A cold, open morning passing through us. Jones has a red lollipop in his cheek, the stem sticking out like a cigarette. All confidence and swagger he moves up the street like a gangster. He’s looking for a stick. The right stick. All gatherings of plants and bushes must be explored. He holds back the branches of one bush, “Come, Daddy, Come!” He has opened a door that I must pass through, and together we emerge into a new world, journey mystical realms, enter jungles, descend to lakes with lizards and stars. And then Jones standing there. Watching me looking back, all the branches and vines and climbing things now wrapped around him like they did not want to give him up, like he still belonged to their world and not mine. And the bottle collectors are out this morning. They scavenge in the alleys, the glass clinking in their bags like wind chimes from across water.

Jones wakes up early from a nightmare.

“Hulk was fighting Spiderman and it made me upset and I cried.”

His heart so pure and simple, still so light.

Outside, it is just starting to snow. As I push the stroller up the street tiny snowflakes hit our faces. Impossibly intricate worlds dissolving upon contact. And Jones is happy, his tongue out, trying to catch them all. Joy now, all residue of his nightmare obliterated. The rest of us, the adults, we can travel decades, lifetimes with ours.

A woman passes smartly by. She is fresh, ready for work, for whatever might emerge into her day. This is the best version of herself that she is offering the world, everything still immaculate and hopeful at this hour. She smiles when she sees us, her lipstick perfectly red, perfectly expensive. And Jones points past her at a Santa Claus that sits on a roof, and beneath there is a large sun room attached to the house. Inside there are two nuns, both of them wearing African dresses, all golds and browns and bright white teeth. They are decorating for Christmas and they are happy, smiling and chatting with one another as they hang tinsel from a tree. It was as if somebody were saying, “Here, I give you beauty.” And to see this moment, to imagine the journeys that brought these women to this sweet, almost invisible point in time was a gift that had been laid in our path. Like light flaring unexpectedly before us, an encouragement for this, and all the days to follow.

On Sunday Rachelle and I took our son to his swimming class in Kensington Market.

Walking down the stairs to the pool there’s the heavy, nostalgic smell of chlorine drifting up to meet you, and when it does, something takes place that moves you from one point in time to many others.

Every pool you ever knew is conjured, and you remember feeling a little vulnerable and excited as your bare feet padded toward the pool. You remember diving boards and lifesavers, games and races, unknowably beautiful lifeguards perched above like trophies, and the light catching the water as it swells and dips, glinting.

Everything refracted, everything reframed.

But on this day there were about six parents– each one with their tiny, precious child– forming a semi-circle around the instructor. So comfortable and confident in the water, she was like some mythical sea creature who spoke only in a song.

“Three blind mice, three blind mice, splash your hands, splash your hands,” she encouraged, and all the children kicked and splashed– and that, the water leaping up, became the physical manifestation of their joy. To witness this could have been the instructor’s great passion, the love to which she had given her life over.

And Jones was so happy. Excited, he shouted along to all the nursery rhyme instructions. He was game for anything. Even Torpedo Time, when the toddlers are submerged under water and then pushed through a hoop by a parent only to explode out of the water like the radiant beasts they are. Rachelle, who was smiling so broadly her face could have split in two, swung Jones through the water and then lifted him as strong and high as she could, before swinging him back down and then throwing him up in the air. And Jones, now soaring, was above it all, glowing in a weightless paradise for a moment, before falling back to us and into his mother’s arms.

He has a piece of gauze over his left eye and sits there wordlessly, his face giving nothing away. His mother looks so warm and concerned, so ready to help. She keeps looking over at him, searching for ways to make him feel better, but he offers no clues as to what she might be able to do. There is such yearning in her eyes–she wants to climb into him and fill him with strength, she wants to absorb all of his pain, she wants to take him to that lake he loved as a child and watch him return to being her limitless and beautiful boy.

Everybody in the waiting room appears weary and drained of confidence on this day. A man of about 60, somebody who looked like he had lived well and confidently in his body for decades, groans when he shifts his weight and tries to cross his legs. As if avoiding one another, even ourselves, all eyes drift to the TV set where a news station, crammed with all manner of banners and crawls, is on. So much news, so many things of the world competing for our attention. And along the bottom of the screen, as random as a dream fragment, “ Prince Harry regrets not talking more to Prince William about his mother’s death.” And suddenly I’m traveling in time and back on Elgin Street in Ottawa 20 years ago. There were perhaps ten of us, huddled together on the sidewalk watching a TV through a window, all staring at a shot of a crumpled, black car in the middle of a tunnel.

Some people were crying, and I remember thinking that was a display of sentiment, and that we couldn’t possibly feel sincere emotion for celebrities who had been so one-dimensionally assembled for our consumption.

And I was wrong in the ways that only a young, single man could be, I was so very, very wrong.

Fish in an aquarium:

Space flowers in flight, timeless in their wisdom.

Music:

Spirits come to make you happy. They move your body and you enter different lives, become more than before.

Speech:

Like rocks placed one in front of another, a path for those who can’t see.

Feathers:

The soft residue of worlds not our own.

Sand:

The idea of forever, where everything is the same size.

Mom:

Her voice, the scent and light of her hair, the home I will always return to.