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.
Our son Jones loves to dance. It’s his thing. You can see the joy in his eyes. They shine, lit from some spot deep within. Each morning he jumps up on our bed and dances for us, and it is no small thing. It’s beautiful and unpredictable and so ecstatically rendered that it feels like being blessed by a higher order of being. It’s a good way to start the morning.
Both with sticks, Jones and I walk quietly to daycare. Both of us lucky. Somewhere in our bones we know this unspoken thing. Big, slow snowflakes drift like dandelion puffs around us. A delivery van stops across the street. Bollywood music blaring. Just blaring. Jones has never been quite so astonished. It is a miracle, and he looks at me like we’re both witnessing a miracle. He’s glowing. The snow increases, squalls for a moment. It’s the gentlest invasion of white, as if silent, weightless birds are schooling around us, as if the world fundamentally changed before our eye. Jones points, “There are so many of them, daddy!” The Bollywood music is still pouring out of the van and Jones begins to dance. In his puffy jacket. His rain boots. His ridiculous hat. His glowing face. A woman with heavy snow flakes, glistening and then melting into her dark hair, smiles as she walks her dog through us.
All these things coming together.
This day being made, this day being blessed.
]]>A cold, open morning passing through us. Jones has a red lollipop in his cheek, the stem sticking out like a cigarette. All confidence and swagger he moves up the street like a gangster. He’s looking for a stick. The right stick. All gatherings of plants and bushes must be explored. He holds back the branches of one bush, “Come, Daddy, Come!” He has opened a door that I must pass through, and together we emerge into a new world, journey mystical realms, enter jungles, descend to lakes with lizards and stars. And then Jones standing there. Watching me looking back, all the branches and vines and climbing things now wrapped around him like they did not want to give him up, like he still belonged to their world and not mine. And the bottle collectors are out this morning. They scavenge in the alleys, the glass clinking in their bags like wind chimes from across water.
Jones wakes up early from a nightmare.
“Hulk was fighting Spiderman and it made me upset and I cried.”
His heart so pure and simple, still so light.
Outside, it is just starting to snow. As I push the stroller up the street tiny snowflakes hit our faces. Impossibly intricate worlds dissolving upon contact. And Jones is happy, his tongue out, trying to catch them all. Joy now, all residue of his nightmare obliterated. The rest of us, the adults, we can travel decades, lifetimes with ours.
A woman passes smartly by. She is fresh, ready for work, for whatever might emerge into her day. This is the best version of herself that she is offering the world, everything still immaculate and hopeful at this hour. She smiles when she sees us, her lipstick perfectly red, perfectly expensive. And Jones points past her at a Santa Claus that sits on a roof, and beneath there is a large sun room attached to the house. Inside there are two nuns, both of them wearing African dresses, all golds and browns and bright white teeth. They are decorating for Christmas and they are happy, smiling and chatting with one another as they hang tinsel from a tree. It was as if somebody were saying, “Here, I give you beauty.” And to see this moment, to imagine the journeys that brought these women to this sweet, almost invisible point in time was a gift that had been laid in our path. Like light flaring unexpectedly before us, an encouragement for this, and all the days to follow.
]]>When one of them reached up to the overhead compartment she modestly held her top down so as not to expose any flesh above her waist. She looked so very young, almost like a doll. She passed the time by watching videos, her face a shifting map of unfiltered responses, each one blossoming and becoming a kind of sunlight that illuminated her face.
The other one had short hair and the fleshy round face of a Buddha. She asked her friend to put some drops in her eyes, and one of them missed the mark, forming a tear just below her eye where it stayed unattended, as if a moment of sorrow now suspended in time. She was perfectly impassive, and as she sat there staring out the window her eyes grew heavier and heavier. Dazed and almost given to sleep, she seemed in a dimensional fog, just flickering in the limbo of this world, and capable at any moment of becoming more spirit than person and simply floating away.
I was listening to Sigur Ros on my headphones and it all felt like a movie, everything holy and beautiful, as if present only for my attention. Outside, as snow fell, farmlands, retreating forests and tiny homes sped past, more like memories than the architecture of the world. It felt profound, somehow, and then out of the camouflage and dull wash of scrub, a deer stepped from invisibility, so suddenly and magnificently manifest that it could only have been an angel.
“In 1986 I lived in Montreal for my first year at university, and I listened to every single Canadiens games on the radio. They weren’t really a great team, but they won the cup that year, largely because of Patrick Roy, who was unbeatable. But my favourite player was Chris Nilan, the goon on the team. Nobody wanted to win more and he would do anything, absolutely anything for the team. And when he was on the ice you knew it was going to be okay. Even if you lost, you still knew it was going to be okay, that somehow you still won. It reassuring, a defiantly optimistic kind of feeling and it gave me confidence, something I probably really needed being away from home for the first time.“
“My wife recently got into hockey and one night a week she would play shinny with a bunch of other women at an outdoor rink. Sometimes I took the dog out to play fetch and watch. I remember how beautiful and quiet it was out there. The acoustics in the winter are so soft and different, almost as if isolated and then put in slow motion. There was nothing but the sound of the game—the blades on the ice, the sticks on the puck and the players breathing, shouting to one another… The spirit of the games were so gentle and cooperative, too, everybody actually on the same side, sharing with one another something they loved. And I would be there off in the distance, the dog running after the ball, so happy to be bounding through the snow, and it all just felt so pure and lovely. Those moments were poems.”
“I don’t have any association with it. I never played as a kid because we were too poor, and now, after the car accident, I’m never going to have the chance. I live on the street now. My body’s been ruined, look at this, I’m in constant pain and I can’t work. My shoulder dislocates when I’m sleeping and I wake up screaming. I don’t know if I’m crazy or not, you know? And whadda ya the doctors give me for the pain? Methadone. And you know what it does for me? It makes my dick soft, so no, I don’t think nothing when you say hockey.”
“When I was ten my father would do up my skates before each game. He laced them tighter than I ever could, and it felt like getting tucked into bed, only a kind of opposite. And then after the game he would buy me an Orange Fanta and to this day whenever I have one I am instantly transported back in time, to the smell of that rink and the permanence of my father’s understated love.”
