And all up and down University avenue, in front of all the hospitals, people are out over their lunch breaks. Workmen sit on a cement embankment smoking. They’re grungy, hung-over, covered in tattoos, their construction vests hanging open. There is a leanness to these men that is both in the eyes and of the body. Glistening with sweat, they watch everyone who passes before them. Every woman walking by knows this. Every man. Everyone judged. Everyone sized up.

, you know, the spot where you see www.michaelmurray.ca and type in “ Men can” followed by a space, the autofill will provide you with these five suggestions:

Men can get pregnant
Men can have babies
Men can have babies now
Men can have periods
Men can cook

The morning is all freezing rain.

I have to wear a big blue poncho over my oxygen concentrator so that the moisture doesn’t damage the machine, and the tiny ice pellets coming into contact with it sound like kernels of corn popping, like flames crackling. Jones and I are happy enough. The rain, neither liquid nor solid at this point, is sparking freshly off our faces, it’s chemistry in the process of revision as it tumbles from one form to another.

Ted, who works for our landlord, is outside. He seems ancient, like he was born from the earth rather than flesh. His exterior more bark than skin. And he is reaching into a bucket of salt and bare-handing it onto the sidewalks. Like he’s feeding chicken. Like he’s scattering seeds. Up and down the street he wanders.

Jones and I make our way slowly and carefully toward daycare. Jones stopping for every fallen thing.

Jones climbing every mound of snow. Jones stomping every plate of ice. Before us are men shovelling the snow and slush from their part of the sidewalk. Maybe four or five of them stretching up the street. Each one feeling useful and alive in the elements, each one happy to have a weight to carry. A need to fill. Each one smiles and waves as we pass. My oxygen concentrator venting beneath the poncho so that it billows at regular intervals, pulsing– puffing out and then receding, again and again. Jones small and wild beside me, we’re anime characters now, passing through the ghost clouds of the day and into the great and mysterious universe waiting beyond our sight.

The other day my wife Rachelle Maynard posted this on a Buy, Sell and Trade Facebook group she belongs to:

LIKE NEW BLUNDSTONES 7.5 Mens or 9.5 Womens

$150

Don’t spend $250 on a new pair of Blundstones your husband will never wear because they’re just a little bit hard to slip on. No. Don’t be angry he’s only worn them 3 times and doesn’t truly appreciate the kindness of your gift. So just buy these instead. They are in near perfect shape. They come with a box and everything. Pick up near Bloor and Spadina.

Comments:

Sahara: Forgive me, but your husband sounds like a bit of an asshole.

Anne: Nice colours!

Emily: I agree with Sahara, your husband sounds like a real piece of work. He better look like Daniel Craig is all I can say! LOL!!

Sahara: I once heard about a husband who took his wife to a Lord of the Rings movie marathon on their wedding anniversary! He thought if she saw them all at once, in order, then she would love them like he did. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?

Dina: I would cut a bastard if he did that to me on our anniversary.

Betty: My husband is also an asshole. #MeToo

Stephanie: Sounds like he has pretty small feet! LOL!!

Emily: Men are trash.

Jen: You know, I have absolutely no doubt of my innate superiority to my husband, and pretty much all men, in fact, yet I still end up feeling oppressed. How the hell does that end up happening?

Nicki: Smash the Patriarchy!

Robynne: Would it be possible to come by on Tuesday around 4:00 to have a look?

Elena: My husband is also a jerk. #MeToo

Misha: I started to notice that whenever I walked into the room my husband would slam his laptop shut. He said it was fantasy hockey. Turns out he meant porn. Dirty, disgusting porn #MeToo

Treena: I would dump his small-footed ass. You can do better Rachelle. You deserve better. We all do.

Lisa: I swear to God, my husband can’t even figure out how to work the remote. Why are they all so fucking incompetent??? Why do we have to do EVERYTHING??? #MeToo

Beth: The fucker doesn’t deserve boots.

Maria: Make him walk barefoot in the snow. #MeToo

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.

