It’s the coldest day of the year and somewhere within, each one of us feels a premonition of mortality shudder our bones. The foyer of the Western Hospital has more homeless people than usual. Mostly men with jagged, unfashionable beards, they curl into the hospital’s available lounge chairs. Shapeless under their winter gear and salvaged miscellany, they appear to be melting—whatever had lived inside, now collapsed and unsupported. These people, so candid, they doze all around us.

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.

After the meal, Rachelle went off to run some errand with her sister while I decided to wander about the streets of our old neighbourhood.

Not sure where to go, I just stood on the sidewalk attempting the appearance of somebody who was making an important decision. This must have looked like providence to the woman walking by. She did a double-take, and then looked intently at me me, this man pulling an oxygen tank behind him lost in deep thought. She smiled, wanted me to know a bit about God, and handed me a pamphlet that asked the question, “Will suffering ever end?”

As if in answer to that, a street person immediately joined me on the corner. I would guess that she was in her 20’s, but she might have been younger. Through her wounded shell, you could see the beauty inside, how if just a few things had been different in her life, this capacity for joy would have blossomed.

She didn’t seem to want much more than company, as she just stood beside me, somehow assuming an immediate and willing position of subordination. It was as if we were now, and always had been, part of the same pack, and I was the Alpha.

Strung out and jittery, she kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other, sometimes moving in small circles in order to scan the horizon in all directions. Between her fingers she kept the small stub of a cigarette. There was little tobacco in it, but she worried it between her fingers like Rosary beads, asking each person who passed if they had a light. I tried to communicate to her that because of the oxygen tank I had with me, I couldn’t be around an open flame as it might cause an explosion, but she didn’t seem to understand.

I had to leave, but I didn’t want to. I felt protective, like she needed me there. I wanted to help her somehow, but the circumstance of my oxygen tank and her need to smoke were dangerous.

“Okay, I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

She looked disappointed.

“I can’t talk,” she began, “my words go away and I can’t find them, but I want you to know I’m big.” Her eyes were wide and she stretched out her arms, “I’m more.”  

After being rejected by two guys and then seeing me approaching, he said in a voice that was both inviting and reproachful, “Hey man, don’t be like those guys, why dontcha buy one?” I shook my head, and this brought out his bitterness, “ You’re not in a hurry, man, you’re not doing anything, I can see that!”

He was right, but it still felt like an insult, like it was intended to be an insult, and as I sat down to have a tea on front of the Common, I was now acutely aware that I was no different than any of the other drifters who composed the street at this hour.

A young homeless man with a big, spacey grin on his face and a huge backpack slung over his shoulders came down the sidewalk. Everything made him happy, and when he saw my tea he beamed as if he had just seen a mystical object. I thought he might reach down and take it, but a display bicycle in front of Curbside Cycle caught his eye. Fashionable, with a big, wooden delivery container at the front, it was just sitting there, one of those art objects that got people in off the street to talk to the engaging staff.

The homeless guy just got on this bike, and silently, practically invisibly, turned into traffic and vanished into the city. It was astonishing, this, like something imagined rather than seen. Curious to see how the world would unfold without intervention, I did nothing. Nobody did anything, until one of the employees happened out of the store, noticed the missing bike and had events explained to him by a preoccupied deliveryman, who pointed down the street.

As if created for just such an occasion, two young men rocketed out onto the street from the store and sprinted off after the missing bike. They were built for this. Not for violence or displays of virility, but because their native disposition was to act, to confidently not be a bystander. A pretty girl came out from the store and watched after them, standing on a concrete city planter as if a pedestal and staring off into the horizon after her knights. And there was something beautiful and heartbreaking in this, and in their return five minutes later with the purloined bike, and once again the winners having won, the loser having lost.

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.

