And all up and down University avenue, in front of all the hospitals, people are out over their lunch breaks. Workmen sit on a cement embankment smoking. They’re grungy, hung-over, covered in tattoos, their construction vests hanging open. There is a leanness to these men that is both in the eyes and of the body. Glistening with sweat, they watch everyone who passes before them. Every woman walking by knows this. Every man. Everyone judged. Everyone sized up.

, you know, the spot where you see www.michaelmurray.ca and type in “ Men can” followed by a space, the autofill will provide you with these five suggestions:

Men can get pregnant
Men can have babies
Men can have babies now
Men can have periods
Men can cook

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.

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.

IMG_3544

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.

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 other day my wife Rachelle Maynard posted this on a Buy, Sell and Trade Facebook group she belongs to:

LIKE NEW BLUNDSTONES 7.5 Mens or 9.5 Womens

$150

Don’t spend $250 on a new pair of Blundstones your husband will never wear because they’re just a little bit hard to slip on. No. Don’t be angry he’s only worn them 3 times and doesn’t truly appreciate the kindness of your gift. So just buy these instead. They are in near perfect shape. They come with a box and everything. Pick up near Bloor and Spadina.

Comments:

Sahara: Forgive me, but your husband sounds like a bit of an asshole.

Anne: Nice colours!

Emily: I agree with Sahara, your husband sounds like a real piece of work. He better look like Daniel Craig is all I can say! LOL!!

Sahara: I once heard about a husband who took his wife to a Lord of the Rings movie marathon on their wedding anniversary! He thought if she saw them all at once, in order, then she would love them like he did. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?

Dina: I would cut a bastard if he did that to me on our anniversary.

Betty: My husband is also an asshole. #MeToo

Stephanie: Sounds like he has pretty small feet! LOL!!

Emily: Men are trash.

Jen: You know, I have absolutely no doubt of my innate superiority to my husband, and pretty much all men, in fact, yet I still end up feeling oppressed. How the hell does that end up happening?

Nicki: Smash the Patriarchy!

Robynne: Would it be possible to come by on Tuesday around 4:00 to have a look?

Elena: My husband is also a jerk. #MeToo

Misha: I started to notice that whenever I walked into the room my husband would slam his laptop shut. He said it was fantasy hockey. Turns out he meant porn. Dirty, disgusting porn #MeToo

Treena: I would dump his small-footed ass. You can do better Rachelle. You deserve better. We all do.

Lisa: I swear to God, my husband can’t even figure out how to work the remote. Why are they all so fucking incompetent??? Why do we have to do EVERYTHING??? #MeToo

Beth: The fucker doesn’t deserve boots.

Maria: Make him walk barefoot in the snow. #MeToo

A crowded patio at night.

The man has sturdy legs and broad shoulders. He’s handsome and looks comfortable in his own skin, like he’s very good at whatever it is he does for a living and is used to moving fluidly through the world. Behind him, holding his one hand with her two, is a blind woman. She is stunning in her beauty, radiant, even. Looking at her it feels possible that a mountain stream had assumed the form and flesh of a woman and appeared amidst us like a miracle. Those of us who are watching her have no conscious choice in the matter. There is something that pure and commanding about her beauty.

She’s blinking awkwardly into the lights above the bar as the man explains the topography of the patio she is trying to navigate through.

“There’s some uneven ground here, and then a slight step up. You okay?”

She nods wordlessly.

As they pass through the thicket of tables and chairs and people, every set of eyes are upon her. Conversations are falling silent, heads are turning and imaginations are sparking. Everybody is watching, trying to enter into the mystery of her life, trying to understand the uncanny sense of relief– of hope, even– we all felt in seeing a person so unable to apprehend her own powerful beauty, a person so unsullied. She moves through us like a saint through fire, and maybe she feels our eyes upon her, feels the hunger and predation that haunt a bar like this, but maybe, perfect in her own wilderness, she feels nothing. She moves closer to the man as the level of spatial complexity increases, dropping one hand from his and letting it idle in the back pocket of his jeans.