A beautiful woman in a sundress,  her hair still wet from the morning shower, was trying to unlock a door. The sun was falling upon her, the wooden porch, the entire red brick face of the home. She didn’t have the right key and was struggling with the lock, with how her morning was assembling itself, and she tossed her head back in frustration. Tiny, almost imagined droplets of water were cast from her hair and caught in the sunlight, and everything seemed to stop for a moment. 

And then a raccoon, having slipped from night into day, emerged from behind a tree. With his detached animal knowingness he stared directly at us. Jones, astonished, squealed at the miracle, while the raccoon, keeping to the shadows, disappeared back into the night of some protective greenery. Up at the corner, at the mulberry tree and raspberry bushes,  so many berries had been crushed on the sidewalk that they looked like paintball splatters. There were berries hanging above us and growing from the earth beneath us, and it was like we’d passed into a different realm and were now moving through a fertile, green tunnel. As I was picking a raspberry for Jones, a woman sprinted by us toward the subway. Plugged into her iPhone, with a knapsack on her back and a briefcase in one hand, she was ready for the big meeting, ready to present the best version of herself to the world. She was moving fast, like an athlete who still retained her running form from college, days that had recently started to feel further and further away. 

An older man, immaculately dressed in wardrobe that looked from another century, ambled up the street coming to pass a college-aged woman wearing a bright yellow dress. Her face was still new, and she carried with her a pronounced, heaving limp that was mysterious and beautiful and sad, and when she smiled past us, there was the unexpected scent of clove cigarettes and skin cream. A butterfly then appeared and it was a sign. Perhaps a spirit guide, and Jones declared that we must follow it, and so we did– everything around us like still lingering dreams from the previous night, only now beginning to fade into the waking day.

They didn’t talk much, although the one with the small, white hospital towel draped over his knees, offered that, “heart disease might be involved, too.” He took a drag from his cigarette as he waited for a response. You could see the tattoos covering his hand, the IV piercing the skin just above the word HATE spelled out on his knuckles, the smoke being exhaled. The other guy nodded. He had nothing to say. And with that the conversation disintegrated. Just space between them now. An unbroachable distance. Grief-struck and lost, a million miles apart, they looked through all the people passing by on the sidewalk in front of them, and stared off into other worlds.

Upstairs at the bar there’s an unrelenting press of people. So many of them. Jostling together excitedly, they’re all hopeful on this festive night out, each one wanting to feel special in some regard, each one waiting for their life to pivot. Unshaven Bros in sports toques and ball caps, beta predators who only move in packs of two and threes, are looking over at a cluster of Friday night women worrying their phones. Men are pushed up against the bar three deep, each one competing for something.

The bartender is at the centre of it all.

Although completely overwhelmed, she’s working calmly through the chaos. Surrounded on all sides by some sort of want, she makes a millions subtle calculations with each one of her actions. Each person is a problem that must be solved, a fire that must be extinguished. Her face determined, she moves fluidly and with purpose, and all the men encircling her at the bar with their steaks and Keg-sized glasses of red wine, are watching.

A man around 60 leans in. Everyone is leaning in, trying to flag her attention. This man, he’s lived his life handsome, and the confident residue of that lingers within him still, “Can I be next?” he asks in a salesman’s voice. The bartender forces a smile and takes his order, and all the other men waiting stiffen a little, jealous.

He is pleased with himself, this man. He feels special.

When she returns, he leans in yet further, “That tattoo on your right forearm, the roman numerals, are they from your favourite Shakespeare passage? Are you an actress?”

It is not clear that she is flattered by this attention, but she gives a partial, evasive answer.

“It’s a date,” she says, giving the man a polite, discouraging smile. Gesturing to how busy she is, she moves to disengage and tend to other preening, signalling men, but this man was not finished. “This is my favourite passage,” he began, and then in his best Shakespearian accent:

“If music be the food of love, play on.

Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die…”

And she is trapped, so trapped she is almost suspended in air.

