And today, some 40 years later, Jones and I are walking on the sidewalk between snowbanks on our way to daycare. But Jones is an adventurer, he needs more life than that, so I help him up to the mountains. We’re holding hands as he balances on the changing topography, and he could not be happier. “I’m taller than you, daddy!”, he shouts. The sun is behind us, our long shadows cast before us like a path. Jones the long one, mine the short. He looks at me, smiling, “Daddy, are you happy?” A question of such unexpected beauty. My radiant beast, so vividly alive, caring whether his father is happy or not. I tell him that I am very happy, that I could not be happier, in fact, and Jones says, “I’m happy, too!” And so we continue, both stronger now. The sunlight bouncing off the thin membranes of ice covering the branches in the trees above us. Everything imperishable.

One in red scrubs, the other in black.

These women, they are attractive. Around thirty, they look like they’re used to getting hit on in bars, to knowing what it feels like to have a man watching carefully as she leans over the pool table to take a shot. Neither woman makes eye contact or acknowledges anyone else in the elevator. There is an unspoken hierarchy. We all know it.

There is a task before you.
What do you desire from this task?
Describe what happens.

*****************************************

Since last we spoke many have fallen and I have come to understand numbers.

I have learned that I can take a punch, if it’s a glancing blow. My punctuation comes and goes, since last we spoke. I have forgotten lyrics and come to believe in angels. Received dangerous information of a sexual nature. Realized the only ones I really like are the kids. I don’t want them to work. I want them to stay as they are, perfect things, almost perfect, running and happy. The light is always moving within them. Since last we spoke there has been chanting and a kind bus driver with flowing grey hair. Music and fires, and an Elvis impersonator, but no UFO’s, although I hungered for them.

Since last we spoke, black cats and the possibility of ghosts. Vitamins dissolved into water and planes crashing all over the world. Into Jungles. Into Oceans. Into Mountains and corn fields and unknowable bodies of water. The weather, so much weather has happened since last we spoke. The hurricanes! Like buzz saws they cut across the oceans. Memories. Memories were forged and lost. Driving easy through the streets, late, windows rolled down. That’s The Way I Like It by KC and the Sunshine Band blaring. Head out the window like a dog, hopeful that more of the world might pour within. I lingered over you, since last we spoke. I wanted to be nude with you, under a dirty sheet in a borrowed house. I wanted to climb a tree and become all of the leaves. Since last we spoke I remembered your eyes, the way they changed and became lonely. The way they stayed lonely. I have eaten too much bread, since last we spoke, and walked impossible fields that lay like green blankets before deep water. I have used the Instant Pot and ridden my bicycle with no hands, but I have not changed my mind about Dolly Parton, since last we spoke.

Rachelle and I took our son Jones to Ramsden Park on the weekend.

It was another very hot day and everybody there was looking forward to letting their kids loose in the splash pad, but it wasn’t quite ready when we got there. A worker dressed in a full body orange hazmat suit waded through the water carefully pouring chlorine, while the children, confined to the perimeter by their parents, twitched like racehorses, desperate to get out of the gate and into the world. When the All Clear sign was given, the children ran screaming and dancing into the fountains of water, and the goodness and fortune in that moment was a living, profound thing. The parents happy and relieved, receded into shade, and the worker in the hazmat suit stepped out of that second skin revealing her astonishing, natural beauty as if a slow-motion scene from a movie. All afternoon, all summer, perhaps, similarly aged teen boys hung about, trying to think of winning things to say.

Jones played hard for about ninety minutes. Everything urgent and happy, everything expanding. And when it was over and we started to walk up the street to the car, we came upon a home that was being renovated. A worker was operating a digger, and to Jones this was a Bigfoot sighting. Jones was born under the sign of The Digger, you see. The Digger is his spirit guide. The Digger is everything. And the man driving it saw the impossible wonder in Jones’ face and offered to let him come into the cab and sit on his lap for a minute while he worked. And Jones did, his little hands on the levers, his life now something he was dreaming as much as something he was living.

