A college-aged woman is making her way through the crowds. She’s wearing a big sweater over which she’s pulled a down vest. Her smile is warm as she cuts through the crowd, a long skateboard tucked beneath her arm. She looks so healthy, so confident, so effortlessly beautiful. It is impossible not to imagine her life, to see her her boldly meeting each new challenge she faces in this fresh world. She must skateboard through the city each day, her foot slapping the pavement as she goes faster and faster. Popping over streetcar tracks and swerving around trucks, she is the glowing velocity of youth. And then she materializes in the hospital like an answered prayer, and for a moment all our boring suffering falls aways, and there is nothing but the hope of spring.

The elderly husband is in a wheelchair being pushed through the hospital by his elderly wife. They’ve probably been married for 60 years, but he’s presently vanishing before her eyes. No longer the man she met chasing a dog down a street so many years ago. Now he’s frail and stooped, his shoulders curling forward as if some magnet within his body was  compelling them together. But in spite of this, in spite of his immobility, the hospital slippers, IV bag and bruises crawling up his legs, he’s trying to be cheerful, trying to make the best of things. He says something to his wife, but his voice is a whisper and she can’t hear him. He tries again and it’s the same result. And then he stops trying to talk, and the two of them, so bound, move in silence toward whatever comes next.

As I was waiting in the elevator, a woman suddenly angled through the closing doors and appeared amongst us. Slightly startled and self-conscious, she looked about at the motley crew surrounding her. A handsome man, with whom she had just made eye contact, asked her what floor she wanted.

“Seven,” she said, and then as if it was a word she thought she was saying in her head rather than out loud, softly added, “oncology.”

Nobody said anything, and she looked down. Her blond hair was still shiny and immaculately maintained, and she had one of those artificial tans that stood out, somehow suggesting she had always aspired to be a trophy to someone.

She smiled weakly at me, “ To look at me you wouldn’t even know, “ she began, but then as if seized by a kind of shame, she stopped. None of us felt like we belonged, it wasn’t just her. And then we all rode the elevator up in awkward silence, each one of us getting off at our own particular floor, each one stepping into a world we never dreamed we might belong.

He’s been Donald Trump’s personal physicians for the last dozen years or so, and is responsible for declaring Trump to be the healthiest man ever elected to the Presidency. He took a lot of flak for that, as you might imagine, and for the way he looks, too, so the transition from private to public life has been pretty traumatic. Consequently, Dr. Bornstein started to see a psychiatrist. What follows are some fragments from their hacked sessions:

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Bornstein: I had a dream a few days ago where I was in the Oval Office and accidentally walked in on President Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They were having sex in the hovering butterfly position. I had a vision of the earth consumed in flames, and then all of my teeth started falling out.

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Psychiatrist: You seem bothered, Harold. Is there something on your mind?

Bornstein: Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE that America is great again, and I LOVE being the Surgeon General, but I’m starting to have some doubts about the Flesh Wall we’re building along the US/Mexico border.

We have no idea what sort of biological reactions are going to take place within that wall, and those reactions could be just as grave a threat as ISIS.

Psychiatrist: Have you spoken up about your feelings?

Bornstein: No.

Psychiatrist: We’ve had this talk a few times already, (about 90 seconds of inaudible talking)

Bornstein: I know, I know, I know, dammit!! THERE ARE NO SUCH THINGS AS PROBLEMS, ONLY OPPORTUNITIES!! THERE ARE NO SUCH THINGS AS PROBLEMS, ONLY OPPORTUNITIES!!

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Bornstein: In this dream Ivanka and I are beamed up into into a flying saucer. The aliens want us naked. We look at one another and understand.

Words are not needed. Our clothes fall away and we are naked and beautiful. Children of the universe. The aliens want us to couple. They need our beauty and fertility. My desire for Ivanka is almost overwhelming, and I can see that her desire for me is equally matched. As I pull her naked body to mine, I could see the earth, a distant blue jewel through the window just past her honey perfect shoulder. And then suddenly– due to something I knew her father had done– the earth just exploded, and as the UFO cartwheeled away from the shock waves, I was ejected naked and erect into space, where I spun alone for cold eternity.

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Last night I dreamt that a Mexican had shot the President.

I was working feverishly trying to save his life, but there was just so much blood! It was everywhere, even in my nostrils, but I keep working and working and then just when it looked like he was going to survive, I started to stab him until he was nothing more than meat for the Flesh Wall, and then I paused, took a deep breath, and then just keep stabbing.

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Fantastic turnout here.

Just light’s out.