Her legs had been amputated just above the knees and parts of her fingers were missing, too. The area where her fingers stumped were swollen, red and bleeding, and smears of blood were all over her sweatpants, jacket and the two bags of cat food she was looking to buy. He hair was a dangerous nest of possibility and her eyes were angry and lost. She was talking, in a fractured but not incoherent kind of way, but it wasn’t clear to whom, and as she was doing this she was cutting the line. The security guard, moving in an I-hate-my-job way, was coming over to stop her, while the cashier, with a look of horror on her face, recoiled.

I did not know what I should do. The suffering and need of this woman could not be more vivid. I wanted to be Jesus, I wanted to selflessly love and help her, but I did not.

I stood there paralyzed, thinking about the blood-streaked bags of cat food on her lap and how they were going to get from there to the cash. I did not want to be a part of that process and so I decided to buy the cat food for her. This cost $4. I did this out of self-interest rather than altruism. The cashier and everybody in line seemed relieved.

Then one of the bags fell from her lap to the floor– as if a bell tolling, a command to be more involved in her suffering than I was willing to be. Again, I just stood there, waiting for somebody else to become alive to this moment, and then I saw something in her hands that looked a lipstick container and it struck me that perhaps this was all a performance and she had smeared lipstick on herself in order to look like blood and garner sympathy! It was an act!

It was an astonishing cognitive leap, this. There are homeless, broken people all over Toronto, and in order to inure ourselves to this procession of misery, we have to believe there’s a level of performance to the suffering. We construct ridiculous narratives that keep us distant from those asking for our help. Maybe it was all just a ruse, but no, no. This woman needed to buy cat food– either to eat or to feed to the one point of light in her life–and there was blood all over it and it was lying on the floor two feet from where I stood.

For what felt like a minute but was probably closer to 20 seconds, nobody did a thing, and then a woman bent down and with a gloved hand picked up the bag of cat food and returned it to the woman’s lap, the security guard then rolled the panhandler out, and the rest of us continued with our day as if nothing had happened.

Like the restaurant itself, the waitress working when I was there was easy to overlook. She wore her generic black and white server’s attire as if camouflage. Bespectacled and with practical black hair that obscured her features, she moved quickly, whether she was approaching a task or finishing one.  She avoided eye contact and wore make-up in the fashion of somebody who wasn’t accustomed to wearing make-up, as if it, too, were part of the disguise she had to wear for work.  Perfunctory and with her head down, she was a delivery system who offered up no clues as to what her life exterior to the restaurant might be like.

The place wasn’t very busy and she was getting off early. She cashed out quickly, without hanging around to have a glass of wine or something to eat the way that restaurant staff often does. In her friendless manner she hurried out the door, stopping when a homeless woman sitting on a milk crate said something to her.  They spoke for a moment or two and then the waitress took out her purse, gave the woman some money and then hugged her right there on the sidewalk. For nearly a minute they must have embraced, and then after having wiped away a tear the waitress left, moving into the rest of her unseen life.

Across from this, splayed on a bench lay a dusty, shirtless man baking in the sun, all of his life’s possessions scattered about him like discarded Kleenex. It felt like he was trying to defy his circumstance, the weather and all the people who had been trying in small ways to help him.

As I was locking my bicycle a tall, beautiful Russian woman, just as thin and cruel as a switchblade, walked toward me. She was a tennis superstar, a billionaire’s trophy, somebody who would never fall in love, and the language she used with her companion was precise and directional. There was not a sentimental bone in her body, and concealed beneath her sunglasses she was still able to make it clear that she wanted me out of her way. Disdainful, she was a supermodel who would not break stride, and I hurried in my task, trying to make myself smaller and less obtrusive as the city beyond opened up before her terrible beauty.  And then, just a few moments later, a middle-aged man talking to himself, his hands a fury of unknowable intent, walked past me too, “ I don’t care, I’ll take the day off work, end up downtown and probably get a blow-job,” he said to nobody living in the visible present.

At the Real Thailand restaurant, beneath faded pictures of some Thai King, sat a scattering of elderly, single women sitting alone at various tables. With swollen ankles and sunken faces, they stared straight ahead. Their hearts and minds elsewhere, they existed within humid, little bubbles of sadness.