Jones, an inch away from three, glowing like a little sun. And I am thinking about memory and when it begins, and as he was smiling out at Rachelle and I, everyone so proud and happy, all I could think was, “Let it be now, please Lord, let this be the first waking memory of his life in this world.”

I used to spend an awful lot of time in taverns.

Typically, I’d take my place amidst a stretch of solitary men drinking at a long bar. The conversation was a slow background rumbling, almost like distant thunder, and it lasted all night.

Sports.

The weather.

Women.

TV.

The past.

Strangers who had no expectation of seeing one another again, with little in common beyond the drink in front of them, making a conscious effort not to be alone, to try in some way, to connect. These conversations were beautiful to me, and I’ve come to miss them.

As a substitute, I’ve taken to listening to Sports Talk radio at night. The other day was a call-in show out of Toronto. Lacey from Oshawa had a few things to say about the Blue Jays. She was stubbornly defending third baseman Josh Donaldson:

“ Josh is far and away the greatest Blue Jay, and just because he’s injured the team shouldn’t quit on him! He’s given them everything, and now they just want to abandon him? That’s just so crappy. You can’t treat people like that. It’s wrong.”

The voice was familiar, and as I listened I realized that I knew her. Lacey from Oshawa was part of a group of patients I did pulmonary reahb with at a facility in Toronto. She was so thin then, and so angry, and every single day she wore a Blue Jays jersey with Josh Donaldson’s name on the back.

Her path had been difficult, and the heavy veil of sadness and pain that shrouded her was rarely lifted. Maybe at Bingo, if she got a line, she might allow herself a thin, bitter smile, but that was about it. She simply could not bring herself to socialize, and what we found out about her was through observation and hearsay, all of which reduced to this: when she fell ill and became incapacitated her husband left with their young son. That was how her life had worked out.

As I listened to her on the radio, hearing her speak more than I had in the two months we shared at rehab, I heard a stronger, braver voice. She was– with this phone call decrying a lack of loyalty to somebody doing their best in the face of physical limitations– making a conscious effort not to be alone. She was reaching out, and it felt like a miracle that I got to witness this, that I got to imagine her recovered and at home, fully herself now, and fighting for somebody she loved.

Rachelle, Jones and I were in the backyard– the adults sipping coffee while Jones patrolled the U-shaped garden that frames the patio where we were sitting. Above us was an incredible canopy of leaves and branches. Somehow, it seemed a deeper and more vivid green than it should have been, and then, cutting through this foliage was the kind of sunlight that makes you think of Bible illustrations, and beyond that, nothing but the rich, blue infinity of a sky that knew everything.

Jones, propelling himself Fred Flinstone-style in a toy car he likes to play in, came over to us. He was the ice cream truck. Cheerfully, almost professionally, he offered us make-believe ice cream cones with make-believe sprinkles. His spontaneous joy in this theatre was a living, radiant thing, and the feeling it gave was not unlike if a deer had wandered into the yard and nuzzled us.

It felt that soft, that pure.

And then after a minute or two had passed, Jones stood up on the one step that leads from our apartment to the patio. The sun shone upon him like a spotlight, and an angelic babble issued forth as he waved his arms about like a preacher in full sermon. The language he was speaking was unknown to us, but it seemed like the right language, the one the voiceless world around him already seemed to understand, and the only one that corresponded to what was shining within.

I was sure Jones was performing a blessing, and it was humbling to feel just how lucky we were to be alive in this flimsy and glittering world, and to be lifted up beyond it by such small soft hands, even if just for a moment.

When the waitress brings me the bill she sucks in her cheeks like a super-model and shakes her shoulders from side to side, “Good music tonight”, she says.

George Michael is playing.

Freedom.

I like her, although I am not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because she’s wearing a grey t-shirt just like the one you had. Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe I like her because the grey t-shirt she’s wearing connects me to you, helps me to draw a line back to your body.

