1979 Page 7

  Sleepovers at Dale’s house aside, my only connection to the neighbourhood that had once been home was through the eight-foot-high metal fence that surrounded the schoolyard. Sometimes at recess, when the weather was nice, if there wasn’t a ball-hockey game going on or no one felt like playing hotbox, I’d stand there at the fence at the rear of the schoolyard and look at the rows of identical houses with their fluorescent-green lawns—corners as sharp and square as the jaw of Sgt. Rock, the freedom-fighting hero of my favourite comic book, the suburban perfume of freshly cut grass making my nose twitch like the rabbits at the pet store downtown before it became the Cornerstone Church.

  Our house had been one subdivision over from the school, so the people, if not the houses, were different from the ones I’d known. But I recognized them all anyway. There was the hunched-over old woman working in her front garden, her equally elderly, wheelchair-sentenced husband helping out as best he could, passing her the hand shovel when she needed it, both of them equally expert at pretending that it somehow really mattered. There were the men who did shift work and so were home during the day, passing the time until it was the hour to change into their work clothes again, washing their cars in their driveways or weed-whacking the manicured edges of their lawns. There were the women raising the only flag they knew to salute, hanging the family’s flapping laundry on the backyard clothesline. There were the dogs on chains barking at passing cars going by too slow or too fast. There were abandoned bicycles and oversized plastic baseball bats and purple hula hoops. There were the kids walking home from school for lunch, the local radio station the only clock they needed: sitting down to their fish sticks halfway though the local and then the world news (12:07); soaking up what was left of the ketchup on their plates with the last french fries by the end of the sports (12:12); two scoops of ice cream or a jiggling helping of green Jell-O while the farm report wrapped up (12:20); and with just enough time left over to get your coat back on and get out the door as the first funereal strains of the organ that announced “In Memoriam” floated through the kitchen.

  Once, when we were waiting for my dad to pick me up from Dale’s—his parents had two cars plus a special van for his father’s wheelchair, but they always seemed to be busy so my dad had to come and get me on Sunday morning if I stayed over—we were tossing a football on the street in front of his house and I threw a duck that flew over his head. Whatever. I was going to play defensive back, not quarterback, when I got to high school. Dale’s dad had played football at Queen’s University, and Dale used to say how he was going to have an advantage when he tried out for wide receiver because his dad had taught him what slant and hook and fly routes were when they played catch. Used to play catch.

  The ball rolled to a stop alongside a sewer grate. Dale picked it up and tossed it back.

  “What was it like when you were down there?” he said.

  “Where?” I knew what he wanted to know, but I’d learned that part of the game was to act surprised.

  “When you got lost when you were a kid,” he said. “Down there.” He caught my pass—not too hard, not too soft, right between the numbers.

  “How did you know about it?” I said.

  Dale would have been too young to read about it in the newspaper or pay attention to the radio when it happened, but he wouldn’t have had to since someone, at some point, would have told him. He shrugged and turned the ball around in his passing hand so that his fingers wouldn’t be on the laces when he threw it, a sure-fire recipe for a wobbler. He tossed the ball. I caught it.

  My hands were bigger than Dale’s, so I could hold the football more easily, and I never had to look where the laces were, my fingers found their grip on their own, but I looked at the ball and pretended to be thinking. It was important that I appear to be having a hard time saying what I wanted to say. Eventually, “You know how sometimes something happens that you didn’t know was going to happen—because there was no way anybody could ever know it was going to happen—and then it happens anyway?” I knew that Dale would think about his dad getting sick. I threw the ball so that he wouldn’t be able to say more than Yeah.

  “Yeah,” he said, tossing the football back.

  I caught the ball and studied it. A passing car gave him time to look at me looking at the ball.

  “At first it was like it was a mistake, like it can’t be right.” I threw another perfect spiral. “Then I was pissed off like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “At who?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I just remember being pissed off.” I caught the ball and tossed it back. Just as it reached Dale, “Not long after that,” I said—“a bit, but not too long after—it was… it was just what it was.”