Her eyes close for just a moment, as if it is all too much, and then she reanimates herself and begins to applaud robustly, cutting the man’s recitation short. It was as if a battle had been won, and she got to keep the secret of the tattoo– something so important, so crucial to who she wanted to be, that she had it written into her flesh–for herself.

It’s as if the adult world has been rendered small, simple and fun, and as we boarded the ferry for the three minute journey to the airport, we felt like children getting on a ride at the CNE. It was first thing in the morning and a dense fog hung mysteriously around us, covering everything.

We could not see where we were going, and this created an atmosphere of adventure and whimsy, and in this context all the businessmen looked particularly ridiculous. Each one of them in a suit that suggested the distance between the corporate status to which they aspired and the disappointing status that they’d actually been assigned, they sat in isolated, self-important concentration. Brows furrowed over spread sheets and columns of data, their too-large fingers hunted-and-pecked on miniature keypads, and it was all a little heart-breaking. Like kids pretending at being adults, they attempted to project that what they were doing was of vital importance, but you could tell that inside they all knew better.

Inside they still wanted to discover a waterfall.
Swim with a knife clenched between their teeth.
Find the hidden treasure.

To our son Jones, who is nearly two, everything is a wonder. He is on the edge of language, and his words, mysterious and uncontainable, are still holier than ours. Excited, almost breathless, he exploded onto the ferry with bright, astonished eyes. He ran around pointing, naming everything he saw. The businessmen all kept their heads down—there was important work to be done—but an older couple watched, smiling as this new world broke into day around our son, aware they were in the midst of a tiny God now bringing his universe into being.

There’s always one just-past-middle-aged man– usually with long grey hair pulled back into a pony tail or up into a samurai knot– executing some interpretation of a martial art using a huge wooden stick or some such. Whenever I see one of these men I am forced to imagine their apartment, and I do not like that. I do not like the fabrics and odours and screensavers

that puts in my head, and so I’ve always kept a kind of hostile distance from them.

Our park, the park where we take our son Jones to play every day, has one of these guys. He is pudgy, dresses all in black, and looks like somebody whose life had been taken over by Columbine ninja fantasies a long time ago.

As such, I have not yet chatted with him, and have chosen instead to make fun of him behind his back. However, since my completion of pulmonary rehabilitation I have hired a personal trainer and I now work-out in this park, which brings me in direct competition with the Columbine ninja for the creepiest man in the park. Yesterday, he was stationed, with his collection of magic sticks, by the bench where I now work out.

This is the conversation that took place:

Me: Hey there, what are you up to!?

Columbine Ninja: ( Continues his maneuvers without saying a word.)

Me: I’m about to work-out. Here. By this bench. This one here. Is that okay with you?

Columbine Ninja: (Raises one hand to shush me)

Me: (Begins to pull out resistance bands from a Shopper’s Drug Mart bag)

Columbine Ninja: You must never disturb a warrior when he is training.

Me: Are you a warrior?

Columbine Ninja: ( Does a maneuver with his big stick, strikes the branch of a tree)

Me: Nice.

Columbine Ninja: The true warrior is invisible to those who cannot see.

Me: Yes, of course, I should have known that.

Columbine Ninja: Not all who wander are lost.

Me: Are you a part-time life coach or something?

Columbine Ninja: I am a student, not the master.

Me: Uber driver?

Columbine Ninja: I am a student of Kenjutsu!

Me: I think you work at a weed dispensary.

Columbine Ninja: Anata wa seik? shite imasu.

Me: What was that, Klingon? That doesn’t impress me in the least.

Columbine Ninja: I wonder why it is that you have trouble breathing? Is it because you fear life? I think you are a scared man. In Kenjutsu they teach you how to control your breathing, how to master your fear before it masters you!

Me: I only have one lung.

Columbine Ninja: And all you need in order to live a failed life is one excuse.

And then the Columbine Ninja just walked away and I commenced the most melancholy work-out in history.

Excellent form, though.