Table of Contents (So Far):

• Miscellany

  Ratings

  Otzi the Iceman

  The Picture

  Facebook Marketplace Scam

  Crash

  Northern Exposure

  I Burst Into Tears (Ozark)

• Parenting

  A Dad is Born

  You Can't Reason With a Three Year Old

  Sleepless in Whitby

  Seminar

  The Broom

  Famous Rhinoceroses I Have Known

  IQ Test

  Kiddy Lit

  Q&A

• Health

  A Capital Pee

  Mutant

  Bespectacled

  The Tale of a Busted Ankle

  High Anxiety

  What, Me Worry?

• On Food

  A Sandwich

  Baked Potatoes & Pad Thai

  Chocolate Chips

  Well-Meaning Hosts

  The Time Thing

• Suburbia

  Lawnmowers

  The Cleaners

  Scofflaw

  Yes Ma’am

  Hit and Run

• Animals

  The Third Cat

  Pigeons

  Cops and Dogs

  Eulogy for a Cat

I’m fascinated by Otzi the Iceman. They figure he lived about fifty-three hundred years ago near what is now the border of Austria and Italy. Shortly after his death he was covered in ice, essentially “flash frozen”, keeping him well preserved for the next fifty-three centuries. Today he’s basically a well-preserved mummy. (They say “well-preserved,” but that don’t mean pretty.)

What’s fascinating to me is how well equipped Otzi was. He carried a copper axe. He had clothing and equipment made from several different kinds of animals. He had a flint knife and a longbow. Otzi was clearly a product of a society that had figured a few things out. 

Something else intriguing about him is how he died. He had an arrow shaft lodged in his left shoulder. He’d received a blow to the head. There is speculation that he had blood from four other people on him. He had cuts and bruises. We don’t know if he died where he was struck down or whether he was deliberately buried with all his gear. 

Just who was this guy? Was he a good guy or a bad guy? A soldier, thief, or shepherd? What did his society consist of? Just how advanced, extensive, and organized was this society? Who was Otzi’s best friend? What were his hopes and dreams? It’s a sure bet they wouldn’t have included being discovered five thousand years after his death and being displayed before a world he never could have conceived of. 

Although we’ll never know the answers to these questions, it’s amazing just how much we are able to determine about Otzi using modern scientific techniques. They know what his most recent meals were (meat, grain, roots, and fruit), his age at time of death (around forty-five), whether he was sick much (three times in the six months before he died, the most recent lasting two weeks), that he’s got relatives living in Austria today, and plenty else. 

But I would be happy just to know his real name.

Once upon a time I lived next door to a little old lady. Her name was Mrs. Reilly, and she was a widow. She liked to talk to me about what I did, where I was from, and how I kept my yard. She told me the last people to rent my town house kept their yard in an abominable state. They didn’t mow for months on end. Her game was to shame me into keeping my yard in good shape, and it worked, for the most part. 

Mrs. Reilly was no hypocrite. Her yard was the best on the block. She was often up before the crack of dawn watering her lawn. There were a lot of water alerts those days. Warnings that the Toronto water reservoirs were dangerously low, that we shouldn’t use any more water than we absolutely had to. Yet Mrs. Reilly’s sprinklers would remain on full, Mrs. Reilly going thirsty herself no doubt so that her lawn wouldn’t suffer. 

Sometimes my square meter of grass would get past me, but I managed to stay in Mrs. Reilly’s good books. After each time I cut it she would dart out with her broom, calling “Joey, you can use my broom to sweep the grass off the driveway,” and I would. (I have no idea why she called me Joey instead of Joe—the only people left in the world who call me that are my mother, who’s entitled, and some of my mother’s friends, who aren’t. But I didn’t really mind, because how could I? She was a nice old lady.)

One day Mrs. Reilly spied me in the driveway and emerged from her house carrying a large yellow envelope with something bulky inside it. 

“Joey,” she said, “you work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, right?”

That’s right, I said. 

“Would you mind giving this to Knowlton Nash for me, then?”

I told her that I had never met Knowlton Nash, as he was a television news host, and in those days I worked for CBC Radio, not CBC Television. 

Mrs. Reilly didn’t know the difference and didn’t care. 

She showed me what was in the envelope. It was a framed picture of Knowlton Nash smiling up from behind his news desk. Judging by the famous newscaster’s spiffy clothes, the picture had been taken sometime in the early seventies. 

Mrs. Reilly explained that her husband had been distantly related to Nash. Seems Nash had given the picture to another relative and eventually it had wound up in Mr. Reilly’s hands. After her husband passed away, Mrs. Reilly decided she wanted to give the picture back to Nash. 

Perhaps I should refer to him as Mr. Nash, out of respect, seeing as I didn’t know him. I reminded Mrs. Reilly of this fact, adding that I didn’t think Mr. Nash even worked for the Corporation any more. He had retired. 

The truth was, I figured the odds of me being able to return the picture to Mr. Nash were about as great as me getting up early one Saturday morning to mow the lawn: nil, in other words. 

“Take the picture,” Mrs. Reilly insisted. “Maybe you’ll run into him someday.”

I was stuck with the picture. 

Two years later I moved. I never saw Mrs. Reilly again. Her yellow envelope languished in my locker at work, where I saw it just about every day. 

Several years went by. 

Every time I opened the locker I felt guilty. Once in a while I took the picture out and looked at it just to make sure Mr. Nash’s smile hadn’t turned into a frown. Okay, it never did, but damned if he wasn’t looking at me as if to say, “When are you going to give me the picture, Joey?”

“Don’t call me Joey,” I would tell the picture, before putting it back in the locker. “It’s Joe.”

One time I caught a glimpse of Mr. Nash in the CBC Atrium and I thought: quick, run, get the picture from the locker! But I knew that he’d be long gone by the time I got back, so I didn’t. 

I hung onto the picture. I thought about visiting the people at the National and asking them how I might get the picture to Mr. Nash. But I figured they’d probably just ask what would Knowlton want with an old picture of himself, anyway? So I didn’t. I was afraid they wouldn’t understand the obligation I felt to this little old lady. I didn’t understand it myself. 

Fast forward a few more years. One day a production assistant told me, “Hey, you’re going to be working with someone interesting this afternoon—Knowlton Nash. He’s coming in to do a phone-in show.”

No way. 

Way. 

Finally, I could unload the picture. I didn’t think twice about it. Friends said, why bother? I tried to explain: I didn’t feel right keeping the picture for myself, I couldn’t throw it away, and I couldn’t live with the darn thing in my locker any more. 

I carried the tattered yellow envelope with me all day. It came time for the phone-in show. The production assistant introduced me to Mr. Nash in the announce booth. It was my job to adjust his microphone and make sure he was comfortable, after which I would sit in the control room and operate the interview, riding the levels and whatnot. I had brought the envelope containing the picture into the booth with me. 

Feeling stupid, I explained the situation to Mr. Nash:

“Mrs. Reilly knew that I worked for the CBC and asked me to give this to you,” I told him. “I’ve had it in my locker for years.”

“You kept the picture for HOW long?” Nash snarled, before breaking it over his knee. 

Okay, that would have been the more dramatic ending, but it’s Knowlton Nash we’re talking about here, a genuine gentleman by all accounts, and my experience with him was no different. 

He examined the picture with genuine interest, then opened the card Mrs. Reilly had included and silently read it. Afterwards, he smiled, nodded, and thanked me. 

Silly? I thought so at first, but I don’t think so any more. Getting the picture to Knowlton Nash had been important to Mrs. Reilly, and regardless of what I had originally thought of the mission, it felt good to finally see it through. 

You’re welcome, Mrs. Reilly.

Tried to sell my Korg M1 keyboard on Facebook Marketplace. I haven’t used Marketplace much, but I did manage to sell some winter tires and an amplifier on it before, so I didn’t anticipate any trouble.

After getting a few nibbles that never went anywhere, a woman named Zara contacted me ostensibly from Sudbury, initially in French. She had a Facebook profile featuring a single headshot and a banner displaying a photo of a baby. There were a handful of pics and posts of babies and puppies, complete with sporadic comments from alleged friends and relatives. Just enough to make you think that maybe (maybe!) this could be a real person. (She had no actual Facebook friends, though.)

Zara professed interest in the keyboard but was too busy (and presumably too far away) to pick it up herself. She proposed using UPS to both pay me and have it delivered.

I thought this was a bit strange as it bumped up the cost considerably, but hey, whatever. I went along with it initially. She proposed a time the courier would show up with the money and collect the keyboard. Fine with me. Then the kicker: I would have to pay $160 in insurance online upfront. But hey, no prob! She would ensure I was reimbursed once the courier showed up at my door with the cash.

“Heh Heh. I will admit you had me going there for a bit,” I texted her. “Seems like an awful lot of work for $150.” (Unless, of course, she or he was conducting several cons simultaneously, which seems more likely.)

“I don’t understand you,” she texted me back. “Please check your mailbox and spam.” This was for an email presumably from UPS with directions on how to proceed.

Sure enough, there was the email in my spam folder. Pretty dodgy looking, from the following address: upsexpresslaposte225@gmail.com.

“Need better graphics,” I texted Zara. “And the gmail address is a dead giveaway.”

I provided a few more tips on how I’d conduct the con a lot better, if it were me (not that I’m an expert, but I hate seeing sloppy work).

I blocked and reported her, which didn’t seem to accomplish anything. She gave me a thumbs up on Messenger, evidently happy with my helpful advice. And she changed her profile page slightly: her banner displays a Ukrainian flag now instead of a baby.

Never did manage to sell my keyboard.

Thank God for airbags

It was just supposed to be a short trip to pick up some Thai take-out.

I headed south on Brock toward the FreshCo in my 2019 Hyundai Elantra. The one that I’d purchased for its safety features and drive-ability, mindful that my two daughters would be learning to drive in it.

The light turned red at Dundas. A Durham Transit bus pulled up beside me on my right. On my left, a guy crossing the street waved at me. I waved back, until I realized he was waving at the bus driver to wait for him. I smiled at my foolishness. The light turned red. The intersection was clear. I pulled out in front of the bus.

Safely through the intersection, I headed down Brock for another block. Bowman & Gibson Insurance Brokers sits on the northeast corner of Colborne and Brock. It’s a single story brick building that obscures much of what might be westbound on Colborne. It shouldn’t matter; there’s a stop sign there. You should be able to proceed north or south on Brock without worrying about anyone on the side streets.

I don’t know what I was thinking about in those few seconds between Dundas and Colborne. Whatever it was, BAAMM!!! it was violently knocked outta my head (and possibly into the next province) when a thunderous crash and an enormous impact assaulted my reality and rattled my brain. In that same instant I found myself in a sea of white, my vision completely obscured as (I realized later) multiple air bags deployed around me.

“HOLY F***!!!” I shouted.

It seemed an apt response.

Not a good day for my Hyundai Elantra (blue car in foreground)

My past didn’t flash before me. My future did. Was I about to die? Was I badly injured, crippled maybe?

I felt no pain. I knew that pain might come, once the shock of whatever had just happened wore off.

My vision in front of me and to the left was almost completely obscured by the white air bags. I don’t remember bringing the car to a halt but I found myself stopped, the car still in gear. After a few seconds I had the presence of mind to take the car out of gear, but I didn’t think to turn it off.

I didn’t appear to be physically injured but I was pretty emotionally shaken up. I thought about getting out of the car. There was an air bag in my way. It was enough to deter me from getting out. I thought, I’ll just sit here a bit and collect myself. I wanted to get to the point where I could talk without my voice sounding all shaky. I knew it would be a while.

A guy showed up in the driver’s side window. “Hey buddy, how you doing?”

I thought he might be part of the emergency response team, even though it had only been about a minute since the crash. It was his manner, pretty calm and collected. Turned out his name was Brett and he worked at the Brock Street Brewing Company just down the street a bit further. I will be going there for a drink someday where I hope to buy Brett a drink.

“Blew through the stop sign,” Brett said.

I started to panic. “I blew through the stop sign?”

“No, no, the other guy!” Brett clarified. “He blew through the stop sign right into you. Now he’s buying some smokes in the corner store.”

I was relieved that I wasn’t at fault. There was definitely something amiss with the other guy, though… blasts through a stop sign onto a major road in downtown Whitby, crashes into another vehicle, and then before doing anything else goes into a convenience store to buy a pack of smokes.

“I’m gonna go make sure he doesn’t get away,” Brett said, after making sure that I was more or less okay.

I did seem to be okay physically. I tried to think how I could get the Thai food I’d ordered, then realized that probably wasn’t going to happen. I still wasn’t quite up to getting out of the car. I remembered a friend telling me about a similar accident and how he’d made the mistake of deciding he was okay, and telling the paramedics he was okay, only to have them all leave him alone while he gradually went into shock. I thought I would just sit tight and then get myself checked out.

