On Saturday we took Jones to the Royal Ontario Museum.
The Dinosaur House, he calls it.
The weekends are full of families, and after an hour or so of exhibits, everybody typically ends up at the children’s play area. It is here where Jones’ transformations begin. He becomes a knight in chain mail. A dragon. A Sultan from mysterious desert lands.
A prism changing colour with the light, he is all glittering potential here. The rest of us, the parents, we sit down and exhale, ring the children like a campfire. Try to remember the plots of the lives we’ve been living.
We were meeting a couple and their children there, and I asked the tired-looking husband, who I hadn’t seen in over a year, how he was doing. He sighed, explaining that he no longer worked downtown, but had been moved to an office on a loveless fringe of the city. He couldn’t ride his bike in to work anymore, and found himself transformed into somebody he did not recognize–just another dad commuting to an unremarkable job in an unremarkable corner of the world. All of us now, softly closing doors we will never open again, watching our children begin the future we once lived.