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.

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It was almost three in the morning when she walked home after her shift at the bar.

This time, this twenty minutes, was a pause in her life that was always her favourite part of her day. It was like a clearing in the woods, an opportunity to slow things down and start the process of cleansing herself of all the want that filled the pub each night, clinging like smoke in her hair.  All the solitary men who needed drinks, who needed her to pay attention and make them feel valued as they sat there at the bar, searching each night for some unlikely route to love. And there were the needs of her coworkers, always wanting her to cover shifts so that they could either go to a party or recover from one, always needing her encouragement or complicity, and then simply the need to have a job, to get somewhere on time and serve the needs of others, always dressed in a prescribed, deadening uniform that made her feel like a stranger in her own life. All of this, all of this started to fall away when she walked toward home.

And one night she came upon a pigeon lying on the sidewalk.

She barely saw it, but she did, and as she leaned in toward it, the bird spasmed and flapped about in useless, frenzied circles. And then exhausted, collapsed and looked up at her, it’s chest heaving. She did not know exactly what she saw in those eyes, but she could not deny whatever it was that was calling her. It was her burning bush.

She picked the bird up, held it tight to her chest, and took it home. And as she delicately cleaned it in her kitchen sink, it struck her that she had never before felt so whole. Over weeks she nurtured this bird, restoring it to health and flight– and then other birds followed, and then others, and without any conscious intent her life began to organize and cohere around these lost and wounded creatures, and the person who inhabited the body she had travelled within for 37 years was finally discovered.

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.

Last night was Pub Night at the rehab centre.

It took place in the same generic, over-lit space that all our social events take place, and the “bar” itself was a few cafeteria tables that had been pushed together, upon which was a scattering of paper plates with a few potato chips and cheesies on them. If you had gotten a note from the doctor you were allowed to get half a glass of wine or beer, but most of us had forgotten to do so, and settled for a ginger ale.

More cafeteria tables, also pushed together, formed a U in front of a small stage upon which a band was playing. Many of the men watching, arms crossed as if judging the music, perhaps even their circumstance, sat as far away as possible. It was as if their bodies were clenched, resisting both the music and all that lay before them. Meanwhile, the women seemed entirely receptive and accepting. Happily fanned out to the side tables, closer to the band, they sat swaying to the music and singing along together. It was beautiful to see, and it was hard not to imagine them all fifty years earlier out on a Saturday night in some smokey dance hall, each one of them a vibrant and glowing presence, each one desired– their entire lives still waiting to unfold mysteriously before them.

After I got the phone call informing me that I had advanced cancer, I went to the New Edinburgh Pub. I sat at the end of the bar,  so thin and pale and hunched as to be little more than a shadow on the periphery, and ordered a half liter of red wine and a large soda water, and then quietly flipped through a newspaper for the rest of the night. That was over 20 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

The New Edinburgh Pub, located on Beechwood in Ottawa, wasn’t too far from where my parents lived.

It’s a generic place, a standard Ottawa pub that looks like it was made from a Build-Your-Own-Bar kit. It wasn’t ugly, but there was just no mind paid to the character or aesthetics of the place, and it reflected nothing back to you. It was nobody’s first choice, just a space in which you could drink.

The reason that I went to this particular pub on that night is that I didn’t think that I would know anybody there. I wanted to be invisible and uncalled to. I wanted to separate from the herd,  step outside of my life and dissolve into the space around me. I didn’t want to see anybody who might call me back to my life or the one that had been expected of me. I could not bear my own sadness, let alone theirs.

My recovery from the treatments and surgeries for Hodgkin’s Disease took a long time, years, actually, and each night, I went to this pub. It became the bell I had to ring each day, the one that confirmed my survival. And in spite of my desire to be anonymous, to have nobody care about me and vice versa, I became friends with all the staff and regulars.

I went there late, in the drinking hours, and all of us there carried our weights. But the pub served as a place where these weights were lifted, and suspended from our lives we could just sit amongst other people, unjudged and unmeasured.

We all need rest stops like this. And when I think of this place I think of it as being as essential to my recovery as the hospital. I sought to abandon the world, but it was here that I found the world, and that world restored me.

Just the other day, about half and hour before I turned the astonishing and impossible age of 50, I was told that after decades, the New Edinburgh Pub will be closing. This is what the world does. It reinvents itself. And that the landscape of my past is vanishing is nothing new–it happens to everybody, on every single block of this world, but still, it’s a blow, a real loss. And I just want to thank the New Edinburgh Pub– Paul, the truly decent owner, and everyone who worked and spent time there, I want to thank them for being present and sharing that space with me.