Brett came back, said they’d got the guy. He suggested I turn off the car’s engine. Sheepishly, I turned it off. I told Brett I’d better call my wife and let her know that I wouldn’t be coming back with the Thai food.

“I’m okay,” I told her when she picked up. “But I’ve been in an accident. It’s pretty bad but like I said I’m okay.” I was sounding pretty shaky but there was nothing I could do about that. “Can you call Thai Delicious and tell them I won’t be coming?”

She told me she would and that she loved me. I told her I loved her too.

We resolved to give Thai Delicious plenty of business later to make up for it.

Brett gave me a note from a witness with a name and number. “She wanted you to have this in case you need a witness,” he said. I tucked it in my wallet.

A paramedic by the name of Tristan (I think) showed up and checked me out. Turned out I had a nasty cut on my right leg and some scrapes on my right arm. There was what looked like a bad carpet burn on my left elbow. Looking at the pictures of the airbags that were deployed, it’s obvious that all my injuries are a direct result of the airbag deployment. The airbag beneath the dashboard cut my right shin . The one from the steering wheel cut my right forearm. The one from the driver’s side door burned the skin off my left elbow. Presumably they all prevented more serious injury.

Later I would find other scrapes and the distinct impression of a seat belt running up my side. The paramedics took me to Oshawa hospital where I was also checked out and given a relatively clean bill of health and released back into the wild, though I was warned that some whiplash could develop over time.

I was kinda surprised that the hospital did nothing for my cuts and scrapes. When I asked about them, the doctor’s assistant just said, “Clean them and they’ll heal up nicely.”

The following day I had an opportunity to speak to the investigating officer when he kindly came to my home to return my driver’s license and insurance papers. He explained to me that no police are required for minor fender benders, but police are required when there are injuries involved. In this case the injuries turned out to be pretty minor (I don’t think the other guy was hurt at all), but at the time of the accident it looked to witnesses like the injuries would be far more serious.

All the witnesses the officer questioned thought I’d been killed, such was the violence of the collision. I had been struck on the driver’s side, toward the front of the car but the impact had included part of the car door. It had probably looked pretty darned dramatic. (Sure wish I could get my hands on some security footage, if any exists!) Our Hyundai Elantra’s safety features performed as advertised and I sure am happy about that.

Although the other guy claimed he’d been waved onto Brock by another driver, all three witnesses said he blew through the stop sign and right into my car. The police officer told me that if he hadn’t hit me he could well have struck and killed pedestrians crossing the street. It turned out the fellow was driving with a suspended license and had taken the family car without permission. He’s facing three charges, including careless driving. The other two charges are personal in nature and the officer wouldn’t tell me what they were (I didn’t pry).

Despite what happened to me and my car, it appears there were other factors at play that make me feel some sympathy for the guy, and his family… I think he has a rough road ahead of him.

Whereas I’m back on the road, a little worse for wear, but still intact, mobile, and enormously grateful to be alive.

I just finished watching all six seasons of Northern Exposure, a television series that first aired in 1991 about a young doctor forced to work in a small town in Alaska.

Northern Exposure was prestige television before there was such a thing as prestige television. I remember considering it a cut above when I first got into it, though not right away. I’d seen part of an episode when it first aired and dismissed it. My friend Trish insisted I give it a second look. She loaned me several VHS tapes jam packed with Northern Exposure episodes. I watched them with my roommates and we were soon hooked. I watched the first two seasons and thoroughly enjoyed each episode. I continued watching on network television once Trish’s episodes ran out. Then life intervened and I left the country for a while and fell off the Northern Exposure bandwagon.

But I always remembered the spell the show wove, its sensibility, its slightly off kilter humour. When the pandemic hit and I found myself working from (and mostly trapped) at home, I thought maybe some Northern Exposure magic might be just the thing to help get me through. My wife gave me all six seasons as a Christmas present (on DVD; it’s not available on any streaming platforms, as near as I can tell), and I’ve spent just over a year gradually watching them all.

I was surprised to discover how few episodes I’d actually seen. Maybe Trish missed taping a few. Or perhaps I’d completely forgotten some. Turns out I’d never seen any episode beyond the first two seasons. At first I was thrown by the 4:3 (or 1.33:1) aspect ratio, having become accustomed to 16:9 these last twenty years or so, which only became standard after 1996, once Northern Exposure was off the air. 4:3 doesn’t entirely fill a modern television’s entire screen. But after an episode or two the 4:3 aspect ratio stopped bothering me.

I loved re-watching the episodes I’d seen and happily ventured into new territory. The ones I’d seen took me back to a time when I was younger than two of the main characters in the ensemble cast, Joel and Maggie. I was twenty-six when I started watching Northern Exposure the first time around; they were about twenty-nine. Watching the episodes now I found I was closer in age to ex-astronaut turned entrepreneur Maurice Minnifield. So, that was weird. Where has the time gone? (Still younger than the character of Holling Vincoeur, though.)

The first two seasons held up nicely. Much of the magic, I realized, lay in the show’s magical realist elements. The show is at its absolute best when it marries magical realism to bold storytelling (such as briefly breaking the third wall in season two’s War and Peace, or going back in time for a period piece in season three’s finale Cicely). This is not a show with car chases and murders and drama (though death does figure occasionally). It’s a pleasant show, often delightful, shot brightly for the most part, about agreeable, gently flawed people. The music choices are varied, eccentric and entrancing (at least for the first few seasons), featuring artists such as Daniel Lanois, Etta James, Magazine 60, Nat King Cole, Miriam Makeba, Brian Eno and more. It was fun seeing actors like Jack Black, Graham Greene and James Marsters pop up at random. Stars Rob Morrow and Janine Turner are note perfect throughout.

I found the show the perfect anodyne to the increasingly mad world we find ourselves in now. I couldn’t completely escape, though. Unsettinglingly, I heard Trump’s name invoked not once but three times during the course of the series, each instance jarring.

Does it hold up for the entire six seasons? I had read that it doesn’t, but was curious to see for myself. In the middle of the show’s run creators Josh Brand and John Falsey handed the reins over to showrunner David Chase. Chase is famous as the showrunner for The Sopranos, a gritty show about a mob boss, considered one of television’s greatest series. I found this fascinating. Chase admitted not really understanding the premise of Northern Exposure. So this guy, who professed not to understand the premise of Northern Exposure, but who obviously knows a thing or two about making television, wound up running the show. He had other writers (such as Diana Frolov and Jeff Melvoin) to help him, writers who did mostly get the show, so I’m happy to report that the show does indeed hold up. Sort of. Sometimes more, sometimes less. It’s get a bit dodgy around the end of the fourth season and into the fifth, but does eventually find its stride again until near the end of the sixth season.

The sixth season is hit and miss. The season premiere, Dinner at Seven Thirty, is strong, and I thoroughly enjoyed a storyline featuring Joel giving up his medical practice to head north and immerse himself in native culture. Halfway through the season Joel is replaced by another doctor and his wife. The actors, Paul Provenza and Teri Polo, are fine, though little of note is done with them. There’s an episode near the end of the run featuring Ed Chigliak (called Balls) that in my opinion is among the strongest in the entire series (well, one of the episode’s story lines, at least). It provides actor Darren Burrows (Ed) with a material he could sink his teeth into for a change. Another enjoyable episode from season six, Little Italy, curiously presages The Sopranos.

There appeared to be a lack of understanding of some of the characters in season six. Apart from the aforementioned episode Balls, and half-hearted attempts to make him a filmmaker and a shaman, the character of Ed Chigliak gets entirely too goofy over time. It’s a shame; the writers could have done so much more with him. Elsewhere Brian Doan has written (in an essay about Northern Exposure that far surpasses this one in depth) about Chris Steven’s incipient toxic masculinity, and dammit Chris actually does become that a bit. It is painful to watch and a betrayal of the way Chris was presented earlier in the series, when he lived with a self-awareness of his darker side.

Sadly, none of the characters ever live up to their potential. In the first episode of the sixth season (Dinner at Seven Thirty) we see Cynthia Geary as a completely different character. I didn’t even recognize her for half the episode. It was a glimpse of what could have been done with Geary’s character Shelly had the writers allowed the character to grow. And in the final episode of the entire series, Tranquillity Base, which, sadly, bordered on the ridiculous (no, actually was ridiculous), we see Holling Vincoeur as a caricature of himself, more bloodhound than man, while Chris Stevens is ludicrous as opposed to insightful. Still, I like the montage music in the final moments of that episode (Our Town, by Iris Dement), perhaps the only saving grace (one final, parting gift from the series) in an episode that otherwise seemed deliberately designed to make fans repeatedly facepalm themselves.

Although the series ended on a less than stellar note, it was still entirely worth watching. It did not betray my memories of it. And although I will never watch it in its entirety again (unless I somehow become immortal between now and eternity) I fully expect to cherry pick episodes here and there when I feel the need to return to the state of mind that is Northern Exposure at its best.

(This essay contains spoilers for the third season of Ozark)

The other day, during a walk with my wife, I burst into tears.

During the pandemic we’ve gotten into the excellent habit of going for long walks. We find them therapeutic. On this walk, I was telling Lynda about some family history we’d never really got into before.

“He was my favorite cousin,” I told her, and then I burst into tears.

I actually stood hunched over on a corner racked with sobs for what felt like several minutes before I regained control. The last time I cried anything like that in public was twenty years ago, during the end credits of Life is Beautiful, the movie with Roberto Benigni.

This time also had to do with popular entertainment, but it’s much deeper than that.

Three nights earlier Lynda and I had finished watching the third season of Ozark. The season had begun by introducing a character who quickly became my favourite on the show, the brother of Laura Linney’s character. His name was Ben (played by Tom Pelphrey), and it soon came out that the character had bipolar disorder. This became a major plot point, and in the season finale things did not end well for Ben, so much so that I was devastated. I did not cry then, but I was wounded, and it lingered with me for three days, until Lynda and I took our walk, and it all came out.

Apart from the incident with Life is Beautiful, I’m not normally in the habit of crying during or after movies or TV shows. I’m usually immune to entertainment’s emotional manipulations. But this one hit close to the bone. It was more than Ben’s fate that did me in. It was reality. My reality since about the age of twelve.

No, I’m not bipolar. I’ll try to explain, the way I did to my wife during our walk.

When I was about twelve my parents gave me a gift. It was a book. They told me it used to belong to my Uncle Bill.

I wasn’t aware I had an Uncle Bill, and said so.

I don’t know how much my parents told me that day, but over time I learned that Uncle Bill had been institutionalized for schizophrenia back in the fifties. He spent most if not all of his life institutionalized. It’s my understanding that he experienced electroshock therapy during his time in the institution, back before they perfected that. I never met Uncle Bill.

When my parents gave me Uncle Bill’s book something was said. I don’t remember what, exactly. But it was something like Uncle Bill was creative and so are you so it seems appropriate that you should have this book. It was a perfectly innocent remark and it was meant as a compliment. But it had the inadvertent effect of creating, in my young, impressionable mind, a link between Uncle Bill and me.

Around this time, at the age of twelve, my best friend Kevin Brown moved away. A slew of friends I’d been friends with since Grade One drifted away. I found myself isolated. Some jerk at school began bullying me. I got moved out of my bedroom upstairs into the basement while my father built a new bedroom for me. One night, alone in the basement, just before I drifted off to sleep, I experienced the unmistakable, unfathomable presence of evil in the form of absolute despair.

That’s what it felt like, anyway—a fleeting glimpse of horror, of utter hopelessness. It lasted only a few seconds, but it shook me to my core. I had not known it was possible to feel such abject terror.

It was a long time ago so I don’t remember the exact chronology. But around then I decided I no longer wanted to go to school. Every morning, within minutes of waking up, a pit formed in my stomach. I lost the ability to eat breakfast. I just couldn’t eat. It would be eighteen years before I would be able to eat a full breakfast again in the morning. For a while there I couldn’t talk either, in the mornings. I remember reluctantly walking to school with my sister Susan while she tried in vain to understand why I wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t have been able to explain even had I been able to open my mouth. I could only nod or shake my head at her questions. Once, or twice, or maybe thrice, I felt so weird during class that my mother had to come to school to take me home. She wasn’t happy about it. She didn’t understand. Neither did I.

I thought I was either crazy or about to go crazy, but I couldn’t tell anybody about it. I had to deal with it myself. I was absolutely certain that what had happened to my uncle Bill would happen to me. I didn’t know it but I was grappling with the inability to prove a negative. There was no way to prove to myself that I wouldn’t go crazy. Because I could have! Logically, if Uncle Bill had gone crazy, if people could go crazy, then it could happen to me. Only time would tell. This fear, together with the increasing isolation of my social circle, did me in, for a while.

