One in red scrubs, the other in black.

These women, they are attractive. Around thirty, they look like they’re used to getting hit on in bars, to knowing what it feels like to have a man watching carefully as she leans over the pool table to take a shot. Neither woman makes eye contact or acknowledges anyone else in the elevator. There is an unspoken hierarchy. We all know it.

The film Mahogany was released in 1975.

It was a melodrama of it’s time, a rags to riches story in which Diana Ross fought to become a great fashion icon before giving it all up for love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra71dvxOVX8

It was not a critical darling. It was a one-and-a-half stars kind of movie, an enterprise that revealed that although Diana Ross was a great diva, she was not destined to become a great actress, and ever since, the movie’s been slowly dissolving into the past. I bring this up just to say that if you missed it, there is little reason to want to go and find it.

Nevertheless, when a pair of friends asked if I’d like to see it with them last week, I jumped at the chance. I’ve known both these movie-going women for over thirty years now and the sheer improbability of that– that we would travel such great and impossible distances through time– and still be connected, was a kind of miracle to me and I would have gone anywhere they asked.

It feels important to note that when the movie was made the three of us were all just children. Not one of us would have yet reached the age of ten, and the worlds we inhabited then were as small, beautiful and mysterious as marbles lost in a forest. The movie, regardless of it’s failings or virtues, was an extraordinary time capsule that opened up all around us in the popcorn dark of the theatre. It was impossible not to see ghost-images of your own life as the frames passed by. Perhaps a snatch of music would summon my childhood cat, or the shape of a car would remind me of a family trip, a dress, a friend of my sister…And to be called back to those lost spaces and allowed to just float there for a few hours, to drift along this underground river free from the obstacles, complications and mortal apprehensions of the adult world, was a glowing, holy thing.

And then the movie was over. We chatted for a moment on the street, and then the three of us headed back into our current lives, each one likely marvelling at the forces that charted our days and brought us together again, compressing time on this autumn night so far from where we started.

What stunned my class most about the book was the casual attitude the characters had toward slavery. I mean, how could they not know that slavery was an evil? Nothing could have been more clear to us, nothing. Slavery was pretty much the most evil thing we could think of, and it was mind-blowing to imagine that this wasn’t vividly reflected in the experience of our ancestors.

And so we figured that people back then must have been hateful and stupid monsters, willfully acting in their own best interests at the cost of others. And so we judged everybody in the book, imagining ourselves morally superior to the louts, trolls and insane people who populated the past.

But this didn’t make any sense.

There was absolutely no reason for me to think I had a more finely developed sense of morality than anybody who came before me. There must have been some decent people who participated in slavery and had no idea that what they were doing was wrong, no? They were simply living in the world into which they were born, and to them slavery, like the weather or landscape, was an unexamined fact of life rather than a conscious act of moral will.

This seemed clear to me. I was not unique. I was like everybody else, and that, of course, is a very scary thing to admit to oneself.

Technology has accelerated and amplified our culture in ways that are inconceivable.  Every year it seems that the world has changed more than in all the previous millennia stacked before it. It’s dislocating, and I often think of technology, in particular our online lives, as an emergent dimension we don’t yet understand or know how to interact with. Whenever we’re uncomfortable or bored with our physical lives, however briefly, a smart phone serves as a magic wand we can wave to take us to this other realm, and put in that context, none of us should be surprised to find discontent, even anger there.

Our desire for social justice has far outstripped our ability to deliver it, and in many ways I see ideological conflicts as dimensional clashes rather than moral ones. By the standards of today, so much of what we as a society did just ten years ago seems appalling, but as we judge it’s worth remembering that ten years ago we had no idea what we were doing was wrong or unfair. We were just operating within the framework of time and place. So how then to police this if every generation, indeed, every person, is going to be witlessly complicit in ghastly acts ?

Of course, revolution is not about justice, it’s about change.

And as the future and the past battle for supremacy in a ruined present, it seems that the only way it can end, the only way it has always ended, is like in a Shakespearean tragedy—everybody on stage dies, and then, the world purified and laid bare, is seized by those, now done with watching, who had been waiting in the wings.

It was a beautiful day and he was gently tugging at the leaves and flowers of the plants that ring our backyard.

His touch was so delicate, so full of wonder, and above him the tree branches formed canopies through which the sunlight streamed. He, so small, looked up to an infinity of leaves, each one like the next, all coordinated in motion by the light wind, and then through them he’d catch glimpses of a blue ocean of sky and the sun going on forever. A bird was singing, too, the sound isolated and framed, as if directed specifically toward our son, and this conversation that was being conducted was holy. Everything seemed mystical and endless, and Jones wasn’t watching it, as I was, my mind cluttered by the names and functions of things, but he was of it, living beyond time and memory in this moment of gracious, floating beauty.