You’re a great, great crowd, a very smart crowd, and I want to thank you all for coming out in such huge numbers to hear me speak. What’s that? Wow. My people are telling me that there are thousands more waiting outside. In the rain. Terrifying lightning flying around, too, and the sort of giant thunder that scares dogs. These people don’t care. No, they’re happy to risk their lives. They just want to be close to greatness and pay their respects. Real Americans, those people. I love them just as much as they love me. Well, maybe just a little bit less– let’s be honest– but still, I give them huge, huge amounts of love.

Of course, the media will make up lies about this turnout, just like they did at the inauguration.

So dishonest.
No conscience at all.
Lazy perverts.

They’d even stoop to blacken the memory of Mary Tyler Moore just to push their liberal agenda. Makes me want to throw-up.

But you know who doesn’t want to make me throw-up?

Mary Tyler Moore.

So beautiful.
So classy.
Such manners.
A real tribute to her race.
A true 9 out of 10.

It’s hard to believe she was taken before Crooked Hillary. Crooked Hillary who is so sick and weak and has those big bug eyes that always make it look like her head is going to explode. And those coughing fits? Awful. Why couldn’t death just take her? Yesterday’s news. She’ll probably be the next to go anyway. .. And then Bill. Both in such poor, poor health. Sad. Thankfully, I don’t have that problem. I am in excellent health. Best health of any President in the history of America.

It’s a fact.
Never had a drink in my life.
And no drugs either.

And let me tell you, it’s not like I didn’t have opportunity.

I had big time opportunity.

Mary, Mary liked to drink. It’s true. She struggled with it, but it didn’t matter because she really could turn the world on with her smile.

She really could.
Honestly.
No lie.

She could also do it with her ass.

Sweet Jesus, what a caboose!

You’re all probably wondering, did I?

A gentleman never tells, but let me just say that I bounced quarters off that ass. It should have been classified as a secret weapon because that ass could topple regimes. If I had sent Mary, the vintage Mary, young, like when she was doing the Dick Van Dyke Show,

into one of those pathetic, little airport protests, everyone would have seen her ass and just forgotten where they were. Seriously.

You couldn’t say the same for Rhoda.

Oy vey!

No, Mary was the real deal, the one and only.

Mary, and I can give her no higher compliment, was a real star– the Ivanka of her times– and America and her allies, will miss her.

returning to the hospital always feels like stepping into a church, into the holy. Everybody there, whether they know it or not, are in a state of pilgrimage, of prayer.

In the atrium a motley assembly of musicians formed. They were a group of people recovering from mental health and addiction issues, with a few ringers tossed in to add some structure to their compositions. The conductor, an energetic and wiry tangle of holistic cliches, worked hard to inspire her students but most of them remained tense, staring flatly at the floor rather than the crowd that had gathered across from them. Their voices were thin and straining, but still, the congregation rose with the music, an original composition called, “Coming Through Darkness.”

And how did they do that?

How did each one of them push trauma to the side to stand where they were that day?

Oh Lord, let their music, that glowing idea, comfort us all.

And then down the hallway there was a display of art created by patients as part of their therapy. Out of all the generic scenes of landscapes and flowers and pets, there was one work that stood out to me.

Mary of the Roses.

As if floating above the others, as if shining.

And I imagined the woman painting it, how with each brush stroke another layer of her anxiety fell away until this new, beatified horizon emerged.

As I left the hospital, a First Nation’s man beating a drum stood outside on the sidewalk, the flames painted on a food truck rising behind him.

We nodded at each other and I remained, watching and listening, as steams of indifferent people passed by.

A tall, homeless man shuffled down the sidewalk and when he walked into the music, without a word he started to dance. First with his fingers. Slow pointing. Cool pointing. And then his body began to move.

His shoulders, his legs, his fingers, his head, all in surprising and beautiful concert with this simple drumming. Suddenly, he was the revelation of hidden genius–he was a burning bush in our midst. He danced for perhaps a minute and then he stopped, and falling back into the broad, rigid silence from which he came, he continued silently through the day.

There was something that seemed miraculous about this, and the drummer and I– the only people who had seen it– grinned at one another.

“It’s part of the magic of the flow, “ the drummer said. “I like to do this in front of the hospital. People are scared and preoccupied, and then they hear the drum calling to their spirit and it lifts them. Spirit takes them places, it unhooks them from their mortal self and for a moment they are free.  We are signposts in this world, here to help people find their way.”

Miracles, right that moment, unfolding all across the city.

