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.
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The nurses found him elbow deep in the garbage can, sifting through the spent trash as if it were the soil of his native PEI. He was harvesting anything that felt like a potato to his hands, and then dropping whatever it was on the floor by his hospital bed for later use.
Whether it was a sleeping dream he was having or a waking one no longer mattered. Lost on the rolling seas of dementia, Marcel had passed into the timeless overlap of memory where reality is nothing more than an unbidden chemical spark from deep within the mystery of his receding brain.
Marcel was harmless and never given to rage, and the nurses seemed to love him, treating him more like a pet than a patient. You could see the gentleness within him, the shapes of the men he used to be who now pushed against the diseased exterior: the fair trader, the husband, the guy who was always the first to dive in off the dock, the grandfather who did corny magic tricks and loved fishing.
Now in his mid-nineties, he wandered the corridors half-dressed. Like a poltergeist given form, he drifted in and out of the rooms on the 14th floor as if living all the lives contained therein, with each visit subtly rearranging the small articles he came upon, always setting this new house in order. The expression on his face that must have once been so clear was now lost and uncertain. He seemed blinded, a subterranean creature guided through these alien and unnaturally smooth corridors not by sight but by scent, called to this strange transit by a timeless ocean that only he could discern.
Amanda is a haunting. On every street I feel her presence, our shared past inhabiting the city like weather. I was sitting at the bar and I imagined that at any moment she might come striding in, the door swinging open and a fresh smile cutting across her face, and this expectation of the sudden, visual manifestation of my sorrow is the ghost I live with.
Beside me at this bar sat a woman with blonde hair. We were talking about whether it is a good thing or a bad thing to have a large family and there was a look in her eyes that I hope is not present in my own. She looked like she wanted to talk to someone, like she desperately needed to talk to someone. We chatted for nearly an hour, and when she got up to leave there was a pause. She was opening up a space where love might rush in, and strangers, we could have kissed forever in that field, but instead I said good-bye and turned away from, and she walked out the door, now just a little more brittle than when she had walked in.
Everything is punished when love falls away.
Colin
