I am an excellent father and husband.

A true family leader.

As such, I often find it necessary to call Family Councils so that my wife Rachelle, and our three year-old son, Jones,

can discuss important issues as they arise. These are the minutes from a recent Council:

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Michael: Okay, Council #37 is now in order. I know that Jones has a matter that’s been troubling him. Jones, would you like to take Thor’s Hammer from daddy so that you might air your grievances?

Jones: NO!!! I WANT CAPTAIN AMERICA’S SHIELD!!

Michael: We’ve talked about this Jones, you wave Captain America’s shield when you want to be acknowledged by the Daddy Moderator, and you hold Thor’s Hammer when you have the floor. It’s sometimes hard to keep straight in your head, but it’s very important.

Rachelle: Why? Why is it important?

Michael: You see Jones, Mommy just forgot to wave Captain America’s shield to signal that she wished to speak, so the Daddy Moderator has no choice but to OWWW! Jesus Christ Rachelle! That thing hurts! You do know I’m on blood thinners, right? You know that’s going to bruise. It’s not just against protocol to throw the shield, it’s medically unsafe!

Jones: NO TALK DADDY!! JONES TALK!!

Michael: I cede Thor’s Hammer to Jones.

Rachelle: Jonesy, what’s the matter?

Jones: I want to break a chair.

Rachelle: Because of something daddy did?

Jones: Yes. Daddy did it.

Rachelle: What did daddy do?

Jones: I’M GREEN HULK!

Michael: (Waving Captain America’s shield ) Jones? Jones? Can daddy please have Thor’s Hammer so he can speak?

Jones: NO! YOU LIZARD MAN NOW, DADDY!

Michael: Ha, see?! He wants to break a chair because he’s green Hulk, not because I did anything wrong!

Rachelle: Oh, really? Jones, is green Hulk mad because daddy is always finishing Jones’ dinosaur puzzles?

Jones: Yes!

Michael: You know, I put our Family Council protocols in place for a reason. Without strict adherence to shield/hammer regulation the chain of evidence falls apart! And Rachelle, you should know better than to ask leading questions of a child!!

Jones: GREEN HULK SMASH DADDY WITH CHAIR!

Michael: No! Put that down! I’m not kidding, Jones. Put. It. Down.

Jones: You Lizard Man, daddy, green Hulk smash you face!!

Rachelle: Oh my, green Hulk is so strong, I think Lizard Man had best do exactly what you say and let Jones work on his puzzles on his own, and at his own pace!

Michael: Lizard Man is sorry to have finished your puzzle.

Rachelle: Lizard Man has OCD. He has it bad.

Michael: No. Lizard Man does not. He just thinks that if you start something, it is your obligation to finish it.

Rachelle: Lizard Man thinks no such thing. Lizard Man has seen about five minutes of every show on Netflix, before abandoning them. Lizard Man started driving lessons, but never took a driver’s test, and he’s been on page 36 of The Angel Effect for what? Four months now? Six months? Years, maybe? Lizard man is a liar! It’s his evil super power, green Hulk! You must smash the lies!!

Michael: This Family Council is now adjourned!!

The heat sat upon everything.

Oppressive and exhausting, it slowly disabled the day’s options. You couldn’t go outside. You couldn’t get comfortable. You couldn’t even think straight, and every time you moved it was as if this thing, this heavy, unseen entity, was wrapping itself just a little more tightly around you.

It was a long weekend and most of the people in Toronto seemed to have vacated the city for cottages. As Rachelle, Jones and I drove through the city to the Ontario Science Centre, we passed empty streetcars on empty roads, and on very rare occasion a person—always appearing slightly dazed, as if they’d just forgotten where they were going. There was a distinctly post-apocalyptic vibe in the still, dirty air, and it all felt as much a dream as not.

The Science Centre was very crowded, though, and it was filled with people just like us, people looking for a place that was open to the public, air-conditioned and entertaining for young children. We were all lucky, all of us there, lucky to have such a place available to us, lucky to be able to use it, and lucky beyond the known margins, too, lucky in ways none of us could even imagine.

But still, it wasn’t easy. It was crowded and loud, even chaotic, and Jones was so excited that he ran in crazed and unpredictable zigzags, and after a few hours we felt like cats chasing the red dot of a laser pointer. And as it approached noon, the children, all exhausted and hungry now, began to throw tantrums. It was like artillery going off, like fireworks.

One child would explode into tears, another one would kick a juice box out of a parent’s hand, and another would just flop face first on the floor and begin kicking his feet, screaming. And so it went, a spreading contagion that was simultaneously hilarious and crushing.

We managed to slither and bounce through it all to find a passage that led to descending escalators. There must have been two or three of them, each one travelling deeper and deeper down and through the wooded ravine the Science Centre was built into.