Last year there was a play-off game between the Texas Rangers and the Toronto Blue Jays that was perhaps, one of the weirdest, most entertaining, anarchic ball games in the history of the known universe.

Part ayahuasca trip, the game culminated when Blue Jay superstar Jose Bautista absolutely crushed a three-run homer that for all intents and purposes, ended the game, time and the universe.

It was that epic.

The Rangers were ruined.

You could see the post-traumatic stress disorder forming in their glassy eyes. You could see the days of boozing and aimless driving. You could see that recovery was going to be impossible.

And if that wasn’t enough, Bautista performed a now legendary bat flip that saw him standing motionless at home plate, like a statute of a Greek God, as he watched the ball sail to glory,

before dropping the mic by tossing the bat, as if it was now something repellent to him, about a mile away.

This got under the skin of the broken Rangers, and it stayed there.

Jose Bautista has big, rat-like ears, the physical rectitude of a matador and a self-confidence that radiates from him like some sort of X-Man power. He is arrogant, this man, and although he’s an intelligent and astounding baseball player, he’s still a prick. I mean, he thinks of himself as a corporation and acts accordingly. He knows how great he is, and if for some reason you forget it, his body language will surely remind you, and if that doesn’t, well, he’ll tell you. You get the sense with Bautista, that he really does see the rest of the world as, “The Little People.”

At any rate, this bat flip, this losing in the playoffs to the Jays has stuck in the collective craw of the Rangers for the better part of a year.

Sunday was the last meeting of the two teams this year (barring a playoff match-up) and the Rangers pitcher hit Bautista with a pitch. This was pay back, and although Bautista gave him the slow, threatening stink-eye, he didn’t do anything, until he did do something. This something was a hard, illegal take-out slide of Ranger second baseman Rougned Odor on an ensuing play.

Now this sort of thing has been happening in baseball for a hundred years, but only recently was this kind of slide (in which you try to knock over the second baseman rather than achieve possession of the bag) made illegal. Odor, the second baseman, shoved Bautista in the chest. Bautista, who could buy and sell the little man, moved toward him like a God toward a mortal, and as he was pulling his fingers together to make a fist,  Rougned clocked him in the face with a stunning punch that saw Bautista’s $13,000 glasses, helmet and ego go flying.

It was awesome.

Of course, there are all sorts of people who are upset about the savagery of the act, but not me. It was cathartic and shocking, a David and Goliath moment that saw the preening, entitled 30 million dollar a year athlete get what his behaviour actually warranted. It was, for a moment, a kind of justice, a blow for the little man, and it made me happy.

As a child it’s a time of unquestioned magic. Delirious with excitement, we charged about like maniacs while wonderful things fell all around us. Time had no meaning. Everything and everybody was imperishable and glowing, weightless.

As adults, now visited by disappointment and loss, sidetracked and mortal, Christmas has a depth that often feels like weight. Everything ages– we miss people and sometimes, we miss the people we were, too. Vulnerable in ways we never quite imagined, we watch the children now, and knowing that all things change, a subtle undercurrent of nostalgia and melancholy runs through the holiday, and even as we’re living the moment, we’re aware of its passing.

This year, our families were with us, intact and safe.

It’s a stunningly beautiful thing, that, and to consider for one moment all the small, unseen miracles that took place in order to keep us together through the years, distance and unimaginable fires is to be filled with respect and gratitude.

At any rate, all families are miracles, and on this Christmas there were probably around 20 of us sitting around a long, make-shift table. Our two nephews are about 11 and 13 now, and we’ve had the privilege of being close to them and watching them grow.

They look like angels. Talented and mysterious, they hover on a periphery as if a beautiful visitation.

Their parents told us that they wanted to do a small performance after dinner, and when the time came they quietly, shyly, even, stood at the end of the table– one wearing the fur hunting cap that he got for Christmas, the other with bracelets of candy on his thin wrists. Then, after glancing at one another and nodding, they began to snap their fingers in rhythm and sing.

I had never heard them sing before. I’d never even thought about it. And so, right there, something I had never considered, something I had never imagined, was taking place before me. And they sang beautifully. It was utterly stunning, as dislocating and awesome a discovery as if suddenly finding a majestic snow-capped mountain where the 7-11 had always been. It was, I thought, magic.

They were singing the old John Lennon song “Beautiful Boy,” and they were singing it to Jones, our four month old baby boy. They weren’t up there looking for attention or validation, they weren’t pushed by their parents. They were self-directed and acting out of love. It was a pledge, I think, a rite of welcome. Jones would always be protected and loved by everybody in that room and the family beyond. It was such a pure and astonishing moment, so holy, that it felt like time expanded in all directions and was really just one big circle that contained us all.