In front of a corner store a beggar noticed my Montreal Expos t-shirt and we fell into a conversation about the city and baseball team, discovering that we lived there at the same time. Free associating, as if on some sort of game show, we shouted out the names of all our favourite players:

Andre Dawson!

El Presidente!

Casey Candaele!

Pasquel Perez!

Hubie Brooks!

And then we reminisced  about the unhurried evenings we had each spent at the Big O watching games. Sitting in the cheap seats smoking cigarettes and drinking our knapsack beer, the future we were both living on this hot afternoon so distant and unimaginable.

Just as I was about to move forward and pay for my items an old woman stepped wordlessly in front of me in the line. I looked down and saw that she had left her basket on the floor there before me. She dropped a few items into it and made a point of avoiding eye contact with me before pointing her chin up and away in a haughty, indifferent way. It irritated me a little bit, the way that these types of things do, and I watched her. Her hair was touchingly dyed the way that all grandmothers seem to colour their hair and the paint on her fingernails was chipped and fading, her fingers bent and swollen. On the back of each hand was a small, gauze bandage that had been taped into place by a nurse, little, island bruises spreading out from beneath— the signs of chemotherapy. When she left the store she got into a red Sentra that was idling in front, and sat down and smiled as if relieved. Her daughter or granddaughter, the woman who was driving, also smiled and they drove off, the old woman now happy, her basket full of the vegetables she need to make that special dish for her family who still remained.

Heading home I passed a beautiful young woman. The sunlight caught her hair and her cheeks were pinched  a healthy rose by the autumn. Her right leg was in a brace and she used a cane to help as she threw one side of her body in front of the other, heaving up the street toward the subway, beauty and sadness falling indiscriminately upon the world around us.

There were a few other people standing around watching the bin.

A woman walking a poodle, a consensus builder, I think, said, “We should call 311!”

Street guy: “You mean 911, lady.”

Woman: “No, 311, it’s the number you call when you have a city related question or see somebody committing graffiti!”

Street guy: “Committing graffiti?”

Woman: “ The garbage bin is city property, they must have a protocol for such an event!”

I decided to show some leadership.

Me: “ No, this isn’t a situation for government intervention, this is a time for us to come together as citizens.”

Woman: “I still think we should call 311.”

Me: “I’m going to put out the goddamn fire.”

( this is the bin that was smoking)

Street guy: “Who made you boss? I think we should just let it burn, man!”

I ignored him, reached into my knapsack and pulled out a bottle of water. I then poured all of it into the burning bin. Nothing happened.

Street Guy: “Nice job, Superman. You just poured your water into the recycling slot instead of the litter slot where the smoke is coming from.”

I put my hands on my hips and sighed.

More smoke was coming out.

Woman: “I’m calling 311.”

I pushed open the litter slot and peered in. I couldn’t see a thing.

Once again I put my hands on my hips and sighed.

Me: “I’m out of water.”

Woman: “I’m taking my dog away, this is becoming a dangerous situation.”

Street guy: “ Dangerous situation? I live on the streets, now that’s a dangerous situation!  This is nothing! Somebody flicked a cigarette butt into a fucking garbage can and now you two think the world is about to end!”

The woman quickly walked her dog away.

“Did you call 311?” I shouted after her.

She did not respond– she was gone, like a ghost.

Me: “I’m going to buy another bottle of water.”

Street guy: “Fuck the one percent. You’ll buy water for a pretend fire but not for me, and then you’ll pour that water down the wrong slot again.”

I went into the local corner store and bought two bottles of water, but when I came out the man who was running the food truck parked in front of the smoking garbage bin was spraying it down with a hose. He looked like an older, angry version of one of the Mario Brothers. When he saw me holding the two bottles of water in my hands that I had just bought he gave me a disdainful, pained look. And then he shook his head, rethinking something, “Come, come, I give you a free slushie, you do the best with what God gave you. What flavour you like?”

“Blue,” I said.

“Blue,” he repeated, “on the house.”