I had a long stay in the Toronto General back in October and it wasn’t much fun. You feel interred when in hospital, and for a quite a stretch there it seemed as if I didn’t have very much to be encouraged by. The days, enveloped by a fog of confusion, frustration and dread, were very long and very slow, and I found myself looking forward to dinner, imaging it might be a little clearing in the woods. However, nothing could have been further from the truth.

The meal, delivered wordlessly by a stranger in a hair net, would arrive with the loveless flat, slap of a plastic tray. The food itself, alien, was a visual insult, a slushy confection that had been poured from one container into another, a reminder that you had absolutely no control over this life you now inhabited. I found it all inexpressibly demoralizing, so I began to order food in whenever I could.

I wasn’t much good at providing the delivery service accurate information about how to get to me. The Toronto General Hospital is a monster. It goes on forever, in every complicated direction and level you can imagine.

It’s disorienting, like a space station made by a long extinct civilization, and having been moved a half dozen times since my admittance, I didn’t have any practical understanding of where I was. I simply could not give instructions as to how to get to my room. I didn’t have a clue.

All the same, I was in a ward with three other men on the 14th floor of the thoracic/respiratory wing of the hospital, and it took the delivery man ages to find the place. He must have travelled all over the hospital, unwittingly engaging in a tour of all the grief and suffering tucked away there from public view.

Across the hallway, a woman wept loudly, as she did every day at that hour. An elderly man lost to dementia, roamed the corridors a muttering shadow. Family members, huddled and speaking in quiet, hollowed voices stood by the ice machine trying to devise coping strategies.

Our room was dark but for the glow of my tiny tv set, but still, at a glance you could tell that everybody in there was pretty deep in the woods and not going anywhere soon. The delivery man, who probably wasn’t expecting this intimate and difficult a journey when he started work, brought the food to me. Looking very emotional– for reasons that I am sure ran deep and mysterious on this Thanksgiving weekend– he said a quick prayer in a language I didn’t understand, and then petitioned me to get well, “You must get better, sir, you must, there is so much for you, sir!” and then nodding toward me, his palms pressed together, he returned to his life, and out of ours.

It’s the hottest night of the year, and everything feels slower and more specific—the motorcycle whirring by, the exhaust from the bus, the distant shouts. Even movement feels weighted, as if gravity had been altered and natural time suspended, all of us now caught living in the space between an ending and a beginning.

In front of St. Joseph’s, broken men in hospital gowns are smoking cigarettes from their wheelchairs. I recently spent a long, uncertain time in hospital, and walking through this scattering of solitary men, all staring off at some internal horizon, I felt the need to stop.

Curtis, who was undergoing dialysis, had both legs amputated at the knee, was missing several fingers and teeth and was covered in tattoos. He didn’t mind being in hospital, he told me, because there were always people around and it was nice to have company. When I told him my wife and I were about to have a baby, his eyes got child-like and wide, “Oh, God has blessed you, sir, God has blessed you!”

We chatted for a bit, and as I was taking my leave it felt like we had both survived the same plane crash, but only one was able to walk away from the wreckage. After shaking his hand, and feeling like something almost holy had taken place, I walked into the hospital and later, at 4:40 in the morning on August the 18th, Rachelle gave birth to our son, Jones.

Rachelle was so strong. When the labour took hold and then seized her, she gritted her teeth, and then face a bright red, she pushed like a viking while k.d. lang played in the background. We thought this was going to go on and on for hours, as did the entire team who had anticipated a slow delivery, but suddenly Jones, whom I had been traveling 49 years to meet, appeared.

Neither Rachelle nor I saw him immediately. The presiding nurse, her face a sudden astonishment of joy, shouted, “Look down, look down!” And so we did, and there he was, glowing and perfect, seemingly illuminating all the faces now staring at him. For us, it was as if Jones was emitting a light that existed beyond sight, something so powerful and clarifying that with his first exhalation all the heavy, gritty air of the city, of the world and our lives, was cleared away.

The next day we all left the hospital– Jones, feeling the sun for the very first time as we carried him to the car in the Moses Basket a friend made for him. We passed through the smoking men who sat smouldering in the heat like rubble, but Curtis wasn’t amongst them, and so we continued without pause, taking Jones home. Home, an idea and memory that the boy and then the man, will forever be circling. And right this second this home is taking form, his mother rocking him in her arms, his father and dog watching from the sofa, a perfect and imperishable moment that one day Jones will close his eyes to summon.

