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.

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.

Since last we spoke many have fallen and I have come to understand numbers.

I have learned that I can take a punch, if it’s a glancing blow. My punctuation comes and goes, since last we spoke. I have forgotten lyrics and come to believe in angels. Received dangerous information of a sexual nature. Realized the only ones I really like are the kids. I don’t want them to work. I want them to stay as they are, perfect things, almost perfect, running and happy. The light is always moving within them. Since last we spoke there has been chanting and a kind bus driver with flowing grey hair. Music and fires, and an Elvis impersonator, but no UFO’s, although I hungered for them.

Since last we spoke, black cats and the possibility of ghosts. Vitamins dissolved into water and planes crashing all over the world. Into Jungles. Into Oceans. Into Mountains and corn fields and unknowable bodies of water. The weather, so much weather has happened since last we spoke. The hurricanes! Like buzz saws they cut across the oceans. Memories. Memories were forged and lost. Driving easy through the streets, late, windows rolled down. That’s The Way I Like It by KC and the Sunshine Band blaring. Head out the window like a dog, hopeful that more of the world might pour within. I lingered over you, since last we spoke. I wanted to be nude with you, under a dirty sheet in a borrowed house. I wanted to climb a tree and become all of the leaves. Since last we spoke I remembered your eyes, the way they changed and became lonely. The way they stayed lonely. I have eaten too much bread, since last we spoke, and walked impossible fields that lay like green blankets before deep water. I have used the Instant Pot and ridden my bicycle with no hands, but I have not changed my mind about Dolly Parton, since last we spoke.

My parents have taken Rachelle, Jones and I, as well as my sister and her boyfriend, on a vacation to Prince Edward Island, and on Tuesday night we went to a Ceilidh at the Brackley Community Centre.

The structure was small and inside there were about ten rows of chairs spread before a modest stage. The girl who sold me the ticket at the entrance also worked the canteen, which sold water, ice cream sandwiches and chips, and played guitar on stage. It was just that kind of enterprise— a simple, family affair with everyone pitching in to help out.

And it was proably that, more than anything, even the promise of the music, that the audience really wanted to be a part of.

That feeling.

That call to home, wherever that might mean.

Regardless, the show started with just the keyboardist on stage. He was the one professional musician in the grouping and he wore his alt-country style shirt with a certain pride of accomplishment. His patter was goofy, corny and likeable. And as he asked the audience, virtually person by person, where they were from, what at first felt like obligatory shtick became something more than that. There was a sincerity and curiosity present that was undeniable, and it became truly interesting, even magical, to discover where all the people assembled had journeyed from in order to find themselves in this little community centre on a small island in eastern Canada.

The members of the band, who might occasionally rise from chatting with you in the crowd to take up an instrument on stage, were indistinguishable from the audience itself. Not only did they look like normal people, but they acted like normal people, too, and each song came with a specific story that was given as much attention as the performance of the song itself. It wasn’t fussy art where performers hid behind persona, but something spirited and fun and kind. It was their lives they were sharing.

At one point the grandfather was called up on stage. He was missing three fingers from a carpentry accident, and although he couldn’t play guitar like he used to, he strummed it while his grandson worked the fretboard for him. And sweet Jesus, that man had a beautiful voice. Lived-in and true, his voice was a timeless, and there was something in it that everybody understood in their bones. It knit things together, if that make any sense, and you could feel it’s gravity making us all one whole thing.

As the show came to the end, the keyboardist was again alone on stage. The song that inspired him to become a musician was Music Box Dancer by Frank Mills, he told us, and then he began to play it.

It was a huge hit at the time, but I hadn’t thought of it in 30 years. However, hearing it brought my life from that time back into acute focus. Both of my parents still immortal and in their primes, my sister and I watching TV while my mother hummed along to the song as it played on the radio…And that memory, and all the others that informed and shaped it, collapsed into the present where beside me I saw my mother swaying and keeping time to the music and my father smiling—all of us so much older now, but lucky, lucky and happy to be for a moment in this unexpected and beautiful place that took us a lifetime to find.

Last weekend Rachelle and I took our nearly three year-old son Jones to soccer.

He’s too young for soccer, as are all the other toddlers in the class, but it still felt like a virtuous way to spend the morning. And so all the parents sat on the picnic tables scattered about the unmowed patch of green that was the field, while rosy-cheeked Coach Nancy, all of 13 years-old, benevolently led our children through their “drills.” This, a summer job she would surely look back upon as amongst the best of her life.

Above us turrets set against an easy, deep blue, and in front of us about a dozen children either ignoring or doing some improbable variant of the stretching exercises Coach Nancy was encouraging them to follow. Jones was in the totally ignoring her camp. Putting the tiny, orange pylons on each of his arms he declared himself Iron Man, and after acting like a robot for a minute or two, carefully placed one of the pylons on my head.

