spread wide, arms spread even wider.

As the red numbers start to flash, he calls to the kids to hurry.

Around 500 kids go to Gledhill. I’d wager Ray knows 300 of them by name.

“Hi Remy,” he yells. “Good morning, Noah. Hurry, Lyla!”

They high-five him when they pass. They shout good morning.

“Have a good day,” he says. “I’ll see you later.”

Two Septembers ago, Ray was hit by a car on his walk home.

He was gone for six long weeks.

A black-haired, Eastern European woman subbed for him. She was nice enough. But there were no high-fives, or personalized greetings.

As Jessica says, “She was just not their person.”

This fall, we learned Ray was retiring after six years. As much as he loved the kids, he didn’t want to face the blizzard mornings and furious drivers anymore.

“The city is stressed-out,” he says. “They’re just coming onto the Danforth, but their minds are already at work.”

Word went out around the neighbourhood: the final day of fall term was Ray’s last shift.

What should we plan for him? What would he like?

We realized we knew very little about Ray. Did he have kids? Was he married? Had he always been a crossing guard?

Here was a man we saw every day, and we didn’t even know his last name!

That both horrifies and heartens me.

“I bet he doesn’t know my name either,” says Jessica. “Maybe that stuff doesn’t matter. You can have a solid connection with someone, even if they don’t know your name.”

On Friday, we left home 20 minutes early and stopped our parade a block early. The kids carried cards that said “Thank you, Ray” that they’d made the night before. Other neighbours had crafted banners and signs that said things like “You are my Ray of light.” We carried drums, xylophones, ukuleles and plastic saxophones to make noise. Will’s mom, Cara, brought a stuffed fowl. (She a museum studies professor.)

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Immy’s dad owns an audio-visual company. He’d hauled a generator and loudspeaker, hooked up to his iPhone, on a dolly.

When he pressed play and Pharrell William’s song “Happy” blasted, we all turned the corner and danced our way up to the Danforth.

It was a Ray Parade.

Ray was resting between green lights on a little canvas seat he brings with him.

He watched us approaching with a quizzical look.

As we got closer, he cracked a big smile. This was for him!

He kept working furiously.

“Hurry Immy!” he yelled, starfished in the intersection. “Good morning Lauren!”

Cars honked, kids gave him homemade cookies, parents banged drums. As we crowded onto the sidewalk, two city councillors presented him with scrolls of recognition.

Later that morning, Ray told me he’d worked at Hallmark for 32 years before taking this job. For the last decade there, he’d felt like a cog — nameless and replaceable.

Here, on the street corner in the sleet and snow, he felt “special.”

“There’s people in life that don’t like their jobs,” he said. “I enjoyed this work.”

(I learned his last name: Monckton.)

I don’t know who got more out of the Ray Parade: him or us.

We had so much fun dancing in the street with our neighbours on a regular Friday walk to school.

We smiled at one another knowingly.

In the rush of our busy city lives, it’s the little moments that matter most.

Happy Retirement, Ray! And to the rest of you: Merry Christmas!