It lasted until the summer. Sometime after school let out, my parents got us a puppy, Sarge, and took Sarge, my three sisters and me on a three week long trip around the Maritimes. We camped in Prince Edward Island, drove the Cabot Trail, visited my old friend Kevin Brown in Sydney, Nova Scotia, visited relatives in Norton, New Brunswick, and visited more relatives in northern New Brunswick. The trip was sufficiently eventful and fun that I forgot all my fears and returned to normal. I especially enjoyed visiting my cousins in Johnville, New Brunswick, including my cousin James, who was the same age as me.

James was a lot of fun. He and his brothers taught my sisters and me how to play many card games, and one night we camped outside their old farmhouse on the old Mahoney homestead. That night James told me the funniest joke I’d ever heard up til that point in my life. “What’s big and hairy and sticks out of your pyjamas?” he asked me. 

I laughed and laughed, and I hadn’t even heard the punchline yet.

“What?” I asked.

“Your head,” he said.

I just about died at the age of twelve laughing.

James was my favourite cousin, I decided.

By the time I started Grade Eight, I had recovered from my anxiety, and no longer thought I was going crazy, and replaced all that with an almost but not quite crippling case of self-consciousness, especially around anybody I thought was better than me, and girls. I thought just about everybody was better than me, especially girls, so I was pretty much self-conscious around everybody. Still, I’d replaced the old set of friends with a new set and with thoughts of my poor uncle out of my mind I was more or less happy for the rest of my teens.

I don’t remember seeing much of cousin James until later on in my teens when we visited my Aunt and Uncle’s cottage on Skiff Lake in New Brunswick. James and I found time to do a bit of canoeing around the lake together, and I quickly discovered that he wasn’t quite the same James as I remembered. He told me tales of a trip to Toronto that did not sound quite right to me, adventures so fantastic and prurient that I did not think they could be true, and that whether true or not I found disturbing. I found I couldn’t relate to him, and alas he became no longer my favourite cousin.

On January 17th, 1985. I was attending Ryerson Polytechnical Insitute (it wasn’t a university yet) in Toronto. I was a long way from home, in a completely new environment, with a whole new set of friends, but I was having a good time. By this time I was keeping a journal. On that date I wrote:

“I am susceptible to two different kinds of depression. One I’ve felt all my life; I call it the ‘Black Irish Mood.’  …the other depression borders on clinical depression.  I’ve felt it three times that I can remember. I get it when I’m extremely tired or physically run down. I felt it for a large part of grade 7, for the last few weeks of summer, and I feel it occasionally now. It scares me. It is characterized by feeling totally out of control of my life. I feel at the mercy of unknown forces.”

I would come to think of that first year in Toronto as one of the best years of my life. Still, that journal entry hints at some dark clouds assembling on the horizon.

All remained well until I returned home to the island for the summer.

On May 5th 1985, I wrote:

“Since getting home I haven’t been feeling like myself.” 

This was a bit of an understatement. On June 17th I elaborated:

“This last week has been one of the strangest weeks of my life, at least psychologically speaking.  All Wednesday night I felt real uncomfortable, and it wasn’t the first night I’ve felt like that. It was like a feeling of anxiety or nervousness.  I had to go plant strawberries at Burn’s Poultry Farm on Thurs, so maybe I was a bit apprehensive.  Why I don’t know; I couldn’t control the feeling. …for some reason I was gripped by anxiety, a pit in my stomach. I thought I was becoming depressed, but there was no reason for it.  Weird ideas and thoughts came unbidden into my head (e.g., suicide, not something I would ever consider seriously).  It crossed my mind that maybe I was on the road to a nervous breakdown or insanity.  I tried to reason with myself, but the pit in my stomach wouldn’t leave. I think it is gone now…I never want to experience it again.”

I would experience it again many times. It was a bad summer. And a bad fall. It was everything I’d felt when I was twelve years old multiplied by one hundred. I became distant from my friends. I became concerned for my state of mind. I was afraid I was going crazy. I WAS crazy, kind of. I thought about how I was feeling constantly. I could hardly concentrate on my summer job. I told no one but my journal:    

July 23 1985

“I still suffer the occasional feelings of anxiety or depression or whatever the hell it is.”

On September 4th, on my way back to Toronto for my second year at Ryerson, I experienced my first panic attack:

“Well, when I hit the plane I wish I knew what hit me. I had a really scary attack of the nerves, at times really bad, that lasted until about 2 hours after I landed.  No reason, no warning, nothing.  Scared the hell out of me. Feeling of total emptiness, of despair, and I knew that if it kept up, a total breakdown, & maybe suicide, was inevitable.”

From that point onward I lived in fear of more panic attacks. I was right to be afraid, because they kept coming. I would have them at night. I would get up and run around my apartment trying to make a panic attack go away, or keep it at bay. I would drink a glass of water, not because I thought the water helped, but because the act of getting the water and drinking it distracted me. I would have panic attacks in the morning after waking up, and run around the apartment like a madman, out to the balcony for fresh air. I would have them during the day, alone, with friends, in class, the entire time convinced that I was going crazy, that it was only a matter of time until I suffered a complete nervous breakdown, whatever that was.

I kept the way I was feeling entirely to myself. I pretended I was okay. There’s a picture of me with my friends and roommates on Thanksgiving after baking a turkey. We’re all standing around the turkey smiling at the camera. My smile is too big, unnatural, entirely fake. What was going on outside was entirely at odds with what was going on inside.

One day one of our professors at Ryerson paired each of us students up for an exercise.  I was paired with a young woman whose name I wish I could remember now. She was nice, I liked her. We were told to interview one another. Ask one another a bunch of questions, get to know one another, and afterwards, share our impressions with the rest of the class. I was a mess, but I got through it okay.

“What were your impressions of Joe?” the professor asked.

“Calm,” she said. “Confident. In control.”

Anything but, I was shocked that I came across that way. But the turmoil I felt was completely inside. I did not let anything out, except rarely. I told two friends how I felt, but they were too young, had no experience in such matters, and could not help me. One of them teased me about it later, while I was still in anxiety’s horrible grip. I mention it, but I don’t hold it against him.

I went to see Ryerson’s doctor, explained my symptoms. I remember him as being older than I am now, writing this, though he might not have been. We might as well have been on two different planets. He attributed my symptoms to stress, which sounded too much like, “it’s all in your head” to be of any help to me. He couldn’t—or didn’t—help me.

I remember long, long walks at night, around enormous city blocks in the cold, to chill the fear out of me. It kept the panic attacks at bay but did not otherwise help much.

Still, a part of me resisted this invisible, relentless foe. Though I could see no end to my suffering, tiny nuggets of hope occasionally appeared to sustain me. A grandmother wrote to an advice column that she had suffered depression all her life, only to have it mysteriously lift in her old age, and now she could enjoy her grandchildren. If it could happen to her, it could happen to me. Maybe I would be fine in my old age. It was something to cling to.

One night when I decided I needed professional help. I visited Princess Margaret’s Emergency department. The emergency physician asked me several questions. The only one I remember is whether I was gay. I guess he figured maybe I was struggling with that. That wasn’t it. I asked if I could see a psychiatrist. He said the waiting lists were long, but he’d put me on one. I never did hear from anybody.

I went home for Christmas that year, barely holding it together. Fake smiles, fake Christmas cheer. I felt better when I drank, so on occasion I drank a lot. One night at the local hot spot in town—it may have been the Regent—it was Zombies. You know, to turn me into a zombie. I drank one after another. They had no absolutely effect on me until suddenly they did. My mother was waiting up for me. Even less impressed than when she’d had to retrieve me from school back when I was twelve. The next morning we had our family picture taken. Shortly before the shoot I was in the bathroom puking my guts out.

“We have to get our picture taken in fifteen minutes and listen to this!” Mom complained to my father outside the bathroom. I barfed, on cue, sick, depressed, but amused.

That family picture hung on the living room wall for years. Punishment, I guess.

Waiting in the Charlottetown airport to return to Toronto, I found a patch of sunlight by a window, sat in it, and reflected on my state of mind. I decided then and there that I had to beat this thing, whatever it was. There was nobody to help me, only me. I had decided this before but it never quite took. This time resulted in a subtle shift in attitude. A positive bias that hadn’t existed before. Back in Toronto things got better. Not all at once, the panic attacks didn’t quite go away—I continued to have them off and on for years—but I dealt with them better. My fear of going crazy gradually vanished. I wasn’t going to become like my uncle. I wasn’t going to become schizophrenic. I became myself again—happy.

Meanwhile, my cousin James, my erstwhile favourite cousin—the same age as me—was diagnosed as schizophrenic. He attended university in Ottawa. I don’t know the whole story, but one day after he stopped taking his medication they found his car abandoned in a field. The driver’s door was shut and his wallet, money and identification had been discarded on the passenger seat. The passenger door was ajar. None of us has ever seen James again. They never found James’ body, and they never found James.

Thirty-four years later I watched Season Three of Ozark and rooted for my favourite character Ben, who suffered from Bipolar Disorder—not the same disorder, I know, but it resonated, like all great art.

It had all ended okay for me because I’m lucky.

It did not end well for Ben, but that doesn’t really matter because he doesn’t even exist, other than in our imaginations.

But there are those who have existed, and my cousin James is one of them, and it didn’t end well for him.

Three days after I hurt for bewildered, betrayed Ben as he stepped out of that restaurant in that final episode, I stood on the street with my wife, and said, “He was my favourite cousin.”

And it brought forth such a well of long suppressed feeling that I cried for James, and for my Uncle Bill, and for my younger, hurting self, I think.

And then I had to explain it all to my wife, as I’ve just done for you.

My wife Lynda was at work, seven months pregnant and enjoying, if not every minute of it, at least every second or third minute of it. I was at home, painting the nursery. I was painting the nursery because our twins were due in just two months, and we were afraid they might be early—you know, like two weeks early—because she was pregnant with twins.

So there I was, painting away, and the phone rang. Too late, I missed it. Then it rang again, but my hands were full of brushes and rollers and it was just too much trouble to go into the next room and answer the phone, except that… 

…the damn thing rang again.

This time I knew it was important, so I hightailed it to the phone and picked it up just in the nick of time. It was Lynda. She sounded—well, panicked. Her voice was all quavery. On the verge of tears. “I think my water broke,” she said, and provided details that were watery, messy, and a little scary.

I was thinking, nah, not possible, we’re two months early here. Clearly, she’s misread the signs.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

“Painting the nursery.” 

“Paint faster,” she said.

I took off to the pharmacy where she worked, ready to bundle her into the car and rush to the hospital at something resembling four times the speed of light. When I got there she said, “Hang on. Gotta finish up a couple of prescriptions first.” 

Excuse me?  

It was obvious to everyone in the store that something wasn’t quite right. “Nothing serious,” I explained to one woman. “She’s about to give birth, is all.” 

Twenty minutes later she was finally ready to go. We’re in the car. I start the car and we’re outta there.

Or so I think.

“Wait!”

“What? What is it? What’s wrong?” 

“I forgot my boots.” 

I stopped the car, ran back into the pharmacy, and got Lynda’s boots.

She was weeping a little on the way to Markham-Stouffville Hospital. “I’m scared, Joe. I’m two months early.” 

I was scared too, but I needed to reassure her.

“Everything’ll be okay,” I said,  and took hold of her hand. She accepted my hand—for a bit, then gently placed it back on the steering wheel. “Two hands,” she said. “Wouldn’t want to get in an accident now.” 

I agreed. We made it to the hospital accident-free. There, we took the wrong hallway, then figured it out and passed a woman facing the wall, a man gently rubbing her back. A glimpse of the future?  

Soon we were in the birthing room where a cheery nurse catered to my wife’s every need. We’re in good hands, I thought, but soon it became clear that Markham-Stowville can’t handle little babies that want to arrive two months early. The closest hospital that can is McMaster, in Hamilton. Two young, hip paramedics arrived and transferred a stoic Lynda onto a rolling stretcher and took her away. I drove to Hamilton, alone in the dark, in the rain. Knowing that I had the easy part.

Lynda was just over thirty-one weeks—not a big deal, we were told. They gave her medicine to speed up the babies’ lung development, and other medicine to delay the birth as long as possible. Our spirits were good. We were lucky she was thirty-one weeks and not less, like many others that came through that ward. Some babies, we were told, come as early as twenty weeks. It’s heartbreaking—their chances for survival are not good. At thirty-one weeks the success rate is close to one hundred percent.

