1. It’s late at night and I’m at my laptop playing WordCrack on Facebook.

I’m killing it. Words are just coming to me as if by magic. I’m easily the best WordCrack player who has ever existed. I am happy and at peace, surging through my life with the confidence and brilliance of an elite athlete. And then, amidst all the letters in the scramble, I see the name Jones popping up. I know it means something important and that it’s my duty to highlight and score the letters in order to keep my son safe, but when I try to do this, his name vanishes and appears somewhere else. I’m desperate, frantic in my attempts, but his name keeps eluding me, and then suddenly my time is up and I’ve failed. My score is zero. With a sense of dread I walk toward the nursery to check on Jones, but I know he won’t be there, that he’s gone, and that it’s my fault because I wasn’t a good enough WordCrack player.

2. Laetitia Casta and I are on a beach.

“Do you want me to climb up that tree and get you a coconut, mon cherie?” I ask her.

She says that she does and I shimmy up the tree with the greatest of ease. As I start to shake the tree, Laetitia does a cute, little dance for me down on the beach, “You are such a nimble, little monkey!” she says.

I can feel the sun on my face and the salt water breeze wafting through my hair. I am young and invincible. I shake the tree trunk a little bit harder, hollering like Tarzan, and this makes Laetitia laugh, and a coconut breaks free and begins to fall toward the beach, but instantly, it turns into Jones. I scream and throw myself after him, and I am falling for an eternity through a kind of darkness, never catching up to him, and then I wake up in a cold, poisonous sweat.

3. Rachelle, Jones and I are playing Risk.

I have amassed all my troops in Quebec and have assured myself victory, but Rachelle and Jones make a pact and gang-up on me. I try to be good natured about this, but inside I am burning with anger and jealousy. In short order they eliminate all my troops and knock me out of the game, laughing together as they do so. I start to scream at Jones, “You’ve always loved your mother more than me, always!!” And then I wake up feeling like an asshole, trailing this weight of shame behind me all day long.

He was one of the boys I grew up with in Ottawa, and he was a great guy. Modest, kind and good at everything, he was well liked, the sort of person you always wanted around. Parents watching him grow felt proud, confident and happy in the future that was unfolding before him. He was like all the other pure and wonderful boys we grew up amidst, and whenever I saw him, I saw the happy reflection of all of us who grew up together in that neighbourhood, smiling back.

He jumped from the Alexandra Street bridge last week, falling 120 feet before landing in about six feet of water and then pulling himself to the rocks along shore. Using the word miracle, the police officers said that they had never seen a person survive such a high fall into such shallow water.

The Alexandra Street bridge, which was built around 1900, connects Ottawa to the city that lies directly across the river, Hull, Quebec. I cannot express to you just how important Hull was to teenagers growing up in Ottawa during the 1980’s. At the time, Ottawa was a very conservative, even timid place. There were rules that governed everything and an almost soviet conformity enveloped the city like a cloud. However, in Hull the drinking age was 18, you could buy beer at corner stores and bars stayed open until 3:00am. We flocked there by the thousands, crossing the Alexandra bridge like we were a part of some migratory pattern.

For me and my friends, sheltered, underaged kids who only knew optimistic, suburban existences, the unfettered liberty of Hull was a small glimpse into what we imagined the realm of adults could be. It was a place full of potential. Every time we crossed that bridge we felt that a “first” might take place– the narratives of our lives just then beginning to take shape. It was a never-never land where we could dip our feet into the future, while still returning home each night to the safe nest our parents had constructed.

To this day the bridge has the steely permanence of an antique.

Cantilevered, it vibrates when you pass over it, as if an echo of all the trains that once crossed. Our transits, often by foot or bike, were always made at night. With the water in view beneath the cross-hatched metal and the wind, now feeling slightly alien and hostile pushing at you, a feeling of vulnerable and solitude presided. With untethered blackness above and beneath, and the ghostly hum of the bridge moving up through your body, you were in limbo, as if moving from one realm into the next.

It was here on the Alexandra bridge, perhaps feeling lost between these two worlds, where our dear friend decided to step off. He did not do it at night, but during the prosaic, naked day. What was taking place in his heart at that moment must have been indescribably mysterious and painful, a motivating state of mind that’s bleakly impenetrable to the rest of us, who only by the grace of God, have remained on solid ground.

May he forgive himself everything, and find peace in this living world where he will be forever loved. And may he always remember that he pulled himself to shore. The miracle of his life was of his own creation.

In March, over 200, 000 students marched in the streets of Montreal. That’s an awful lot of people, and it warrants some respectful consideration. Personally, when students protest I pay attention. I’m middle-aged now, and I like to know what they think, how they experience the rapidly evolving world, to which we (those generations that came of age before the Internet) are cultural migrants. Because of this, I try to move toward them when it comes to understanding an issue, I want to see it through their eyes rather than try to get them to see it through the eyes of my peers. I want to understand where they’re coming from rather than tell them where they’re going, and I do this for all sorts of reasons, but primarily because I think it will make me a better, more empathetic person.

In the last 15 years the world has changed more than it has in all the centuries it was built upon. The Internet is a more important invention than the wheel, and it’s entirely reasonable to assume that the model by which we’ve successfully lived for 100 years, might not be the model by which we’ll successfully live for the next 100 years. The seeds of a movement like Occupy, that seems so disorganized, loud and dirty to many, will very likely bear revolutionary fruit, and I think that this seismic shift in the way we think about our society, is a wave that’s breaking right over the heads of those who dismiss it as aimless, bongo-playing dilettantism. As Fran Liebowitz said, “ In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country capitalism triumphed over democracy.”

We need to think about that, and perhaps respond to it.

My cousins are students in Montreal and they’re brilliant and so well informed that they’ll make your head spin. And what they are doing in striking and taking to the streets is a purely democratic act. A lot of their money is invested by the government in a way that they don’t agree with and they’re asking the government to redirect that money toward something that they agree with—education.  I want to live in a country where post-secondary education is affordable to people. They think of that as a core value. What is wrong with that?

As Dave Eggers said, “The truth is not two-sided, it’s round.”

The mocking tone of certainty issuing forth from elders on this issue lacks grace, empathy and hope, and perhaps even worse, it lacks imagination. I think that we should see what happens, how the students proceed and what goals they might achieve, before jumping in and telling them that they’re wrong and that when we went to school we had to walk 15 miles in the snow.