A couple who look like they’ve been together for a very long time sit in a waiting room at the Western Hospital. The man looks anxious and uncomfortable, maybe even angry, and his wife will not intrude upon that. Holding her purse primly– like she was in church– she sits with her knees together staring straight ahead. She will not say a word. She will not move a muscle. They don’t look at one another. The tension in their lives a living thing, a creature that travels great distances and will not go away.

And in the foyer there is a Book and Bake sale taking place. A very skinny woman in a motorized wheelchair is looking at the cupcakes. She’s wearing a pink kerchief on her head, in honour of Valentine’s Day, and she is thumbing through a book called Rogue Angel.

All the donated books there. Books thumbed through on beach vacations, books that changed lives or passed right through them. All these stories moving through time, intersecting, and ultimately reducing to the same story: How will I live, how will I die? And at the kiosk beside, there is a long lineup for the Lotto 6/49. Doctors and patients alike. Pretty nurses are scrolling their phones as they wait, men in hospital gowns clutching IV stands, people visiting loved ones. Each person having a plan for the money, each one hoping for something–a candy apple red Corvette, a promising drug, some safe horizon. Past them and outside, through slush and snow I step into a taxi. I am tired and my oxygen tubing has caught on the door, and as I am trying to disentangle it, the sudden astonishment of a female driver speaking to me. Her accented voice from far away, the subtle trace of her perfume, like light falling on water.

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)

When I got into the taxi I was startled by how pleasant it actually was outside. The weather, if I had to describe it, was rather gentle and I was entirely embarrassed to have thought there was some sort of storm thundering around outside.

I told this to the driver, explaining that I was originally from Ottawa where winter was a bare-knuckled punch to the face and there, I wouldn’t have even noticed this little snow shower. He laughed, “Yeah, I know what you mean, man. I’m from Calgary and winter is a different game altogether. I used to be a trucker out there and often when you’re driving, you’re in the wilderness, and when you come across the mountains, well, I tell you, it’s something else. It’s like they have their own weather systems. You’re alone on the road and you feel absolutely tiny before them, and all around you, everywhere you look, just blankets of snow, snow covering everything! I actually found it eerie, and when a storm swept in off one of those mountains, oh boy! Suddenly, and I mean this, you couldn’t see a thing, complete whiteout, and there was nobody there to help you! Just keep your hands on the wheel,  your eyes open, hope there’s no avalanche. It really felt like nature was just going to swallow you up and vanish you from the face of the earth. And keep in mind, I was driving a huge rig, but hell, that was just a toy in comparison. I swear, I never felt so vulnerable or mortal, and after awhile I couldn’t take it, which is why I took up driving a cab. I feel safe in the city, this,” he gestured to the outdoors, “this shit is nothing.”

The bus negotiates the winter night:
a flickering ship in the pine forest
on a road as narrow and deep as a dead canal.

Few passengers: some old, some very young.
If it stopped and switched off its lights
the world would be deleted.

I nodded my head, “ So what you’re saying is that since you can’t influence the weather, why bother worrying about it, right? Well, I guess that’s a pretty reasonable way to approach life, if you can pull it off. “

“Rain, no rain, who cares?”

We sat in a kind of prickly silence after that.

As he rounded onto Bloor at Spadina, he began to furiously pound on his horn. “Look at this, “ he yelled back at me. “The lady is taking up two lanes while she tries to turn!” As he was saying this he was driving past the SUV, but still honking his horn and sneering at the woman for good measure. Feeling slightly wounded by his response to my rain question, I said, “Ah, you shouldn’t worry about it! You can’t influence how she drives, so why get yourself all tied-up in knots?! “ Adding magnanimously, as if offering him a drink, “And besides, you’re already past her, relax! Traffic, no traffic, who cares?”

The driver exhaled loudly, looked back at me once and then looked back at me again before shaking his head from side to side.

“You think you’re smart guy, eh?” he said.

“Sometimes.”

“You feel smart right now?”

“I feel like a fucking Buddha.”

“You are no fucking Buddha.”

And for the rest of the fare we drove amidst a tense silence, one that was punctuated only by the sound of dispatch in the background.