And then he ran away and across the field to the perimeter where beds of stones lay waiting for his curiosity. He marvelled at them like the precious jewels they were.

He then climbed a tree. Saw a bear. Heard a plane. Did a somersault. And as he was riding a horse back across the field to the rest of the Little Kickers, he stopped very suddenly and pointed up at the sky shouting, “The moon!” And there it was, a barely visible silver edge up there in the morning sky–classical music drifting over from a nearby estate that just sort of hung there, as if a cloud, as if the most natural thing in the world.

Jones then found another bed of rocks, this one directly in front of a fenced gate. He started to throw the rocks, playing a game in which the point was to hit one of the metal bars of the fence and make a “ping” sound.

Unknown to him, a small crowd of Asian tourists walking down the street to Casa Loma had stopped and were watching him as he went about his joyful labour. When he came close, they would all lean to the side, softly exhaling an “Ooooh,” and then when he made the “ping,” they all shouted and applauded,  and Jones spun around, utterly amazed at this encouraging surprise, and so happy– happy, like this was and always would be the world.

A beautiful woman in a sundress,  her hair still wet from the morning shower, was trying to unlock a door. The sun was falling upon her, the wooden porch, the entire red brick face of the home. She didn’t have the right key and was struggling with the lock, with how her morning was assembling itself, and she tossed her head back in frustration. Tiny, almost imagined droplets of water were cast from her hair and caught in the sunlight, and everything seemed to stop for a moment. 

And then a raccoon, having slipped from night into day, emerged from behind a tree. With his detached animal knowingness he stared directly at us. Jones, astonished, squealed at the miracle, while the raccoon, keeping to the shadows, disappeared back into the night of some protective greenery. Up at the corner, at the mulberry tree and raspberry bushes,  so many berries had been crushed on the sidewalk that they looked like paintball splatters. There were berries hanging above us and growing from the earth beneath us, and it was like we’d passed into a different realm and were now moving through a fertile, green tunnel. As I was picking a raspberry for Jones, a woman sprinted by us toward the subway. Plugged into her iPhone, with a knapsack on her back and a briefcase in one hand, she was ready for the big meeting, ready to present the best version of herself to the world. She was moving fast, like an athlete who still retained her running form from college, days that had recently started to feel further and further away. 

An older man, immaculately dressed in wardrobe that looked from another century, ambled up the street coming to pass a college-aged woman wearing a bright yellow dress. Her face was still new, and she carried with her a pronounced, heaving limp that was mysterious and beautiful and sad, and when she smiled past us, there was the unexpected scent of clove cigarettes and skin cream. A butterfly then appeared and it was a sign. Perhaps a spirit guide, and Jones declared that we must follow it, and so we did– everything around us like still lingering dreams from the previous night, only now beginning to fade into the waking day.

The heat sat upon everything.

Oppressive and exhausting, it slowly disabled the day’s options. You couldn’t go outside. You couldn’t get comfortable. You couldn’t even think straight, and every time you moved it was as if this thing, this heavy, unseen entity, was wrapping itself just a little more tightly around you.

It was a long weekend and most of the people in Toronto seemed to have vacated the city for cottages. As Rachelle, Jones and I drove through the city to the Ontario Science Centre, we passed empty streetcars on empty roads, and on very rare occasion a person—always appearing slightly dazed, as if they’d just forgotten where they were going. There was a distinctly post-apocalyptic vibe in the still, dirty air, and it all felt as much a dream as not.

The Science Centre was very crowded, though, and it was filled with people just like us, people looking for a place that was open to the public, air-conditioned and entertaining for young children. We were all lucky, all of us there, lucky to have such a place available to us, lucky to be able to use it, and lucky beyond the known margins, too, lucky in ways none of us could even imagine.

But still, it wasn’t easy. It was crowded and loud, even chaotic, and Jones was so excited that he ran in crazed and unpredictable zigzags, and after a few hours we felt like cats chasing the red dot of a laser pointer. And as it approached noon, the children, all exhausted and hungry now, began to throw tantrums. It was like artillery going off, like fireworks.

One child would explode into tears, another one would kick a juice box out of a parent’s hand, and another would just flop face first on the floor and begin kicking his feet, screaming. And so it went, a spreading contagion that was simultaneously hilarious and crushing.

We managed to slither and bounce through it all to find a passage that led to descending escalators. There must have been two or three of them, each one travelling deeper and deeper down and through the wooded ravine the Science Centre was built into.

It was like being submerged in a forest, and the air became cooler and lighter as we descended, and when we stepped off into the refreshing, muted light of a wide open museum space, we were transformed.

About fifty feet in front of us rotating light projections were being cast onto the floor from the ceiling. Ladybugs. Stars. Race Cars. Mysterious fish. Geometric patters. All the children dancing beneath and within this light, and everything was beautiful and quiet and astonishing, like we had just been led to an illuminated cave full of dolphins at play in the purest waters.