  Dale nodded like he knew what I was talking about, held onto the ball.

  “I mean,” I said, “it didn’t make any more sense than it did before. But there wasn’t anybody I could yell at, and it looked like no one was going to come along and make it all alright, so…”

  Dale was staring at the ball in his hands, tossing it up and down a couple of inches in the air. Without looking up, “So… so what?” he said.

  “So I started really looking for a way out,” I said. “I mean, who wants to be stuck in the dark?”

  Former Star Athlete and Well-Known Chatham Lawyer Diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis

  “This Isn’t What I Wanted; This Shouldn’t Have Happened to Me”

  HE’D DONE WHAT he was supposed to do. More than that—he’d done everything right. Righter than right: parent-pleasing report cards, a harvest of A+s every June; the captain of nearly every team he excelled on; every teacher and friend’s father or mother happy to know that their son or daughter was a friend of his; and later, law school and a beautiful wife and two beautiful children and a very successful hometown practice and one of those fortunate people who knows that they’re fortunate, is happy to assist as a Rotarian and a Big Brother those unluckily less so.

  Then one day, when he was thirty-four years old, he woke up and his fingers felt funny. Didn’t hurt, exactly—tingly more than truly painful, more like they’d fallen asleep—and it wasn’t even all over, was only in the fingertips, but still… Funny, he thought, slowly opening, closing, both fists. That’s funny, he thought.

  But tremors and difficulty staying upright without a cane and chronic fatigue and slurred speech and a failing memory and difficulty concentrating and blurry sight in one eye couldn’t be called funny. When he’d had trouble holding a pen one morning while writing a cheque for his daughter’s piano lessons, he’d attributed it to one too many Jamesons the evening before or perhaps something he hadn’t noticed he’d done golfing, but his wife had insisted he go see the doctor, so he went and saw him—was tested and waited and worried and tested and waited and worried some more—and was eventually told that he was suffering from an inflammatory disease called encephalomyelitis edisseminata or, as it’s commonly known, multiple sclerosis, which damages the insulating covers of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.

  “You’re telling me I have MS?” he said.

  “I’m afraid so,” the doctor said.

  You’re afraid, he thought.

  The doctor monologued on about how, like approximately one hundred thousand other Canadians, he wasn’t alone, that there were very active support groups in place throughout Kent County, and that there had been significant progress made in recent years with new kinds of treatment and medication to help stem the effects of the disease—if not cure it; there is no cure as of yet—and that it’s very important to remember that multiple sclerosis is not a death sentence, that the average sufferer lives only approximately ten years fewer than non-sufferers.

  So I can look forward to a long, unhealthy life, he wanted to say. Didn’t, of course. His parents had taught him, and he had impressed upon his own children, the obligation we all have to be cheerful—civiliz
ed society’s primary social lubricant. And if certain situations don’t allow for cheerfulness—and if he ever deserved a mulligan, this was one of those situations—then at least one could attempt not to make things worse, both for oneself and for others. He thanked the doctor and shook his hand and even remembered to make a follow-up appointment with his secretary on the way out.

  Tremors and difficulty staying upright without a cane and chronic fatigue and slurred speech and a failing memory and difficulty concentrating and blurry sight in one eye battered his body, but almost—almost—as bad was the fact that at least once a day, though often more, he was assaulted by the same stabbing thought: I don’t deserve this. What did I do to deserve this? Why is this happening to me? This isn’t me. This isn’t who I am.

  He lived for many more years. He tried to be cheerful.