Two days later. Valentine’s Day. Our babies decided they wanted out now. Decisions were made. Lynda was moved from a cozy little room with pleasant music to a sterile place of white walls and shiny metal beds. I counted eighteen people in the room. The anesthetist had a funny little dog on his stethoscope. Lynda was pumped so full of drugs she couldn’t talk properly. I worried about her.

Our doctor’s name was Lightheart. Doctor Lightheart explained the use of forceps to her intern, then promptly demonstrated, deftly delivering Keira. Keira let out a healthy wail and was whisked away to the level 3 neo-natal intensive care unit where I hoped they didn’t mix her up with another baby.

Still one baby to go, though. Suddenly Erin’s heartbeat dropped to half the normal rate. The atmosphere in the room changed instantly. Doctor Lightheart reached inside Lynda farther than I would have imagined possible. Her hand was poking at Lynda’s belly from inside, like a scene right out of Alien. I didn’t know you could DO that! 

Finally, the forceps brought Erin out. She didn’t cry like Keira did—just a brief, muffled chirp. This was because she’d been fitted with a respirator, but she was fine. She, too, was whisked away to the intensive care unit.

The room emptied.

It was Valentine’s Day.

And I was the proud father of two.

I am the father of three-year old twin girls. The cutest darned things on the face of the planet. Even in the middle of the night these kids are cute, which I believe is an evolutionary mechanism, a sort of “survival of the cutest”—such cute-ness clearly evolved to defuse the wrath of parents at three in the morning, when children refuse to sleep. 

For several nights in a row our girls will sleep perfectly fine, cleverly lulling my wife and I into a false sense of security. Then, without warning, they will strike, invariably in the middle of the night before a Really Important Day—often a day requiring actual consciousness. 

If the girls would just stay in bed it wouldn’t be a problem—but they don’t, of course. They trick us into allowing them up, utilizing such clever tactics as the infamous “I Got to Go Pee-pee!” ploy. Many’s the time I’ve fallen for that one. Only after they’ve been sitting on the potty for the better part of an hour with nothing coming out do I clue in that maybe I’ve been had. I cajole them back into bed, and they’re right back at it five minutes later in a devilish cycle that my wife and I know only too well will continue throughout the night. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. My wife and I love those little girls like nobody’s business and would never, ever consider the sort of radical action my own mother once took when I cried nonstop both day and night for three solid months following my birth, until mom, at the end of her rope, returned to the hospital and demanded that they take me back. (Fortunately, the hospital had a “no refunds or exchanges” policy in place.)

Studies have shown that sleep deprivation can lead to serious lapses in judgment. My wife informs me that being male can also lead to serious lapses in judgment. Combining the two is clearly a recipe for disaster. Sadly, as near as I can figure, when a child refuses to sleep there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Oh, I know some people swear by Dr. Ferber’s famous method, and others take their children to bed with them, and still others have become inordinately fond of drugs and alcohol, but none of these solutions has worked for us (although we are enjoying the alcohol). 

I remain optimistic, however. What may work in the end, I figure, is good old-fashioned patience. One day, those little girls of ours are going to be teen-agers. And if there’s one thing I know about teen-agers it’s that they like to sleep—’til noon if they can swing it. Of course, this would be a perfect opportunity to exact some sort of revenge—many parents, I’m sure, would derive enormous satisfaction from rousing their children at the crack of dawn, spouting silly aphorisms such as “the early bird gets the worm.” But my girls aren’t birds and possess no particular hankering for worms that I’m aware of, and revenge is not my style. 

No, sleep is my style, and the more of it the better. If the day ever comes when my girls want to sleep ‘til noon, you won’t find me standing in their way. You won’t find me standing at all. You’ll find me two rooms over, snug in my own bed, sleeping ‘til noon right along with them.

My wife went to a seminar today. It was on how to be a better parent. Before she went one of our daughters asked her where she was going. 

“I’m going to learn how to be a better mother,” my wife replied. 

“But you don’t need to learn how to be a better mother,” our daughter responded. “You’re already a perfect mother.”

I thought this was really sweet. 

Until she added: “Daddy should go!”

Sometimes I wonder what the girls will say when they’re grown, and look back at my performance as a Dad. 

“Left a little bit to be desired there, Dad,” they might say. 

“Hey, I did the best I could given my limitations as a human being,” I imagine defending myself. 

“Sure Dad,” Erin will say. “But what about the broom?”

Ah yes. The broom. 

Came home one night after they’d been with a babysitter. They were always a little worked up after babysitters. Probably because they saw how great the world would be without any rules. And then along I come and re-impose rules on their universe. 

So this one night I kept my cool, but they would. Not. Do. A single thing. I said. 

Ever wonder why you’re perfectly calm one minute and a raving lunatic the next? One explanation offered is that it’s because the kids are getting under your skin, but you’ve got your foot on the brake keeping yourself calm, as they’re painting the dog and putting your prize rhododendron in the microwave, right up to the point where you're attempting to save the cat from the oven, and then, you take your foot off the brake, but the other foot has been on the gas all along, and suddenly you’re zero to a hundred and twenty in a split second. 

That was me that night. Doing my best to remain calm in the face of two completely adorable but utterly out of control orangutans and failing miserably. 

I’d had enough. I took my foot off the brake. Picked up one of the girl’s plastic toy brooms. Threw the broom on the floor. As God is my witness I thought it would bounce. It didn’t. Instead it shattered into a thousand pieces. 

I had the girls’ attention now, but I certainly hadn’t improved the situation any. Man were they mad, especially Erin, because it was her broom I’d broken. She was inconsolable, and I was ashamed, because this was not me. I was not someone who broke kids’ brooms, or ever lost control. 

I heard about that broom for months. I’m sure when they’re adults I’ll hear about it again. I won’t be completely forgiven until the girls have children of their own and discover that they too are only human. Just as I’ve forgiven my own parents for the odd bonehead move they made when I was a kid. 

Now if I can just limit my own bonehead moves to that one time with the broom until they're in college …

My daughters have been talking a lot about fame lately. 

I used to want to be famous. 

Now I just want to be pretty. 

Neither is going to happen anytime soon. 

Anyway, we were at the zoo talking about fame. Part of my job as a Dad is to provide fatherly advice. So, I said: girls, it’s better to be respected than famous. Take a look at that rhinoceros, for instance. Everybody comes here to look at it. They all want a glimpse of that rhinoceros. In a way, that rhinoceros epitomizes fame. Everybody knows the rhino, and in return, the rhinoceros has little or no privacy. Of course, it’s worse when you’re a rhinoceros. It’s not like you’re gonna get the best seats at the restaurant when you’re a rhinoceros or drive a Porsche. You just have people gawking at you all the time. But sans good seats and Porsches it’s the same general idea. 

I asked Keira and Erin if they understood.

Keira said, “What does epitomize mean?”

Erin said, “Dad, that’s a hippopotamus, not a rhinoceros.”

And anyway (they went on to say) we don’t really want to be famous; we want to own a pet store. 

I was pleased. Now I don’t have to worry about them becoming famous, and I’m certain they’ll be respected pet store owners. Better yet, if they decide they want to sell rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses, I’m confident they’ll be able to tell them apart.

One Saturday I was looking after Keira and Erin. In a quiet moment I decided to check out Facebook. Now, I have to confess that I’m not a big fan of Facebook. However, from time to time people send me messages on Facebook and I feel obliged to read them and perhaps (if I’m feeling generous) provide some manner of curt response. 

So I checked it out and lo and behold several people had sent me various forms of tests. There was a test on optical illusions, so I took that and scored ridiculously high: nineteen out of twenty. 

Buoyed by this success, I ventured onto the next test. 

It was an IQ test. 

The directions specified that I should be alone with absolutely no distractions. Oh what the heck, I thought. How hard could it be? I clicked START. 

Right away I was in trouble. Turns out the darned test was timed. Not a problem if the girls didn’t interrupt me. And they were fine, playing quietly in the adjacent room —until about three minutes in. Keira came to me with a question. My concentration was shattered. No matter. I forged on. Erin started a fight with Keira. Keira complained to me. Keira started a fight with Erin. Erin complained to me. The cats were meowing. They too were complaining. I should have been paying attention to them all, but I wasn’t. Instead I was writing a stupid online test that I failed the moment I began, because I ignored the initial instructions: BE ALONE WITH ABSOLUTELY NO DISTRACTIONS. I was a moron right from the get go. And the results of the test confirmed it. 

I know what my IQ is supposed to be. Or rather, what it was before I had children. I’ve had it tested twice for high school and once for university and taken the odd informal test since then. I know the exact results in each instance. I was once reasonably intelligent. 

On the positive side, I can now quantify just exactly how much stupider I am in the presence of children and cats.

(With apologies to Dr. Suess)

Those children’s books

Those children’s books

I do not like those childrens’ books

I’m forced to read them every night. 

And tho my children do not fight

(not a single kick or punch) 

as they choose between a Seuss or Munsch

each I’ve read a thousand times. 

The cadences, rhythms and rhymes

have burrowed deep into my brain. 

I fear that I may go insane. 

And no

I will not read them on a train. 

Unless my children ask me to, 

alas which they are wont to do:

“Would you, could you, read them, Pop?  

We even promise not to hop.

And we would love it if you could, 

Um, do the voices that you do so good.”

And that is why I have no choice 

But to use a girlie voice

For the parts of Pocahontas, 

Sister Bear, and, when they want us,

into monsters, fairies, princes, elves, 

Dads like me must turn ourselves

At the drop of a cat in a hat.

Oh, I’m well aware of what I’m missing: 

Heinlein, Atwood, Doris Lessing

Time I am desperately awaitin’ 

In which to read some Irving Layton

But I must refrain from useless pleading

I know the need for children reading

Ondaatje matters not a whit,

If we pooh pooh our kiddy lit

Carol Shields? Who will need ‘er? 

If no one left around can read ‘er? 

And so I set aside my selfish ways

Have come to terms with endless days

Of bedtimes pushed yet further back

As I negotiate an endless stack

Of endings I have long since known, 

And read to children ‘til they’re grown

And maybe then some.

And so we read our stories in a house, 

We read of spaceships, critters and a mouse

We read it cuddled up together 

In both good and nasty weather

And it may drive me round the bend

But I suspect that in the end

I will probably admit 

That all those shelves of children’s lit

Were rather better for my kids 

Than sitting watching endless vids.

Yes, I have come to see the worth

Of reading to my children right from birth

And if with me you don’t agree

You can go and read up in a tree.

Read it and you may, I say

Read it and you may.

I get asked asked about my daughters all the time. Questions such as:

Q. Do you ever get them mixed up?

A. Plenty. Once when they were just babies I was looking after them alone and all day long I thought, that’s funny, Erin’s doing what Keira usually does. And Keira’s doing what Erin usually does. Go figure. Then their mother came home and said, “You do realize you have them in the wrong beds, don’t you?” Sure enough I had them completely mixed up.

Q. Are they identical?

A. My father says they’re not identical, they’re just indistinguishable. According to the medical authorities they are fraternal twins because when they were born they had separate placentas and separate chorionic sacs. However, according to research I’ve done, this can still result in a ten percent chance of them being identical. They certainly look identical; however, they’d have to be genetically tested to be sure. My own personal theory is that they’re mirror twins. Erin is left-handed and Keira is right-handed.

Q. How do you tell them apart?

A. For me it’s mostly the sound of their voices. As soon as they speak, I know who they are. From the side and back they’re virtually impossible to tell apart. Sometimes they accidentally scratch themselves in the face. Then the one who has the most scratched up face becomes Scarface. That helps a lot.

Q. How can you be certain that the one who started out as Keira is still Keira, and not Erin? Maybe you got them mixed up and just don’t know it.

A. In fact, we just decide every morning who’s going to be whom. “Alright, you’re Erin today, and you’re Keira. Cool? Cool.” Then we just remember who’s wearing what. Makes things so much easier.

Q. Was it hard having twins?

A. The first three months were a living hell. It’s gotten easier since. Much, much easier. I couldn’t recommend having twins more. It’s magical. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.

Please be advised that this bit of nonsense contains the word “pee.”

So. 

I really had to pee. 

I was trying to get to work early for a radio drama taping. I wanted to get there and test the microphones, the console, and still have time to sit in on the read-through. Figured if I left by seven, I could make it in by eight-thirty, with the first cast members arriving at ten. 

Freezing rain messed everything up. The damned bus didn’t show up ’til seven-twenty. Then the train was late. Forty-five minutes late. Waiting for it, standing in the freezing rain, it occurred to me that I really had to pee. 

I couldn’t leave the platform in case the train came. The train was already late and the subsequent train had been canceled. If I left to pee, I’d miss the train and I might never get to work. If I couldn’t get to work, I wouldn’t be able to record the radio drama cast. I’d let a lot of people down. The train would come soon, I knew. I’d be able to go to the washroom on the train, or maybe even be able to hold it until I got to Toronto. 