It was like being submerged in a forest, and the air became cooler and lighter as we descended, and when we stepped off into the refreshing, muted light of a wide open museum space, we were transformed.

About fifty feet in front of us rotating light projections were being cast onto the floor from the ceiling. Ladybugs. Stars. Race Cars. Mysterious fish. Geometric patters. All the children dancing beneath and within this light, and everything was beautiful and quiet and astonishing, like we had just been led to an illuminated cave full of dolphins at play in the purest waters.

Thin and pale, her hair was pulled back into a practical, oddly lonely ponytail. Her mother walked beside her, carrying the young woman’s belongings in a plastic bag and speaking cheerfully about trivial matters, as if relieved to finally be able to speak of trivial matters. She was trying to assure her daughter that she did not belong in a hospital, I think, and that she could just pick up her life wherever she had been forced to abandon it. The young woman said nothing as the mother talked, and although her eyes were still a little sunken and dull, there were traces of relief to be read in her tired and beautiful face.

They passed through the revolving door that led to University Avenue and stepped out into what must have felt like a miracle. The night was so unseasonably mild that it seemed like you’d just emerged into some temperate and surreal vacation– and everything, the waiting stand of festive cabs, the disembodied sounds of the night, everything,  felt laden with potential. The young woman stepped forward onto the sidewalk and looked up into the the dark canyon of sky above her. With arms outstretched and head back, she moved in a slow circle, as if calling the world back. When she was finished she was facing her mother, her arms still open. And in this unexpected moment their eyes caught. They smiled at each other, and then over the course of a second, maybe two, their smiles began to tremble, and then they were both in tears, sobbing and embracing on the sidewalk, the cab drivers looking quietly on.

It was an autumn cool morning, the dew still hanging off leaves. The air was light and clean and felt as if it came from very far away, and Jones’ eyes were so wide and bright they were like gravity– everything bending and speeding toward him.

A plane flew overhead and he froze on the sidewalk, pointing at the sky. He was blown-away and kept looking over at me to make sure I was seeing this miracle, too, this burning bush. I did not know how to explain the sky, or tell the story of how humans achieved flight, and so I just said, “Plane!”

He blinked into the sun and sky, continuing to look up through the green infinity of leaves, waiting for whatever else might streak across the sky. Squirrels, like shadows, jumped from branch to branch, and as this early light hit the red brick of the houses across the street, an old, prosperous looking man stepped out of his front door and got into his sports car. He’d traveled great distances to get to this beautiful autumn day, and he might have been wondering how many more of these good days he had left. He started the car and pulled out of the driveway, at which point three birds suddenly burst from a tree. Jones was amazed again. “Tree!”, he shouted, but his eyes were following the birds, each one of them off to unknowable adventures.

Jones stopped to examine every bush on our little journey, every forgotten thing on the sidewalk. He was so happy and slow up the street, so mindful. He wanted to meet it all– the college-aged woman struggling slowly along on her morning run, the two dogs being taken for a walk, the discarded table left broken on a tuft of grass, and the truck, the dazzling truck that rolled heavily by like some sort of glittering robot. All of it, each and every precious thing. And then we came upon some flowers and he stopped again, pointing at them, “Mommy!” he declared, “Mommy!”

And yes, yes, of course mommy was a flower. Nothing in this universe yet separate from anything else, and everything proof of magic.

And so I did.

The place, stripped to a skeleton staff and now loosely populated by the permanent residents– most of whom were confined to wheelchairs of varying complication– was pretty empty. The days, now shapeless and free of plot, offered little and so I wandered hallway after hallway. Seeming more memory than music, the theme song to MASH drifted from one room I passed,

while another was antiseptic and empty but for Trump/Pence banners taped defiantly to the wall, and then through a doorway, I caught a glimpse of a nurse changing a patient’s tracheotomy tube– so intimate and tender as to be virtually erotic. Downstairs, scattered like islands, I came upon people who sat anchored and voiceless in wheelchairs, each one stationed near a window, watching.

There was a church service later in the morning that took place in the same space that hosted Bingo, Pub Night and all our other events. It was Catholic, which occasioned a few religious props being removed from a box and placed on a cafeteria table, and somehow this act was achingly beautiful.

A strong, elderly woman dressed all in black walked in, made the sign of the cross, and then nodded warmly to all who made eye contact. She went directly to a middle-aged woman who was frozen and strapped into a wheelchair, and touched her with a tenderness that exceeded language. Gently, she pulled a favourite sweater over her head, and then smiling,  began to brush her hair—a mother’s imperishable, radiant love, holier than a saint.