It was not an easy year for us, but Lord, we were so lucky, and there was Jones, sitting on the lap of his beaming mother, and all around him, for as many years as could be counted, family, each one a loving star in his cosmos.

Here are three:

Dear Mike,

I have just read a novel in which an Englishman sees Spokane, Washington for the first time from a window of an airplane. It reminds him of Northwest Pakistan. Do you ever look at a place or a thing and it reminds you of something on the other side of the world? The first time I saw Athens from the air it reminded me of a coral reef deep in an ocean where I had never been.

Dear Mike,

Do you think you would ever be able to remember everyone who ever asked you the time? The only instance I remember very clearly was when I was 18 and sitting in the airport in Milan. An Italian man in a suit said something to me and pointed to his watch. I was terrified and shrugged and waved my watchless wrist at him. It became a habitual gesture. People ask me the time and I point to my wrist, whether I am wearing a watch or not.

Dear Mike,

The first time I saw the Milky Way I was seven years old. We were driving home to Chicago from my grandparents’ house in Lorain, Ohio in the middle of the night and my dad pulled the car over in a place where there were no streetlights and showed it to me. I remember the feeling of crouching as I looked at the sky.

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.

Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s most recent film, had this kind of “cottage effect” on me. Shot intermittently over 12 years, it depicts the unhurried, unremarkable metamorphosis of a boy as he ages from 6 to 18. Nothing really happens in the film, at least not as we’ve come to expect from the conventional, action-packed narratives that are part of our typical entertainment diet. Studiously avoiding exaggeration, Linklater employs a quiet, understated realism. Instead of getting to know the people on screen through defining acts of high drama, they’re revealed to us through ordinary, low-key repetitions. We get to know Mason, the boy in the film, before his personality is formed, and this makes for an unusually intimate and sympathetic portrait. We’ve been watching his pain and hope since he was a child, and like a parent, we cannot but help love him for that, even if we might not actually like him all the time.

Linklater repeatedly foreshadows catastrophe in Boyhood, and I kept waiting for something to happen, some tragic and intense vector to come sparking out of the story, but no, life plods along its ordinary trajectory. This, of course, is the way that it works in most of our lives, too. When we distractedly check our phones while driving, most of the time we don’t crash, and so it is in this movie, but each time that alarm signal is given, we remember just how fragile and beyond our control life is, and how at any moment, it can explode in tragic directions.

For me, a middle-aged man, the movie took place in the immediate, blurred past (last 12 years) where everything feels like it was yesterday, but simultaneously, the movie also took me to my distant past. Mason’s experiences, although set to a different backdrop of music, technology, etcetera, were my experiences growing up, too, and this gave the movie a circular, timeless feel. Getting to know Mason was like getting to know somebody at a cottage, proximal rather than directly communicated. All of our lives, for all the plot and ambition we stack upon it, unfold along the same lines. Nothing that happens to us is singularly unique, and in the end we’re all small, and there’s a beauty and melancholy in this shared humility, I think, something that Boyhood manages to bring out. And although the movie might not fully engage you throughout its three-hour journey, it will stay with you.

After family had left and the remaining adults retreated to their bedrooms, the girls began a dance party in our living room. The bass-heavy music thumped away, with the girls singing along together in a harmony that they might never find again. For that moment, they were a perfectly constituted choir—a constellation of sound, movement, energy and potential.

Studying YouTube, they taught themselves new dance steps.

Gas.

Pedal.

Gas.

Pedal.

And as they gained confidence and expertise, their steps grew louder and more choreographed. They were becoming more like the versions of themselves they wanted to be, and their voices, now high-pitched and excited, rose above the music. Lying back in bed watching TV, Rachelle and I could make out flashes of their tossed hair reflected back from the mirror in the hallway, and it was like catching glimpses of agents of nature, unguarded and fierce in their natural habitat.

As it was getting late, we told them that they’d have to keep it down and mind our neighbours, and so they began to dance softly. Having switched to stealth mode, it was as if they were now in moccasins– their feet falling as soft as whispers. And after 30 minutes they had danced themselves dry and all ran to the kitchen, chugging glass after glass of water from the cutest cups that they could find.

And in 10, 20, 30 years, that song they were listening to will come to them over the radio or in a bar, and it will all return in surprising torrents. The moves, like muscle memory, will return, the pretty, downtown dresses bought on Queen Street, the junk food shared and last names suddenly recalled….Yes, that feeling of the endless summer of youth, of being thirsty and drinking cold, cold water, of a life once so simple, pure and beautiful– everything still imperishable and perfect stretching before them.