The train took its sweet time coming. But it came, and I got on it, and I thought I’d better sit down if I want to get a seat, and sure I had to pee, but I could hold it ’til Toronto. Lots of other people got on, we stopped at Ajax, then Pickering, and by then so many people were on the train that we couldn’t take any more. There was no way I could get up from my seat and get to the washroom because there were far too many people in the way. 

No problem. 

I’d be able to go to the washroom in Toronto. 

“Sorry folks, we’re gonna have to wait here on the platform for a while until they figure out what to do with us,” the conductor announced to the train. “It’ll just be a few minutes.”

Half an hour later the train hadn’t budged an inch, and I began to think of Tycho Brahe.

Brahe was a sixteenth century astronomer who, once upon a time, attended a banquet. It was considered the height of bad manners to leave the banquet before its conclusion (so the story goes), so Tycho didn’t go anywhere, even though he really had to pee. He stayed the course right up until his bladder exploded, and he died several days later. Physicians these days think that this sort of thing is impossible, and that Tycho actually died from something else (such as mercury poisoning). But sitting on that train with my bladder poised to explode, I was fairly certain that not only was that how Tycho Brahe had died, it was how I was going to die. 

Fortunately, the train began to move. I would be spared such an ignominious death. 

Unfortunately, we moved about two hundred meters and then the train stopped again. A frozen switch. No problem: a mere half an hour later and we were on the move again. 

By then I was in agony. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we have created a world in which we cannot pee when we have to. And that is just plain wrong. Because you see, everybody has to pee. It’s a natural body function. Why, you yourself have probably peed this very day. You may be returning from a pee (did you wash your hands?) Or you may have to pee right now. If so, I suggest you go and pee. Because it’s really not the sort of thing you want to put off. 

Once I had to pee and I thought, I’ll just take the elevator down to the second floor. I’ll be able to pee once I get to the second floor. 

Wrong.

The elevator got stuck between floors. I was stuck in an elevator in Toronto. It was one in the morning. Security had to call Wisconsin to the elevator company’s head office to locate an elevator repairman. The elevator company’s head office woke up a repairman who lived in Barrie. He had to drive all the way into Toronto and a mere hour and a half later I was able to pee. 

And I’m here to tell you that that pee felt good. 

And so (for that matter) did the pee I had after being stuck on the train. 

Which is why, perhaps, we’ve created this crazy world in which it’s not possible to pee whenever we want to. So that sometimes, after we are required to hold our bladders for interminable lengths of time, when at long last we are finally able to pee, we can appreciate just how unbelievably good it feels. 

Ahhhhhhh……. 

ZZZipp.

I was sitting in the dentist’s chair when the dentist did the usual dentist’s trick of filling my mouth full of dental implements before asking me a question. It’s my habit to yank all the dental gadgets out of my mouth before answering the question. 

“I’m fine,” I told her. “How are you?”

I discovered she was fine and she returned all the implements to my mouth and got on with the business at hand. 

After a while she said, “This is difficult.”

I pulled all the implements out of my mouth again and asked her why. 

“Because you’ve got such a small mouth,” she said. 

“Huh?” 

“I mean, have you ever looked at it?  Your oral cavity is freakishly small.” 

I wondered how it was that after forty-some years of attending dentist’s offices this was the first time one of them had ever remarked upon this. 

"It’s a wonder you don’t have major jaw problems,” she added.

Interesting, I thought, thinking of my sister, who did have major jaw problems. 

An optometrist once told me that my eyes were freakishly shaped. Like footballs. Which, apparently, was why I was myopic (most peoples’ eyeballs are round). 

My mother has informed me that when I was born the doctor used forceps, which is why (according to her) I have a cone head. 

Fortunately, all of these oddities are concealed by lips, eye sockets, and hair, so few people suspect what a freak I truly am.

When I was eleven I couldn’t see the chalkboard. So I got glasses.

When I was twelve I wore them part time. I would carry them from class to class and put them on when I needed to. By the time I was thirteen I was wearing them all the time. Just in time for my teen-age years. Just in time for the glasses to eat away at my self-confidence. 

Sometime around the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, after much consultation with friends who’d already taken the leap, I got contacts. I loved them right away. They made my disability go away. It required some practice, but soon I had no trouble putting contacts in my eyes. There was the odd mishap, like the time my lens got too dry and scratched my cornea, and the time a lens split in half in my eye and rolled up under my eyelid (I freaked out at that one, until I reasoned that the lens couldn’t get lost behind my eye—that it had to be just under the eyelid. Sure enough a doctor flipped the eyelid back and got it out).

Once I got mixed up and thought I was rinsing out my contact lens container and accidentally washed my contacts down the drain. No problem, I resorted to glasses. But by then I had developed a loathing for glasses, so on the subway I took them off and set them on the seat beside me, then promptly got up at the next station stop and left them behind. They never showed up at Lost and Found. For three days, while I waited for replacements for both my contacts and glasses, I was forced to live life with my natural eyesight, such as it was. Because I’d always had some form of vision correction since the age of 12, I hadn’t noticed how badly my eyes had deteriorated. I wasn’t exactly blind—I could still see close up, but what an eye opener, pun intended. I still had to go to work. I remember editing audio tape with the tape machine inches from my eyes. I went to the zoo with my girlfriend and was unable to see any animals. I couldn’t watch television, there was no point going to movies, and I couldn’t even read a book or magazine with comfort. I realized for the first time in my life how much of a disadvantage I would be at had I been born in a time without vision correction—in other words, for most of human history (and it’s also true for millions of the world’s poor today).

But other than those incidents I had a good twenty-six years wearing contact lenses.

Until a couple of years ago. When I started getting headaches.

I have an astigmatism. I can’t see far away and just about all distances are blurry to me. In my mid-forties, as I think is the case for just about everyone, I started to develop far-sightedness, or an inability to see close up. My eyes began to lose their elasticity. My contacts couldn’t correct all my vision problems.

I persisted anyway. I loathed glasses, I told myself. It was inconceivable that I should have to wear them all the time. I dealt with the headaches. I worked through the headaches, lived with them all the time—except when I wore glasses. I tried different contacts, but none of them made the headaches go completely away. Some days were worse than others. You might be asking yourself why I would put myself through that kind of torture. I would refer you back to the part of this essay where I mention loathing glasses.

Still, the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve made my peace with glasses. They allow me to see, after all. They are a miracle product. Not as elegant as contacts, which allowed me to pretend that I didn’t have a disability, but still. Thank God for glasses.

One weekend the headaches were so bad that I was practically in tears by the end of the day. It was obvious that the end of contact lenses was nigh. I knew this would be the case someday, but I thought that day would be when I was seventy, not in the prime of life.

I have worn glasses every day since. Twice I have put the contacts back in but haven’t been able to stand them any longer than an hour. I am looking at a future of glasses and no contacts.

My optometrist tells me she has one more trick up her sleeve. Something called “monovision”, which involves selecting contact lenses to correct for distance in one eye and for up close with the other eye, and letting the brain try to make sense of it all. I’m not optimistic, but I’ll give it a try. I’d sure like to be able to wear contacts again.

Still, if I have to wear glasses full time I will accept it with grace. Why wouldn’t I? There are people who suffer much worse fates—loss of limbs, chronic pain, what have you. What’s having to wear glasses compared to that? 

A mere annoyance.

There are worse accidents to have but a busted ankle is bad enough for me, thank you very much. Ironically, it happened minutes after leaving my annual physical. I’d gotten a clean bill of health, more or less. There was some blood work left to be done, but otherwise fine.

I needed to get to work. My wife had dropped me off at the doctor’s office before going to work herself. My plan was to walk from the doctor's office to the bus.

Earlier that morning, when I first stepped outside, I had been happy to see that the ice had receded. Sidewalks and roads seemed mostly clear. Still, I was careful as I walked along, sidestepping any areas that looked dangerous. It was about minus three with a light wind blowing. Not too bad a walk.

I remember peering ahead, trying to spy a bus stop sign. I don’t even remember falling. I just remember suddenly finding myself flat on my ass. My backpack protected me from hitting my head. When I went to get up, I spotted my left foot, encased in an ankle high-winter boot, twisted around in the wrong direction. So twisted that I gasped aloud upon seeing it. “Aaagghh! Aaagghh!” The sight was worth a good two gasps.

I couldn’t stand on that. It was wrong. It needed to be right. I reached out, grasped the boot, and started to twist it back in the right position. It resisted, giving me time to realize that wrenching my foot back into the proper position myself was probably a bad idea.

What to do? I couldn’t stand. There was traffic along Brock but no cars stopped. There was nobody on the sidewalks. I considered trying to crawl forward along Brock with no real plan other than to move. I was, I realized, in a bit of a pickle (I had completely forgotten that I carried a cell phone).

Initially there was no pain. I anticipated a physical reaction, figured I’d go into some kind of shock, but having never experienced a similar injury, I didn’t really know what to expect. Would I have some kind of panic attack? Right then I felt pretty calm about it all, just trying to work out some sensible course of action. I thought, maybe I should start calling for help.

I managed one half-hearted “help” before a woman stepped out of a store across the street. Traffic had paused, so she ventured into the street. “Do you need help?” she asked.

“Help!” I said. “Yes!”

She came closer, caught sight of my foot. “Oh my God,” she said.

A man came out of another store and jogged over. He wasn’t dressed for the weather. “Do you need an ambulance?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I think that would be good. But you should put some clothes on.”

“I’m fine. Did you hit your head?”

“No. My backpack protected me.”

“Good. Just to be sure…” He held a finger up before my face. “Follow my finger.” He moved it back and forth. I followed it with my eyes.

“Are you a doctor?” I asked.

“No. Just had First Aid training.”

“What’s your name?” I asked him. I wanted to remember the names of the people who helped me.

“David,” he said, getting out his cell phone. He began talking to the folks at 911, got them up to speed. Then he went back into his store, quickly retrieved some coats, and covered me with them. He put some under my head too. I noticed that I was still lying on the patch of ice that had done me in. I laid my head down on the coats and felt well-looked after.

A fit, outdoorsy-type stepped up. “I’m a trained ski instructor,” he said, sounding a bit like Patrick Warburton. “I can snap that foot back into position for you if you like.”

Briefly, I considered it. For like a fraction of a second. Sure would be nice to have it facing the right way again. “I appreciate the offer,” I told him. “But I think I’ll wait for a doctor.”

He accepted that.

Another fellow seemed to take over, a younger fellow, maybe around thirty. He asked me how I was doing. I told him fine. I asked him his name. “Anthony,” he said.

“Thanks for sticking around, Anthony. Thanks everyone,” I said, craning my head around to see who else was there. I couldn’t see anyone else. Perhaps they’d moved on, confident that Anthony had everything under control.

As we waited for the ambulance, I asked Anthony to snap a picture of my twisted foot as I lay there on the sidewalk. I figured it would be fun to show people later. 

Anthony snapped the photo, handed me back my cell phone, and then stepped out into Brock Street, where he waved his arms like someone directing a plane on a runway. I don’t remember any sirens. An ambulance pulled over and two paramedics got out.

“Careful,” Anthony instructed. “Pretty icy.”

Seconds after that, one of the paramedics (Derek, I learned shortly afterward) slipped and almost fell. I wondered how many others had fallen victim to that treacherous patch of ice.

Derek the paramedic cut the laces on my boot and gently removed the boot. With the boot off, it was even more obvious how badly broken my foot was. Later, a nurse would describe it as twisted 180 degrees. It was probably closer to 90 degrees in the wrong direction, but still.

“Ever broken a bone before?” the other paramedic asked me.

“No,” I told him.

“You’re handling it pretty well,” he said.

I resolved to continue handling it well.

We negotiated how to get me on a stretcher. I suggested that if they helped lift me, I could get up on my good foot and get on the stretcher. We were all concerned that my good foot would slip on the ice, but with the help of the paramedics I managed to get up and lay down on the stretcher.

“On a scale of one to ten, how’s the pain?” Derek asked me, once ensconced in the back of the ambulance.

I considered. “Four.” It was quite manageable.

“It’ll probably get worse,” Derek warned. “Any allergies?”

“Only cats.”

“I’m gonna give you some Ketorolac,” he said. “It’ll help for a bit.” He injected me with a needle.

As we drove along, again no sirens. Not a big deal, taking a guy with a broken ankle to the hospital.

In the Oshawa hospital, Derek parked my stretcher in the hall and stayed with me as we waited for a room to become available. “It’s busy,” I observed. Emergency was crowded with patients and paramedics and nurses and other hospital personnel.

“Most of them don’t need to be here,” Derek told me. “You need to be here.”