An impossibly old woman was reclined, almost prone, in a wheelchair. Blankets and knitted things covered virtually every inch of her body, and her skin was so very thin, her body so frail, that it seemed as if a soft gust might be enough to push her through the veil. A couple of hospital staff tended to her, telling her that her brother would be there any moment now. Her eyes flickered open at his mention, and as if surfacing through water she said, “Oh, I hope so,” and then she fell back down and in to sleep.

Ten minutes later a tall, elderly man, clearly ill himself, entered and sat stoically beside her. With a bible open on his lap he mumble-prayed along with the priest. He never touched her, nor did he say anything to her while she slept through the service, but it was clear that he was her brother. He was her tie to this world, the one now disintegrating around her into a living mist. Drifting in and out, all of time swirling around her, what version of her brother might she have hoped to summon, what memory returning in dream, what ghost to see her home?

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.

It’s was her son, I think.

They had the same eyes.

He was staring through things, his eyes fixed on some invisible, stabilizing horizon off in the distance. His knees were trembling, and it seemed like it was taking all his energy and concentration just to be out of bed and sitting in a chair. He wore tiger-striped pajama bottoms that looked like they were bought by somebody who loved him, somebody who wanted to add a little spark to his long hospital stay. And as the woman pushed him by the assembled strangers who cluttered the hospital, she reached out and touched his hair, letting her hand fall to his face where she caressed, and then cupped his cheek. I’m not sure that he noticed, or even if he was able to respond if he had, but it didn’t matter. She loved him for eternity, through all fires. He belonged to her, he would always belong to her, and she touched him with such tenderness and heartbreak, such solitude, that this small, personal moment became something transcendent. As if phosphorescent, it hung there, suspended for a moment or two before receding and returning us to the day.

His pitches were comets from distant and never imagined galaxies. They were rockets, they were bombs, they were terrifying, curving flourishes that made you think you were watching the astonishing dazzle of an alien technology. It was a new kind of physics, one that allowed him to perform stunning feats that lifted us from our lousy, mortal shells,.

He was a blazing fire, a goddamned Demi-God.

Fernandez died in a boating accident on Sunday at the age of 24.

( This is a photograph of Dee Gordon, Jose Fernandez’s teammate. Gordon is known for his speed, not his power, and he is so thin and little that he truly looks like a child out there amongst the gigantic professional athletes. On the first game back after his friend’s death, in his first at bat, he hit a home run, and as he circled the bases he wept like a boy. As he said later in an interview, “I ain’t never hit a ball that far, even in batting practice. I told the boys, ‘If you all don’t believe in God, you better start.’ For that to happen today, we had some help.”)

Three times, Jose attempted to defect from Cuba to the US unsuccessfully, and after each failed attempt he was put in prison where, still a boy, he shared space with hard and dangerous men. In 2007, at the age of 15, he made the crossing successfully, but not before somebody on his boat was washed overboard. Fernandez, operating on the pure instinct of a boy that age, when right and wrong seem clear, and your body, your entire life, is still radiant and unlimited, dove into the night waters to save the person. He had no idea who had been swept into the ocean, and with each stroke he took, an eight-foot wave grabbed him, lifting him up into the shifting darkness above, before splashing down and submerging him again. The person, somewhere before him, bobbing in and out of sight, was his mother. He got to her, told her to hold tight to his left shoulder, asked her not to push down, and slowly swam her back to the boat.

Imagine that.

Imagine doing something so great with your life.

His baseball career was short and beautiful and joyous. It was something to behold, each start an event I got excited for, anticipating it the same way some other people might anticipate a new Game of Thrones episode or a Bruce Springsteen concert.

He was, in a word, awesome, and his death was a tragedy for the communities he lived amongst, and even beyond, even to a 50 year-old white guy living in Toronto who found himself trying to explain to his wife why he’s crying about the death of some pitcher on his fantasy baseball team.

The boat Fernandez was on the night of his death was traveling around 55-60 mph. He was with two of his friends, both around his age, and it was late. It would have been dark, black even– nothing but the feel of water beneath and sky above. Everything beautiful, the wind and spray and stars in his face, infinity spreading out in all directions…And Jose Fernandez, soon to be a father, moving into the future with such velocity, confidence and hard earned momentum… And then the boat hit a rock jetty and all three of the men died on impact.

Just like that.

They would not have known what had happened.

Our lives are so brief.

We’re all speeding through the dark, the beautiful and the damned, alike, each one of us luckier and more vulnerable than we could ever imagine.

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)

And then, two new mothers, each one wearing sweat pants and with a baby strapped to her chest, walked serenely down the street. They were almost glowing, almost hovering, and they walked in geisha silence, as if having moved passed language to an inalienable home that would be forever present.