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He was so excited.

He ran from enclosure to enclosure, his universe animating with such velocity and intensity that he simply could not contain himself. Pointing his finger with eyes that could not be more open, he would identify and offer commentary on every marvel he saw.

“Look! An Alligator!!”

He looked back at us utterly astonished, his mind expanding in ways we couldn’t even imagine. “Come mommy, come daddy,” he encouraged, his feet flapping on the ground as he ran ahead to the next wonder.

There were perhaps a hundred alligators, maybe more, and each one was an impossible occurrence as they materialized before Jones. And when we came upon the albino ones, each one so immaculately white as to look make believe, he almost exploded.

“WOW!! GHOST ALLIGATORS!!!

While Jones was marvelling over them I turned to the Komodo Dragon across the way. It looked as if it was made of chainmail. It noticed me looking at it, and while remaining immobile, it trained a lizard eye on me and stared right back.

We looked at one another for a spell, and I thought of the current running through it, of that electricity that at any moment could spark into unimaginable ferocity, as swift and inevitable as a natural disaster.

And then there were the giant pythons. Dead-eyed, coiled and intestinal, they lay still in the heat, as if creatures that had given up their external form in order to live their pure essence. Jones gasped before them, “SCARY!!” he shouted in a voice that wasn’t scared at all. To him it’s still just a word, something that describes a kind of exhilaration. What does he know of mortal fear? He’s never lost faith or confidence, waited for a doctor’s report, or seen something he loves diminish before his eyes and then vanish.

No, he remains a vessel of light, and as if to accent this there was unanticipated birdsong all around and above us. It turns out that in this park the alligators serve as a kind of protectorate, sheltering all the birds arriving there for mating season from predators. And so amidst these ancient reptiles there were all manner of birds, thin as twigs and bright as targets, living easily amongst them.

I had imagined that the park would be full of children like Jones running about, but mostly it was full of seniors, all armed with cameras with giant lenses, all hoping to capture that moment of first life when the fledglings peck through their eggshells and into this world of light and shadow.

It was a hit.

A really big hit.

It became pretty hard to keep up, and then, after one reader misinterpreted my thoughts regarding the use of fire while giving a reading, I decided to step back to spend more time with my family. Regardless, the letters kept coming, and so I feel I owe it to my loyal fans to resurrect the column, which is what I’m doing right now.

*****************************************************

Dear Bitter Writer:

You’re likely aware of the Twitter Challenge in which women were asked to, “Describe yourself like a male author would.” The point of this, of course, was to illustrate how men objectified women, but what I would find really interesting with you– as an impossibly mediocre white man in possession of a level of confidence that outstrips your very modest competencies by an incalculable magnitude– is to have you describe yourself. I have included a photograph in case you should need a reference point.

Lynn from Montreal

Dear Lynn:

In Havana he was known as “ La muerte incómoda.”

It was a term of respect, of great respect, in fact, and more than a little fear. What had Michael Murray done to earn such a nickname from the gentle people of Cuba?

Well, that’s a long and complicated story that will reveal itself in time, but for now we should just imagine the man as he sat there, commandingly, in the barber’s chair. His face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, and his most striking feature was his opaline green eyes, which could be both alluring or intimidating, as the situation required. A part of his barber’s apron fell open from the cooling breeze of the fan and revealed the shirt he was wearing. There were little baseball players on it. He looked up, his eyes clear and even as he wiped some sweat off his upper lip, “ ¿Cómo está mi calva haciendo allí?” he asked the trembling barber. And in that moment Murray’s beauty was revealed the edge of a very sharp knife.

Dear Bitter Writer:

It recently came to my attention that an author at a major publishing house threatened to slap a reviewer who didn’t like his moronic, insulting book, and I was wondering if the publishing house was going to punish him for it, or if white male authors can do literally anything?

Karen in Toronto

Dear Karen:

Have you seen White Male Author: Infinity War, yet?

Easily the best of the franchise. Just fantastic.

At any rate, this movie goes a long way to answer your question. In it, Thanos

attempts to destroy Planet Earth, and after incapacitating both The Avengers and The X-Men it seemed that victory was certain. Right at this despairing point in the movie, White Male Author showed up and blasted him with his laser pulses.

He then flew around Thanos so quickly that the wind currents kept him pinned to the ground while the other superheroes freed themselves from the Polaris Fog that Thanos had used to trap them, and then all together were able to cast Thanos back into the Canyons of Zorg. So it’s clear that although White Male Author is VERY powerful, certainly superior to Spiderman, he might not be as invincible as The Hulk or The Thing.

At any rate, even though White Male Author is very, very powerful, I don’t think he can do literally anything.