  ~

  William Street wasn’t made for playing catch or road hockey—William Street was for downtown Chatham traffic, such as it was—so when we’d moved from the suburbs after Mom left us, Tecumseh Park or the playground at nearby Victoria Park Elementary School was where you went to throw or bounce or shoot or kick (in spite of the cranky old man who lived next door to the latter and who called the police on us not once but twice, and who was almost as cranky as he was as a Chatham Daily News subscriber). It was an adjustment—grass was usually better than cement, and not having to scream “Car!” at any moment was a nice change, although having your own asphalt playground at the end of your driveway rivalled either of those advantages—but it wasn’t long before the best possible place to get a game of hotbox going wasn’t priority number one. Sports wasn’t a bunch of kids making up a game of something out of nothing on an endless August afternoon anymore; sports were what were going to happen when I got to high school, CCI green and white and Friday night’s game in Saturday’s Chatham Daily News and ra ra siss boom ba cheerleaders, just like on TV. It was like how one day you begged your mom to buy you the “Hang In There, Baby” poster, the one with the kitten hanging onto a tree branch, and then another day you ripped it down from your bedroom wall and crumpled it up and jammed it into the wastebasket underneath the kitchen sink because how lame is it to have a poster of a kitten on your wall? Poof and who you were isn’t who you are anymore, now you see you, now you don’t.

  Now what I liked to do best was lock my bedroom door and put on a record and lie on my bed and eat black licorice and read Allen Spragget’s Worlds of the Unexplained books, where you got the real story on ESP and Atlantis and people who could talk to the dead. I’d taken his The Case for Immortality out of the library too, but had stopped reading it about a quarter of the way through because it sounded too much like the la-dee-da-heaven-and-angels-and-celestial-rainbows stuff that Mom used to talk about when she’d first joined the Cornerstone. I didn’t know if God existed or not, but I was pretty sure that if He did, you didn’t find out by being blithely reassured that everything is going to work out fine because that’s just the kind of guy God is. Whoever or whatever God was or wasn’t, there had to be more to it than that.

  Licorice was the kind of food it was easy to forget to write down. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were all instant reminders to get everything recorded on the page, to not exclude a single piece of bread, an extra glass of milk, the second pork chop that technically belonged to Julie but which she forfeited by taking Angie’s phone call during dinner and not coming back until we were eating dessert. A few pieces of candy in the evening, however, or a can of pop on the way home from delivering the newspaper, were harder to remember, and, to be honest, a pain to record sometimes even when I didn’t forget, when all I wanted to do was just enjoy my Oh Henry! bar or can of C Plus. Sometimes I just wanted to do something without having to say that I’d done it.

  But if I ate or drank and delayed logging in whatever it was, I wouldn’t feel right, could ignore the feeling that I’d done something wrong—or, rather, hadn’t done what I was supposed to do—for only so long before my throat felt tight and my forehead felt hot and I couldn’t help but think about all of the rivers and oceans and lakes bubbling to a boil when the sun exploded one day, just like Mr. Bennett said, and of all of the poor seals and dolphins and whales and everything else that wouldn’t know why the only world they’d ever known was suddenly a seething hell. I’d write down what I was supposed to write down and shut my notebook and feel okay again.

  Forty days was coming up, Lent would soon be over, but I didn’t feel like stopping. I made a mental note to buy another notebook. Maybe more than one.

  Man Grows Old and Cranky

  “I Knew it Happened to Everyone, but Somehow I Thought in My Case There Might Be an Exception”

  HE ALWAYS SEEMED to be falling down. And it wasn’t as if he wasn’t watching where he was going. Every time you step outside your front door a catastrophe creeping to happen. Your belly goes soft, your arteries grow hard, you wonder where the hell you put your reading glasses because without them you can’t even decipher the heating instructions on a TV dinner. An afternoon at the dentist as inescapable as a pit in an unpitted olive. Watery eyes a certainty whenever it’s windy outside. Somebody on television says “torpedo” and you think they said “tuxedo” and you feel like a fool. If the weather is cold and damp, struggling with the plastic cap on a bottle of aspirin to get relief from crooked arthritic fingers that have such difficulty with, oh, for instance, unscrewing the cap off a bottle of aspirin.