And just beyond them a red traffic light sways above the intersection while a bat swoops down through the night and across the clear, crisp moon. Each person there wanting to tell her about the moon, the beautiful moon, and how hopefully we’d throw ourselves into that unknowable night, just to touch it’s face.

I used to spend an awful lot of time in taverns.

Typically, I’d take my place amidst a stretch of solitary men drinking at a long bar. The conversation was a slow background rumbling, almost like distant thunder, and it lasted all night.

Sports.

The weather.

Women.

TV.

The past.

Strangers who had no expectation of seeing one another again, with little in common beyond the drink in front of them, making a conscious effort not to be alone, to try in some way, to connect. These conversations were beautiful to me, and I’ve come to miss them.

As a substitute, I’ve taken to listening to Sports Talk radio at night. The other day was a call-in show out of Toronto. Lacey from Oshawa had a few things to say about the Blue Jays. She was stubbornly defending third baseman Josh Donaldson:

“ Josh is far and away the greatest Blue Jay, and just because he’s injured the team shouldn’t quit on him! He’s given them everything, and now they just want to abandon him? That’s just so crappy. You can’t treat people like that. It’s wrong.”

The voice was familiar, and as I listened I realized that I knew her. Lacey from Oshawa was part of a group of patients I did pulmonary reahb with at a facility in Toronto. She was so thin then, and so angry, and every single day she wore a Blue Jays jersey with Josh Donaldson’s name on the back.

Her path had been difficult, and the heavy veil of sadness and pain that shrouded her was rarely lifted. Maybe at Bingo, if she got a line, she might allow herself a thin, bitter smile, but that was about it. She simply could not bring herself to socialize, and what we found out about her was through observation and hearsay, all of which reduced to this: when she fell ill and became incapacitated her husband left with their young son. That was how her life had worked out.

As I listened to her on the radio, hearing her speak more than I had in the two months we shared at rehab, I heard a stronger, braver voice. She was– with this phone call decrying a lack of loyalty to somebody doing their best in the face of physical limitations– making a conscious effort not to be alone. She was reaching out, and it felt like a miracle that I got to witness this, that I got to imagine her recovered and at home, fully herself now, and fighting for somebody she loved.

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.

Upstairs at the bar there’s an unrelenting press of people. So many of them. Jostling together excitedly, they’re all hopeful on this festive night out, each one wanting to feel special in some regard, each one waiting for their life to pivot. Unshaven Bros in sports toques and ball caps, beta predators who only move in packs of two and threes, are looking over at a cluster of Friday night women worrying their phones. Men are pushed up against the bar three deep, each one competing for something.

The bartender is at the centre of it all.

Although completely overwhelmed, she’s working calmly through the chaos. Surrounded on all sides by some sort of want, she makes a millions subtle calculations with each one of her actions. Each person is a problem that must be solved, a fire that must be extinguished. Her face determined, she moves fluidly and with purpose, and all the men encircling her at the bar with their steaks and Keg-sized glasses of red wine, are watching.

A man around 60 leans in. Everyone is leaning in, trying to flag her attention. This man, he’s lived his life handsome, and the confident residue of that lingers within him still, “Can I be next?” he asks in a salesman’s voice. The bartender forces a smile and takes his order, and all the other men waiting stiffen a little, jealous.

He is pleased with himself, this man. He feels special.

When she returns, he leans in yet further, “That tattoo on your right forearm, the roman numerals, are they from your favourite Shakespeare passage? Are you an actress?”

It is not clear that she is flattered by this attention, but she gives a partial, evasive answer.

“It’s a date,” she says, giving the man a polite, discouraging smile. Gesturing to how busy she is, she moves to disengage and tend to other preening, signalling men, but this man was not finished. “This is my favourite passage,” he began, and then in his best Shakespearian accent:

“If music be the food of love, play on.

Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die…”

And she is trapped, so trapped she is almost suspended in air.

Her eyes close for just a moment, as if it is all too much, and then she reanimates herself and begins to applaud robustly, cutting the man’s recitation short. It was as if a battle had been won, and she got to keep the secret of the tattoo– something so important, so crucial to who she wanted to be, that she had it written into her flesh–for herself.