At the table next to me sits a couple. The man has thick fingers and puffy eyes, and the woman is skinny and looks reflexively defensive, like she’s used to evading attack. They are speaking slowly, as if English were their second language, but it’s not. They’re just drunk and concentrating, trying to summon something true from their well of hurt. He looks into his glass and then up into her wary eyes, “There is something about you I have been missing so much,” he says.

And the waitress, looking from side to side at the nearly empty pub, sighs as I dig out my credit card to pay the bill. I ask her why the heavy sigh. She tells me that it’s been a long day.

And then there is a pause, and in that moment the space between us fills with something.

It’s sadness.

It’s desire.

And we look at one another, our invisible lives inching closer now, everything closer.

The other day I was in a cab heading east on Bloor Street.

It was a beautiful, sunny day in autumn, a lucky day, even, but I was preoccupied by petty grievance. The driver was a smoker, and in order to air out his car before he picked me up he’d opened all the windows. You’d think I’d appreciate this, but I couldn’t get past the heavy, permanent smell of smoke, and the open windows were just serving as conduits, breaches through which all my seasonal allergies might stream. Somewhat unkindly, I asked him to close the windows, which he did, and with that it was like a wall went up between us.

As we approached Varsity Stadium he reopened a couple of the windows I had asked him to close, but before I could protest, music thumped into the car. A marching band–glittering in red and undulating like a flag– was in the stands performing the Battle Hymn of the Republic while a football game unfolded beneath.

Somehow this ignited a million unanticipated things at once, and we drove through the music with our heads out the window, as if it was weather we thirsted for.

On the field U of T was playing Queens and the crowd sounded like a tiny ocean. The athletes, all perfect, all aimed from birth to this moment in time, stood about like gold and blue statues. And one of them was going to make the best catch of his life, something he would return to again and again over the course of his life. Somebody else was going to get injured and never be quite the same. And in that crowd another person would see a beautiful young woman smile and feel nourished. A woman in a wheelchair felt the sun, and parents from small cities and towns, drove in to see their now grown children– now so terribly missed, now just beyond their protective reach.

The driver, whom I had forgotten about for a moment, startled me by speaking.

“I am not from here, so none of this is familiar to me,” He gestured toward the football stadium. “But still, when I hear that music and see all the people, it calls me in my bones. It is a kind of nostalgia, but for what I do not know.”

I don’t much like the food here at Pulmonary Rehab.

The hatred of hospital food is pretty much a universal, and so I imagined that all the other residents would share my point of view. But no, I was dead wrong. The people I spoke with liked the food, even the simulated pork thing that had been pressed to make it look like ribs.

The reasons for this are simple enough. Many of the people here– by virtue of their condition– are unable to work and have little money. Many of them are older and live alone, lacking the will, funds or ability to attentively feed themselves, and are thus entirely grateful when a meal is delivered to them three times a day. This food, regardless of its quality and regardless of whether it’s “Instagrammable” or not, is a good thing.

Its presence is a relief, a daily stress crossed-out.

People enter into this program eroded and depressed, little more than shadows of who they once were. On Fridays we’re allowed to go home for the weekend, but not everybody does. Some people are too sick or live too far away, but others stay because they have nothing they want to return to.

One man, heavy with sad eyes, said to me as he settled in before the TV, “Why would I want to go home and just sit there, staring at my four walls? I like it better here.”

Sometimes people forget just how breakingly lonely illness can be.

But soon enough, people are reanimated. Men who wouldn’t make eye contact when they entered are shortly cracking wise, singing along to the oldies while working out, and women who hadn’t played cards in years are laughing together over Euchre.

Collected from disparate lives and thrown together in common cause, we get to know one another gradually, through the honesty of proximity rather than the spin of words. You see the pain first, because you know the pain, too. But gradually, that’s chipped away to reveal the person lost inside, the person capable of joy and wonder. It’s a gift, this, and all of us here gathered beneath the mortal cloud of our illness become family, and will linger as family long after each one of us has stepped out the door and receded back into the mysterious worlds from which we came.