  And the enlightenment you waited and waited for—stupid youth’s long, empty sputter—finally comes, and comes down to this: eating, shitting, sleeping, fucking, repeat, all of which any barnyard animal could tell you if unlucky enough to know how to talk. Because besides bodily wastes, that’s the other thing human beings are good at making: words, words, words. And nine times out of ten, more often than not, just about as meaningful as a coiled pile of steaming crap. Words, words, words; turds, turds, turds. The gentle wisdom of the golden years thus.

  Here’s another geriatric gift for you: you miss every third word, the light’s bleeding out of your eyes, you rarely leave the house anymore, and yet everything and everyone somehow manages to aggravate you all of the godamn time anyway. The kids playing road hockey outside your bedroom window solely existing to scream you awake from your afternoon nap. Downtown, no one has any manners anymore, it’s always you who has to be the one to move out of the way on the too narrow sidewalk, never anyone else, everyone just rude, there’s no other word for it. At the grocery store or Canadian Tire, people won’t wait their turn in line, are always trying to butt ahead, as if two more minutes added to their empty lives will make them any fuller. Even other old people are an annoyance—your brother on the phone long distance, your neighbour down the street raking his leaves, the woman who works the cash at the pharmacy—all of them with their aches, their complaints, their diseases and minor surgeries and daily bodily discontents. Wailing infants to go with your afternoon tea and cruller at Tim Horton’s; sirening mothers and fathers eager to share their sage parental counsel with the world (“Don’t slurp that, Gordon!” “Put that back where you found it, Elizabeth!” “Don’t put that in your mouth, Jimmy!”); human husks wheezing, shuffling, complaining: from crawling until falling, all of the colours of the rich human rainbow.

  Before—before he was old—he’d always had a dog. Now he carried a Ziploc baggie of dog treats in his coat pocket wherever he went. He liked to feed dogs tied up outside of stores while their masters shopped inside. He’d always let the dog smell his hand first, then give them a treat or two. “It’s okay,” he’d say. “They’ll be back soon. Don’t worry, no one has forgotten about you.”

  ~

  “Lawyers,” Dad said, resting the newspaper on his lap. He said it like the word tasted bad, like something sour. He liked to ease back in his recliner in the living room after dinner and read the paper with the evening news on the TV. It felt kind of cool to see him doing something that I
had had something to do with, no matter how small.

  He lifted the paper. “Any chance to make a problem where there isn’t one and make a buck off it, there they are, like flies on…” When he was home Dad rarely wore anything other than a white T-shirt underneath his black leather vest, and once he’d moved from the dinner table to the recliner with that day’s Chatham Daily News, he put the elastic band from his pony tail in his pocket and looked most like the biker guy he wasn’t. Sometimes I wished he didn’t just look like a tough guy.

  He flicked that day’s front-page headline—ONTARIO HERITAGE FOUNDATION OFFERS $150,000 TO HELP SAVE HARRISON HALL—with his finger. It made a surprisingly loud popping sound, louder than you’d imagine a finger and a piece of newspaper would make. “Get a life,” he said.

  “Who?” I said. “Who should get a life?”

  “These Save-Old-City-Hall idiots. None of them has anything better to do than stick their noses in other people’s business. Probably think they’re real big shots because they get their names in the newspaper.”

  I knew that Mr. Brown was part of the committee that had convinced the Ontario Heritage Foundation to come up with the money to incorporate Harrison Hall into the downtown development, but I also knew that he wasn’t trying to do anything but keep Harrison Hall from being bulldozed. I didn’t mention Mr. Brown or Harrison Hall to Dad. I knew that what he cared most about was the new mall bringing more shoppers downtown and, hopefully, more customers into his shop. He did okay—we weren’t poor, weren’t like some of the people on my paper route who collected welfare and bought their furniture at the Salvation Army—but everything we owned was either old or didn’t work the way it was supposed to or both, like our television, the same one with lousy sound we’d had since Mom lived with us. When you wanted to change the channel on Dale’s TV you just pushed a button on the changer; at our house, somebody had to get up and do it for themselves. It wasn’t just inconvenient. It was starting to become embarrassing.