After only a few short minutes someone directed Derek to push my stretcher into an emergency room. Derek and I parted ways. Two nurses took over, one experienced, the other a student. I believe the student’s name was Kristin. I don’t remember the other nurse’s name. Events get a bit blurry here, because the pain and discomfort suddenly ratcheted up enormously.

I was taken for an X-Ray. Deb, the X-Ray technician, was young and confident and had partially blue hair. She directed a team of two other technicians how to properly X-Ray my twisted foot. It took some imagination to figure out how to get the proper angles.

I lifted my head to have a look at my naked twisted foot.

“Don’t look at it,” Deb commanded.

I decided Deb was right. I didn’t need that image burned into my brain. Still, I caught a glimpse of it before lowering my head. It was so much worse than seeing it while still in the boot. I longed for a time when it would be facing the right direction again. Old enough to know how time works, I reminded myself that this too shall pass.

The pain was now a solid nine out of ten. I’d had no medication since the Ketorolac. Back in the emergency room, the experienced nurse took a look at my foot and drew the curtains. “No one needs to see that,” she remarked.

Later, Kristen, the student nurse, told me that she’d said to the other nurse, “I don’t understand why he’s not screaming his head off.”

I wasn’t screaming my head off because I was doing my best to contain it. I had one arm behind my head and my good leg drawn toward me, trying to reduce the discomfort and pain. It helped a hair, but not much. I wondered how much longer I could stand it. As long as I needed to, I decided.

Kristen started setting up an IV. The IV included both Saline and Morphine. She apologized for the needle, but it was nothing compared to the rest of the pain I was feeling. 

The morphine wouldn’t flow. The vein had collapsed.

“He’s in shock,” the other nurse said. She tried the other arm, then a second location on the other arm. Every vein she tried collapsed. “Three’s my max,” she said.

“Don’t give up,” I encouraged her. “Go for the gusto.”

She tried the first arm again. No luck. I was starting to feel like my luck had run out. I overheard one of the nurses say it was Friday the 13th. I’m not superstitious, particularly. Still…

“I can only stand this another seven or eight hours,” I joked.

The experienced nurse chuckled. “I’ve decided you’re my favourite patient,” she said.

“You tell all your patients that,” I said.

“No,” she said in a way that convinced me that she didn’t. Later, I would overhear several patients moaning and complaining and carrying on outrageously, and I realized that in comparison I was probably not a bad patient to have to deal with.

The nurses conferred. “We need such and such a nurse,” the experience nurse said.

“She’s been called away,” the student nurse said. “What about so and so?”

“No, not her,” the experienced nurse said in tone that suggested Dear God, no, not her. I felt like this nurse was looking out for me.

They finally got ahold of the one they were looking for, the talented IV nurse. It took her two or three tries. I believe between the three nurses it took eight or nine tries before they got a vein that didn’t collapse, before the morphine flowed.

I felt it going into my arm. “My fingers are tingling, if that’s useful information,” I said.

“Normal,” the talented needle-nurse said.

Somebody arrived with some forms. “Can you sign these?”

I signed them. Something to do with giving the hospital the right to treat me.

A doctor showed up. “We need to straighten your ankle,” he said. “I’m going to give you Fentanyl. It’s ten times stronger than morphine.”

“Go for it,” I said.

He injected it via needle. It burned going in. Later, my wife, who’s a pharmacist, reminded me that Fentanyl was the drug killing everyone in British Columbia. Of course, the illicit users weren’t using it correctly.

I became drowsy almost instantly. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, all was quiet. I glanced at my foot. It was swathed in bandages. It was straight again. I couldn’t believe it. I had only closed my eyes for an instant.

Nurse Kristin spied me awake. “When did this happen?” I asked her, indicating my bandaged, straightened foot. “Did I lose a couple of hours?”

“It’s just been a few minutes,” she said.

I checked my watch. Time was acting funny. It was about two pm. It didn’t feel like four hours had gone by since I slipped and fell, but it had.

“A few minutes ago this room was crowded,” Kristin said. “The doctor straightened your foot and the sound it made… everyone in the room cringed. It was horrible.”

I was glad I hadn’t been awake for it.

My wife Lynda arrived. I brought her up to speed. She was (not surprisingly) sympathetic and waited patiently with me. I’d texted her earlier but she hadn’t received the text. The nurse had phoned her at work, but hadn’t talked long. “I have to go straighten his foot now,” she’d told my wife, who hurried over shortly afterwards.

I had another X-Ray from Deb and her team to see how well the doctor had done. Turned out he’d done pretty good, but the break was too bad. Both bones on either side of my ankle were completely broken. I’d need surgery, followed by weeks of no weight on that foot, and then physio and several more weeks if not months of recuperation. It was a severe enough injury that the surgery had to be done pretty soon, but there were no beds left in the hospital for that night, so they sent me home.

I slept uncomfortably with a leg I couldn’t straighten because the temporary cast went up to my knee. I couldn’t get clothes on or off my bad leg and could hardly get about anywhere. I couldn’t even use the washroom properly because our bathrooms are tiny, with the tub close to the toilet. Unable straighten my leg, I had to prop my leg over the side of the tub to sit on the toilet. Hard to get a good seal that way. (Too much information, I know – sorry).

Surprisingly, there wasn’t much pain, although at night my foot sometimes wound up in a bad position, forcing me awake on the verge of a scream. During the day it was fine, as long as I kept it elevated. I’m not sure how such a lack of pain was even possible with two broken ankle bones and screws inserted into my foot, but I wasn’t complaining. The worst was the lack of mobility. I had crutches and a rolling chair and I could hop and crawl, but what a pain in the ass. Still, it could have been much worse. Could have hit my head, or broken my hip.

The next day, Saturday, my angel of a wife waited on me hand and foot while we waited for the hospital to call me in for day surgery, which they finally did around supper. But after three hours back at the hospital, they sent us home again. No more surgery that day.

Surgery finally happened the following day, Sunday. It was pretty straightforward. Still, I was a bit nervous. I was thinking of my paternal grandfather, who died shortly after exploratory surgery for cancer back in 1954. A blood clot got him, I’m told. I didn’t really think anything like that would happen to me, but it was on my mind. 

As I lay on the operating table, the nurse asked me if I had any questions. I had lots, but my brain wasn’t completely functioning. 

All I came up with was, “You guys have done this sort of thing before, have you?”

“Google’d it this morning,” the nurse assured me. “We’re good to go.”

And they put me under.

I woke up later with much better questions on my lips, but the surgeon, Dr. Ibrahim, had left, so my questions had to wait.    

Before the surgery I had worn a cast that went slightly above my knee, preventing me from being able to bend my leg. After the surgery I wore a cast that went a little more than half way up my leg. It was a huge improvement being able to bend my leg.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the pain was quite manageable. I’d heard it could be pretty bad. That’s not to say there wasn’t any, but it was more discomfort than pain per se. At times it just felt weird, making me wonder what was going on down there. I had narcotics (Oxycocet), but I never took any. Ibuprofen seemed to do the job. The cast began chafing after a couple of days. I didn’t realize it, but the chafing was doing a number on my foot. I would find out just how bad it was about a week and a half later, when they took the cast off. 

One morning several days after the surgery I woke up to find that a good portion of my leg had turned black, especially under the knee. This freaked me out. I actually looked up gangrene, just to rule that out, but it was just severe bruising. Probably because I was keeping my leg elevated and the blood had pooled toward my knee. It made bending my leg really uncomfortable. It lasted about a week before clearing up, at least on my leg. Five weeks later my foot was still bruised. There was also quite a bit of swelling.

Sleeping was pretty uncomfortable for the first little while. I was sleeping downstairs in the guest bedroom. I could negotiate a path from the bedroom to the washroom more easily down there with crutches. Also, I wouldn’t disturb my wife with all my clattering about if I had to get up in the middle of the night. 

The bed in the guest bedroom, I discovered, isn’t anywhere near as comfortable as the bed in our master bedroom (my apologies to all our guests over the years). And having a cast on my leg didn’t help matters. I like to sleep on my side. The only way to make this comfortable with a heavy cast on one leg was to stick a pillow between my legs.

The worst, though, was the lack of mobility. I was warned not to put any weight on my bad foot. The last thing you want to do is to break it again while it’s fragile. Maybe there’s a way to get up and down stairs with crutches when you can’t put any weight on one foot, but if so, I never figured it out. I was reduced to crawling up and down the stairs on all fours. It was kind of pathetic. I felt like we had suddenly acquired another dog, and I was it. Sometimes as I crested the stairs into the kitchen I would announce my presence with a bark. 

As if having to crawl up the stairs wasn’t bad enough, I couldn’t even shower by myself those first few days. Not exactly safe standing on one foot in the shower, and I had to be careful not to get the cast wet. I went several days without showering. Instead I just knelt by the tub to wash my hair and scrub my body. I realized something would have to be done about this when my stench started knocking people unconscious. 

Coincidentally, my friend Fergus happened to have broken his ankle a couple of weeks earlier. (So did two other friends—it’s been a virtual pandemic of ankle fractures this year.) Fergus suggested a stool in the shower. My wife borrowed a special waterproof chair for seniors from a neighbour that sat half in and half out of the tub. The idea is to sit on the part outside the tub, then gradually work your way in. Fergus also mentioned something called a Seal-Tight Brownmed Cast and Bandage protector. Between the chair and the bandage protector, I was soon fit for human companionship again.  

One day my wife arrived home with a walker she’d borrowed from someone. I liked it at first, but it required a lot of hopping on my good foot, and after three or four days of this the heel of my good foot started to hurt so badly that before long I couldn’t walk on either foot, so I reverted back to the crutches. 

Crutches are great, but unfortunately you can’t really carry anything when you’re using them, unless it’s small enough to jam in your pockets. So my wife and kids had to wait on me, fetching stuff for me, carrying bowls and plates to the table during meals, and cleaning up without my help. They did all of this graciously, but I hated being dependent, and tried to refrain from asking for anything. Often I would just figure out how to carry or move something myself despite my inability to do so with ease. Which, if it was even possible, was usually time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, especially if it involved stairs. 

During this period I felt a lot worse for my wife than I did for myself. Suddenly she had to do all the chauffeuring, and dog-walking, and grocery shopping, and waiting on me, in and around going to work. It wasn’t fair to her. I tried to compensate by doing most of the cooking, and cleaning up in the kitchen afterwards, which I discovered I could manage by resting my knee on a stool, or leaning on my crutches, and hopping around a lot. Of course, it still didn’t make up for everything she had to take on.

And then there was all the sitting around. I imagined I could feel my body deteriorating with the massive doses of inactivity. Before breaking my ankle, I was reasonably active, walking the dog, doing Pilates. I was contemplating returning to Karate. That was out of the question now, and Pilates classes would have to wait. I did some Pilates lying on the floor, but I couldn’t really get into it. Not vigorous enough, for one thing. Had it been summer, I could have hobbled around outside on the crutches, but with ice still coating the sidewalks and streets, that wouldn’t have been particularly wise. Still, I did manage the odd outing, such as accompanying my wife to Costco one day, which helped shake off the cobwebs.

Many people assumed that I would have a lot of free time while recovering. That never happened. My sister and her husband immediately shipped me up a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy, thinking that I would have all kinds of time to read now (thanks guys!) The truth is that during this entire time I continued to work. I only took one sick day, the day of the accident. After that, I worked from home. Why? 

A. Because telecommuting is now routine. 

B. Because I’m an idiot.

Actually, I did this for a number of reasons. One, because it wasn’t really clear what I should do. Initially, my surgeon never gave me any instructions about work. Another surgeon told me that commuting was out of the question (my commute into Toronto is an hour and a half each way, involving busses and trains and stairs and so on). Because of the nature of my job, I could continue to work remotely via emails, phone calls, and Google Hangouts, so that’s what I did. It kept me busy, and it also kept me in the loop.  There was a lot going on, I had only been in the position for six months, and I really didn’t want to fall behind. 

I spent the first couple of weeks of my pseudo-convalescence trying to get a Medical Absence Form filled out. I needed to know the surgeon’s official opinion on whether I could continue to work, and if so, how.  

This is where somebody like Jackie Chan and I differ. Jackie Chan broke his foot on the set of Rumble in the Bronx. Like me, he was told to keep his weight off that foot for several weeks. Unlike me, he had a film to finish. So he simply returned to the set of Rumble in the Bronx, painted his cast to look like a sneaker, and got on with the job. 

I, on the other hand, had no interest in hobbling into work every day on a broken ankle. The last thing I wanted to do was re-injure it and make it worse. So I sat in my basement and pestered the surgeon’s office. I offered to email the Medical Absence Form to the office so that the surgeon could fill it out and they could email it back to me and I could forward it to work.