(Photo courtesy of Donna Lypchuck)

I had major, very complicated surgery, and for two weeks after the operation– first thing in the morning– the attending nurse would always ask me if I knew where I was. It was a simple question, one that I found a little bit insulting even, but the truth was that I just wasn’t sure.

I mean, I knew who I was, that I’d had heart surgery and was in hospital, but I wasn’t clear on what hospital, or where this hospital was located. Some days I thought I was in Montreal, other days Ottawa, sometimes when I heard the rhythms of an African tongue, I believed I was in Cape Town. Depending on the accents, language and ethnicity of those around me, I imagined I was in India, Australia or China, occasionally, even in Toronto, the city in which all of this was unfolding.

Each day was like waking into a dream, a realm where things were still being shaped. The people moving about in my field of vision were distant from me. It was like they existed in another dimension, and communication was mysterious, even impenetrable, as if something fundamentally untranslatable existed between us. I was, I guess, still disconnected from the conscious, living world and through fogs of trauma and medication, remained a spectator to the existent.

I communicated with very few people during this time, but I did send texts to my wife Rachelle. These are some of the ones I sent to her during the early stages of my recovery:

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Very thirsty. Want popsicle but they won’t let me have popsicle. The nurses are all very mean! Don’t understand. Please bring popsicle. CHERRY.

Why are you not here with popsicles? Very lonely. Very lonely for popsicle.

I love you.

Did I miss the spring?

Why are we in Africa? Were we visiting Douglas?

Oh. Not in Africa. Nurse said that, but thought she was lying.

Am scared when the machines beep. They are sounding an alarm to say that something in my body is broken or on fire.

I miss your blue, blue eyes.

My nurse is an assassin. Cruel eyes and self-loathing. Might be a serial killer. Am terrified when brings me my pills. Must kill her patients and then gets drunk at night, feeling powerful.

I want to be in a lake. Dog just about to jump in from the dock.

What’s going on in Game of Thrones? Has everybody been raped and killed or do some survive?

Food here not made with love. Sort of thing you give jailed enemy.

Do I have jailed enemies now?

Would like to have several jailed enemies. That would be AWESOME.

Brian and Laura should be thrown in tower.

Never heard a word from them. They only care about volleyball and renting house for Pan-Am games.

Is Hunstman spider fastest land creature? Can’t remember.

I want to sit on a sloped field of green with you and our son Jones, drinking lemonade on a checkered blanket, the world around us.

Every culture, language, disposition and illness imaginable was there, all lumped together. There were police officers guarding jittery prisoners, old, African women wearing tribal dresses spitting into clay pots, thick-necked Eastern European men with narrow eyes, a furious construction worker with a broken arm and a smirking teen with an infected belly button piercing. Nurses, tough as nails, stood like fire hydrants and shouted down anybody who tried to intimidate their way past triage, while cocky EMT workers, like bodyguards, struck poses around them.

A few affluent people who felt they didn’t belong there looked inconvenienced and glowered busily on their cell phones, every once in awhile looking up, hoping to find the eyes of somebody else who shared their dissatisfaction with customer service, while dotted amongst were the homeless, some of whom were just looking for shelter. They were aware of the disgust the entitled felt about sitting amongst them, and one of them, a holy and ruined man of 60, was an oracle. He issued forth a stream of undirected words, each one burning with some combination of genius, madness and menace, which then hung in the room like the smoke of prophecy.

Toronto, like a lot of cities, or at least by virtue of the way a lot of us assemble in cities, is a de facto gated community. Here, the gate was open. There was something almost Medieval about the scene, the squalor of it, our suffering so intimate and visible, our secrets now manifest. There was no separation of our humanity or of our innate and arbitrary vulnerability—we were all just there, hoping for intervention and mercy.

This, of course, is the destiny of each one of us, but it’s rare that we catch a glimpse of it. We don’t see or share in the suffering of other people on a daily basis. Those people, the sick, scared and wounded, are behind closed doors, and we just imagine that they don’t exist, or that they inhabit a land we will never visit, but this isn’t true.

I was driven to the ER by a cab that day, and I could see the driver’s eyes in the rear view mirror, concerned, looking back at me. (It turns out I had a respiratory virus that was making it very difficult to breathe.) I’m sure he could see that I was scared, and gently he began to speak to me, “It is okay, you are going to be alright, my friend, I can see that. You are going to be fine. Okay? No, I do not need your money. It is my pleasure to have the opportunity to help.” He smiled at me and nodded his head, “Yes, go now, get better, you have a life yet to lead.”

It was as if a saint had taken me in transit, and his blessing, his encouragement was a beautiful miracle unto itself.