“We don’t have email,” a woman at the surgeon’s office told me. 

“You don’t have email?” I couldn’t believe it. “How is that possible?”

“You’d have to ask the IT department.”

“What do you have an IT department for if you don’t have email?” I asked, though of course just because they don’t have email doesn’t mean they don’t have computers and other IT paraphernalia.

The woman I was talking to turned sullen, and it occurred to me that maybe I'd been rude. Which, apart from being uncalled for, probably wouldn't help my cause any.  

“How do I get you the form?” I asked.

“Drop it off,” she suggested.

“I have a broken ankle,” I reminded her. “I’m not exactly mobile.”

“Jackie Chan would drop it off,” she told me. “He’d paint his cast to look like a sneaker and run all the way here to drop it off and then run all the way home again.”

I could believe that.

Okay, what she actually said was, “Fax it.”

Which sounded like ancient technology to me, like something people did back in, say, the Twentieth Century. I couldn’t help but wonder if this reflected my surgeon’s approach toward medicine. Had he reset my broken tibia and fibula with ancient Roman bone levers? Had he cauterized my wounds with rusting iron tile cauteries? If I peeked, would I find leeches beneath my cast?

“Fax it is,” I agreed, having no real choice in the matter. 

Fortunately, I was able to find a free fax service online, and a mere two weeks after my surgery I was informed that I could either stop work altogether, or work from home. Seeing as I had already been working from home since the Monday following the accident, I opted to keep working. Because I was working from home, it wasn’t even necessary to paint my cast to look like a sneaker.   

My first follow-up appointment was scheduled roughly two weeks after my accident. My wife and I arrived at the Fracture Clinic twenty minutes early. To my surprise, they took me in for an X-ray right away, and as soon as they finished snapping photos of my broken bones they led me to an examination room. Within minutes a technician showed up and called up my X-Rays. Seconds later another technician cut off my cast. The place was a model of efficiency. During a brief lull, I snapped several pictures of the X-Rays with my phone. (Later, someone called me on my camera.)

With the cast off, I admired my injured foot. It was one damned ugly appendage. It was so ugly it was beautiful. It was swollen, blistered, battered and bruised. Rows of stitches over the ankle on either side made it look like the work of Dr. Frankenstein. A massive red bruise marred the right side of my foot from the ankle almost to the toes. Another bruise covered the heel on the left side. Four ugly red blisters decorated the right side. [Later, at home, both my daughters refused to look at my foot after an initial glimpse. Naturally, I wanted to show it to everyone.]

A slim, well-dressed man with curly black hair showed up in the examination room and began riffling through a folder presumably containing information about me. 

“So, what happened to you?” he asked me. 

“Slipped on ice,” I told him. 

“Who’s your doctor?”

“Dr. Ibrahim.”

“Oh, that guy,” he said.

I was confused. “Aren’t you him?”   

“Yes,” he admitted, with a chuckle. 

A comedian, I thought. Good. I’d been afraid he’d be aloof and impatient. I had several questions, some of which had already been answered, such as when would the cast come off (it just had), and what hardware had he placed in my foot (the X-ray clearly indicated 9 screws, 1 plate, and zero screwdrivers).

He answered all my questions patiently, such as which bones were broken, how long I should keep my weight off that foot (four weeks), and when I should come back for another appointment (also four weeks).    

Business was booming, so he left to see one of his other many patients, and a young woman in scrubs showed up. Her name was Francesca. I assumed she was a nurse, but she was actually a student training to become a medical technician. Student or not, her job was to pluck the twenty-seven staples out of either side of my leg that Dr. Ibrahim had thoughtfully inserted there. 

“Does that hurt?” she asked, digging a particularly stubborn staple out of my ankle.

“No,” I lied, effectively giving her license to dig even deeper for the next one. 

Another technician arrived with an enormous big black boot called an Air Cast, all rigid plastic and Velcro. It came with a thick white sock and something resembling a sock but much looser with a hole where the toes were supposed to be. “Use the loose one until the swelling goes down,” the technician told me.

After seven weeks, the swelling still hadn't gone down much, but I switched to the tighter sock eventually anyway. 

She also gave me a small rubber bulb with a spout on either end used to pump air into (or remove air from) the cast, to make the cast more comfortable (they don’t call it an Air Cast for nothing). I only ever did this a handful of times. Most of the time it seemed fine the way it was.

The Air Cast was a Godsend. Whoever invented it should receive the Nobel Prize. My foot felt Protected in that thing with a capital P. There was no chafing, allowing my blisters to heal properly. I could take it off whenever I wanted to, which I did when sitting for any period of time. After a while I began taking it off at night while sleeping, because if you think wearing socks while sleeping is ridiculous, try sleeping with an Air Cast. Although if I had to get up during the night, I made sure to put it back on, because apparently that’s when a lot of people re-injure themselves, thinking they can hop the few steps to the bathroom without their Air Cast, and then they trip or stumble and break their fragile ankle again and it’s right back to square one. 

The next several weeks were a blur of hobbling around. Working from home kept me busy and I assumed most of the cooking chores while my wife took over chores requiring actual mobility, such as walking the dog and chauffeuring our daughters around.  

Fast forward four weeks to my next follow-up appointment. Another quick, efficient visit. X-Rays and a short chat with Dr. Ibrahim. My foot was healing just fine. Dr. Ibrahim told me that I should start putting weight on it right away. This would allow me to return to work. I was to stop wearing the Air Cast at home, but continue wearing it outside, but spend the next week and a half gradually weaning myself entirely off both the crutches and the Air Cast. 

At home, I took off the cast. I had a pretty pronounced limp but I had no trouble getting around. On Saturday, I took a shower without having to sit down for the first time in six weeks. Glorious! I put the cast back on and took a single crutch with me out to run a few errands, including groceries. I had no trouble walking around with only the cast. On Monday, I wore the cast to work, but took a crutch with me just in case. No problem. Tuesday, I left the crutch at home. Friday, I awoke to find that it had snowed, and there were patches of ice on the ground. I figured the air cast would be more dangerous than wearing a normal winter boot (no traction), so I went to work in normal boots with no cast. It was great wearing normal shoes around work.

I remind myself that we’re just talking about a broken ankle here. To get a sense of perspective, take a look at Jackie Chan’s blooper reel. He’s broken his ankle at least twice and let’s not even get started on his many other crazy injuries. 

And then there’s Evel Knievel. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Evel Knievel suffered 433 bone fractures performing 75 motorcycles jumps. He says he only broke 35 bones, but still. He spent a total of 34 months recovering in hospitals.

What’s a mere broken ankle compared to all that?

I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. 

I ran around my apartment freaked out, convinced that I would shortly die. Being the proud sort, I chose to tough it out. I didn’t call 911. Eventually, I reasoned that if I really couldn’t breathe I would long since have passed out, so I went back to bed barely able to breathe and awoke in the morning more or less fine… save for the fear that it would happen again.

This sort of thing happened to me again and again. I would go for weeks convinced that something was wrong with my breathing, that I must suffer from asthma or the like. I got tested for asthma, and found out that although mildly allergic to cats (of which I have three, for some reason), I do not suffer from asthma.

After several years of this, during a period of some stress, I had a series of episodes over the course of a month that culminated in a ride in an ambulance. I finally saw a doctor who referred me to a psychologist. There was a time in my life when I could not have handled the thought of seeing a psychologist. It would have meant admitting that there was something wrong with me. But this time I felt as though I was on the edge, and I welcomed the thought of help. In fact, I almost couldn’t wait the month it took to finally get in to see her.

The psychologist concluded that I suffered from an anxiety disorder, and that from the sounds of it I’d actually suffered from it for most of my life. At first I railed against this diagnosis, but now I figure she was right. I could go months, even years devoid of any untoward symptoms, and then out of the blue things would go haywire. I’d spend weeks or months suffering panic attack after panic attack and waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. And throughout it all I would appear perfectly normal and cheerful to absolutely everybody in my life. I’m certain no one suspected a thing. And I was proud of that.

In retrospect it was damned stupid of me.

I’d tried once or twice before to get help but it had never worked out. Once I asked a therapist if she knew any breathing exercises I could try. 

“You’re asking the wrong person,” she told me. “I have asthma. You just think you can’t breathe. I really can’t!” 

I never went back to her.

Fortunately for me I finally found an excellent psychologist. She believed in talk therapy. We worked several things out. She convinced me that I suffered from anxiety, which is an emotional disorder. It’s one of the easiest psychological disorders to treat.

Perhaps the most important thing she taught me was that I control what I think. It may be the only thing that any of us truly control.

I believe that people I know have died because they suffered from this perfectly treatable disorder. They either left it undiagnosed, or figured it out too late.

If you spend your days and nights freaking out, wondering what the heck is wrong with you, see a doctor. There’s nothing wrong with you that can’t be fixed. 

And don’t give up until they’ve fixed you. 

There’s always light at the end of the tunnel. Always. 

Unless there isn’t, of course. In which case you’re probably not in a tunnel, you’re in a cave. 

Not a problem. If you’re in a cave and you can’t see light, well, that’s just because you’re facing the wrong direction. You need to turn around. 

If you turn around and you still don’t see any light, don’t panic. It’s just night outside, or really, really overcast. Wait a little while until morning comes, or the weather clears up. 

If morning never comes, relax. You never were in a cave, or a tunnel. Somebody just buried you alive when you weren’t paying attention. This sounds more serious than it is. If in fact you have been buried alive, simply dig your way out with your bare hands (if you encounter wood, you may need to punch your way out first). 

If you dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and still can’t find your way to the light and your seasonal affective disorder is acting up and your Vitamin D deficiency has kicked in and you feel yourself beginning to go stark raving mad…

Relax. 

Try the dip. 

There was no tunnel, no cave. You’re not a character in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Those were all just metaphors—mere reflections of reality. Obliterated now by light shining in through my office window. I feel it on my back, see it reflected on my computer screen, obscuring what I write. 

I think I’ll go for a walk.

That will make me feel better.

I’ve been told I worry too much.

I worry about all kinds of crazy things, things that make no sense whatsoever, because I’m the kind of person who wants definitive answers. Unfortunately, there are usually no definitive answers to be had when worrying:

“I wonder if I have a horrible disease?”

“I wonder if something horrible is about to happen?”

Or whatever other silly worry I happen to be obsessed with at the moment. 

Usually there’s no way to know for sure whether any of these bad things will happen, so I find myself in this endless loop of constant worry because there’s no way to answer the question I’ve asked myself. There is no answer. 

Which is what worries are: questions without answers. 

Some questions without easy answers are worth asking, such as: what is the meaning of life?

Worries are questions that are not worth asking. 

I heard a story about a concentration camp survivor. The night before they took him away he worried and fretted about what was going to happen. There was no way for him to know; it was a question without an immediate answer. The next day they transported him to a concentration camp. It was a horrible experience, but he survived. Afterward, he remembered worrying about it. Worrying about it, he said, didn’t help at all. 

He never worried about anything else again.

One day my wife Lynda says to me, you haven’t had any supper. You must be hungry. 

I tell her, no no, I’m fine, thanks. I’ll have a little something later. 

She says, you really should eat something now, shouldn’t you?  

I’m fine, I insist. It’s good to fast once in a while. Gotta keep that girlish figure. 

I’ll tell you what, she says. If I make you a sandwich, will you eat it? 

You don’t have to make me a sandwich, I tell her. 

I want to make you a sandwich, she says. What kind of sandwich do you want?  

I don’t really want any kind of sandwich, I tell her. 

Okay but if you did want a sandwich, what kind of sandwich would you want? 

I tell her that if I did want a sandwich, which I don’t, but if I did, I would want a peanut butter and jam and banana sandwich. My favourite. 

I’m going to make you a peanut butter and jam and banana sandwich, she says. I’m going to make it right now. 

That’s very kind, I tell her. Thank you. 

I go walk the dog. I’m not really very hungry, I think, walking the dog. The last thing I want is a sandwich. But if she makes it I’ll eat it. She’s just looking out for me, I know. 

I get back and towel off the dog (it was a cold, wet night). I let him off his leash, take my boots off, and enter the kitchen. Lynda’s on the phone. I can tell it’s going to be a long call. One of her sisters, probably. The peanut butter jar sits on the counter, alongside the jam, a couple of slices of bread, and a banana. Lynda’s making apologetic motions to me. Motions that say, there’s all the stuff, all you have to do now is make the sandwich. 

I don’t want to make the sandwich. I don’t want the sandwich. All I want to do is sit down and watch TV. 

I make the sandwich anyway. I eat it. It’s good. It is, after all, my favourite sandwich in the world. 

Lynda gets off the phone. Sorry about that, she says. I really was going to make you the sandwich, and then my sister called. 

I know, I tell her. I appreciate that. 

And I do.

Some foods have to be right the first time you try them or you may never properly appreciate them. I have a friend who hates potatoes. It’s sad. I know why she hates potatoes. It’s because when she was young her mother fed her lumpy mashed potatoes. Now my friend cannot appreciate any potatoes. A true culinary tragedy. She will never know the glory of a potato baked in olive oil to perfection, and served with bacon bits, sour cream, and a smidgeon of butter. 

Let me tell you about the first time I tasted Pad Thai. 

A friend brought me to a now defunct Thai restaurant near Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto. She insisted that I try a noodle concoction called Pad Thai. One bite in and I was smitten. I could not believe that I had lived to the ripe old age of twenty-six without ever tasting that TASTE! To this day I’m not exactly sure what the ingredient is that gives Pad Thai that particular perfection—coriander, maybe? I'm just not educated enough in the culinary arts. But it was (and I have never used this word to describe anything before) divine. 

There’s an establishment where I work that serves something called Pad Thai. That’s what they call it, anyway. Well, whatever it is, it ain’t Pad Thai. And I pity the people who try it and think, “THAT’S what all the fuss is about?” Like my potato-deprived friend, they may never learn the delight that is true Pad Thai. 

If you are prejudiced against Pad Thai and potatoes or any other food, I urge you to cast aside those prejudices and try the foods you don’t like with an open mind. And keep trying until you get the real thing. If you don’t like seafood (talking to you here, sis) because your salmon has always been overcooked or your mother (sorry mom) fed you those horrible frozen Captain Highliner disgraces, hie thee to a supermarket and pick up some fresh salmon. Baste it in a nice Teriyaki sauce. Grill it on the barbecue until it starts to fall apart. Don’t overcook it! Serve it with a potato dipped in olive oil and baked for just over an hour, and asparagus stalks fresh from the garden. 

And enjoy.

I think of myself as a fairly grown up guy, reasonably mature, self-sufficient, et cetera. And maybe I am all these things in several respects of my life. Okay… two or three respects. All right, I can dress myself…once my wife has picked out my clothes. 

But recently I realized that I’m not at all mature or reasonable when it comes to chocolate. I have a secret addiction. A secret shame. When nobody’s looking, and I’m all alone… I dip into the chocolate chip cupboard. The cupboard with all the baking supplies. There’s a little cup with a cover on it in which we keep chocolate chips, the semi-sweet kind for baking. And it’s important to keep these chocolate chips, or there would be no baking, at least no baking with chocolate chips in it. 

Which is why it’s such a bad thing when I dip into these chocolate chips. Which I don’t do very often, understand, certainly no more than eight or nine times an hour. Did I say hour?  I meant day… yeah, that’s it. Okay, maybe I’m not quite that bad. But who am I kidding, it is bad. A sweet tooth that may well lead to NO teeth some day. But tasty, darned tasty, and better than cigarettes I would think. Except for the trans-fats they’re probably loaded with… you know what, I don’t even want to look at the ingredients. As long as the chocolate chips have chocolate in them, that’s all I need to know. 

So the other day I dip into them when my wife’s downstairs. Suddenly, uh oh, she’s coming up the stairs and I’VE STILL GOT THE CHOCOLATE CHIP CUP IN MY HANDS! There’s no time to put it back. I clutch it to myself, turn my back to my wife, and kind of huddle in the corner of the kitchen. 

My wife says, “So Joe, I was wondering—hey, what’ve you got there?” 

She comes over. Sheepishly, I show her the chocolate chip cup. And of course I’m still kinda chewin’ on a few chips. It was like I was a little kid again, caught red-handed. 

But she’s a good wife, a good friend. “Don’t eat them all,” she says. “I don’t want to be all out when it’s time to make chocolate chip cookies.”

And if that isn’t reason enough to restrain myself at least a tiny little bit, I don’t know what is.

I don’t mean the following as a put down of any of the wonderful hosts who have accommodated my family and me over the years. It’s just an attempt to correct some well meaning yet, I believe, misguided intentions on the part of some these fine folk.

As a guest, have you ever had a conversation that went something like this?

Host: “Please make yourself a little fatter. Nothing would make me happier than to see you as fat as humanly possible.”

Guest: “I’m quite fat enough, thank you.”

Host: “Oh come on. If you don’t completely gorge yourself I’ll be offended.”

Guest: “Seriously, I couldn’t eat another bite.”

Host: “Just another half a cake. Can’t let it go to waste!”

Guest: “Well, all right. If it’ll make you happy.”

Host: “The only thing that would make me truly happy would be if you gained a good ten or fifteen pounds during this single sitting.”

‘Cause let’s face it: when hosts urge you to eat more that’s what they’re really saying, isn’t it? That their happiness depends on you getting fat.

Once upon a time this wasn’t a problem for me. I was the Human Rake. But after thirty some years of exposure to hosts like this I have become the Human Pear. Another couple of years and they’ll be calling me Joe “Jabba” Mahoney. I can’t handle it anymore. I barely have the will power to say no, and that’s to stuff I barely even like, such as pancakes and sausages. When the chocolate cake comes out, all bets are off.

If you are one of these hosts, I applaud your generosity and kindness but I simply must ask you to cease and desist. Water and celery will be just fine the next time I waddle over to your place, thank you very much.

Had a chat with a friend today. 

She happened to mention that she never ate breakfast at home. 

I asked her why.  

“It’s the time thing,” she told me.

Genius!  

I recognized the power of “the time thing” right away. From now on, whenever my wife asks me to take out the garbage, I’m gonna say no.

“Why not?” she’ll ask me.

“It’s the time thing,” I’ll tell her.

Same with bosses. “Can you do this assignment for me, Joe?”

“Fraid not,” I’ll tell them. “I’d love to, of course, if it weren’t for the time thing.”

The trick is not letting the time thing get out of hand. Which, of course, it already has. I would write more, for instance, were it not for the time thing. I would hang out with my family more. I would play more games, learn the guitar, write more novels, perfect my French, learn Spanish, exercise, maybe even floss, were it not for the damn time thing.

I get where my friend’s coming from. Still, she should probably squeeze in the most important meal of the day. Which I’ll tell her the next time I see her. If I remember, which I probably won’t (it’s the age thing).

My wife suggested I mow the lawn the other day. I have no interest in mowing lawns, but I do have an interest in making her happy, so I went out to mow the lawn. There was no oil in the lawnmower, so I poured a bunch in. Filled’er right up. Only afterward did I notice the writing on the dipstick that said, “Do Not Fill Over This Line!”

I had filled about three inches past the line. 

I considered dumping the oil out, but how interesting would that be?  I opted for seeing what would happen if I tried to start the lawnmower with too much oil in it. 

This is what happened:

First, it took forever to start. Then, when it finally did start, it did so with a huge, racking cough, like a lawnmower with tuberculosis. Then it belched out one city block’s worth of thick black smoke. 

Interesting. 

I poured the excess oil out. 

Unfortunately the lawnmower still worked after that, so I still had to cut the lawn.

One day the door on our dryer broke. The dryer was about three months past its warranty (naturally). My wife was trying to encourage me to be handy, so she suggested I fix it. With all due respect to my lovely wife, it wouldn’t actually matter whether I fixed the door or not, she still wouldn’t consider me handy. Sometimes I think if I were to rebuild our house from the ground up I still wouldn’t qualify as “handy” in the true, he-man sense of the word. It’s not my fault. It’s not my wife’s fault. I simply don’t project enough testosterone, or my hands are too clean, or something. 

Anyway. 

The door on our dryer broke, and I tried to fix it. I took the thing apart, and put it back together, and it still wouldn’t shut properly. So we called the department store where we’d bought it.  

“It’ll cost ya seventy-nine dollars just for the repairman to show up,” the emotionless woman on the phone told me. “Could be hundreds after that.”

“Send ‘im over,” I told her. 

The guy showed up, a big friendly guy, a testosterone-laden, dirty-handed “handy” kind of guy. He took the door apart, then showed me a tiny piece of broken plastic. “Latch was broken,” he told me. “I replaced it for ya. It’s all better now.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “That stupid little piece of plastic is going to cost me seventy-nine dollars to replace?”

“Nope,” the guy said. “It’s going to cost you seventy-nine dollars for me showing up, plus labour, plus parts.”

“How much is the part?”

“’Bout five bucks.”

“And the labour?”

“I gotta figure that out. But I’ll tell you what. If you get yourself a new, extended warranty package for both the dryer and the washer, I’ll waive the labour.”

“Great!” I said. “How much would that be?”

He made a phone call. I got sweet-talked into a new extended warranty package for the dryer and washer. Not a bad deal when you consider it’s only sixty something bucks for each appliance per year for three years (I know it’s not obvious in print so let me just tell you outright that I’m being sarcastic there). In other words, to repair that stupid little five-dollar plastic latch on the dryer door cost me about three hundred and seventy dollars, if we never make another claim on the warranty. 

The guy may have been right to recommend the extended warranty. I may have been right to purchase it. Because they don’t make appliances like they used to. The washer and dryer we had before these ones never had an issue in over ten years. They were Maytags. The new ones are a major store brand, built with stupid little plastic latches in the doors. The repairman said he would almost certainly have to come back sometime to fix them. I believe him, because he’s one of those big, friendly, testosterone-laden, dirty-handed “handy” kind of guys. 

But what bugs me is this:

By buying extended warranty packages on stuff, it seems to me that what we’re actually doing is “rewarding” companies for manufacturing crap. 

“Hey, here’s a piece of crap!”

“Oh, great—here, let me give you some money for it. Now let me give you EVEN MORE money for it because it’s crap!”

All I wanted was a washer and dryer that I could count on to clean my clothes. When they sold them to me, they didn’t mention anything about taking me to the cleaners too.

My father-in-law arrived in town Sunday night. It was my job to pick him up at Union Station in Toronto.

So I drove down, parked near the station, and went in to meet him.

He wasn’t there yet, which was a good thing, because it turned out I was waiting in the wrong place. I was upstairs in Union Station when I should have been downstairs. A friendly employee set me straight, and I headed downstairs to meet the man.

When I got there, I realized that the place I was required to meet my father-in-law was a fair distance from where he would get off the train. My father-in-law is seventy-nine years old, and while not decrepit by any stretch of the imagination, I thought it wouldn’t be particularly nice to make him to carry his baggage all that distance. Plus, I had no idea how many bags he had or how big they were.

So I wandered into the inner sanctum of Union Station and inquired of another employee how close I could get to where my father-in-law would be getting off the train.

“Down by that escalator,” the fellow said. 

He didn’t seem to have any problem with me waiting there, so I high-tailed it off to the escalator.

When I got to the escalator, I realized there were two escalators, separated by walls, so that if my father-in-law were to come down the wrong one, I would never see him. So even though the escalator stairs were going down, I ran up them to see where the passengers were getting off the train.

Sure enough they were getting off near the other escalator.

Instead of running back down the escalator, I thought I would just run over to where the passengers were getting off and meet them, thinking to reduce the distance my father-in-law would have to carry his bags to zero.

Well.

The employee who had directed me to wait by the escalator (the wrong escalator, mind you) greeted me with a decidedly snippy, “I thought I told you to wait downstairs!”

“I just want to help my father-in-law with his bags,” I told him. “He’s seventy-nine years old.”

The employee stepped away and muttered something to another employee who happened to have a walkie-talkie. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the man with the walkie-talkie say something about “a trespasser.”

Huh, I thought. How ’bout that. A trespasser. I looked around for some seedy looking character before realizing that he was talking about me. ‘Cause of course that’s exactly what I was doing, albeit with the best of intentions.

My father-in-law was getting off the train. He saw me. I saw him. I couldn’t leave. Somewhere nearby a security detachment had been deployed to rid the station of its trespasser. Me.

My father-in-law stepped off the train. We shook hands. I took his suitcase from him. It was enormous. It would have been a long walk to meet me.*

“Never mind,” I heard the man with the walkie-talkie say. “He’s leaving now.”

And leave we did.

I admit this story would have been a lot more interesting (and painful) if it had ended with me being tasered. But the incident made me think about the difference between right and wrong, and the grey area in between. Clearly I violated at least Union Station laws by being where I wasn’t supposed to be. But would it have been right to leave my seventy-nine-year-old father-in-law with an enormous bag to carry a great distance? Should I have assumed that train staff would help him? Was I in the wrong attempting to do the right thing? Is the road to hell paved with good intentions?

I dunno.

Glad I wasn’t tasered though.

*Turns out his suitcase had wheels. Still.

Got a call from a service center. A woman wanted to review the contents of a contract I’d signed recently.

“Did you receive the contract?” she asked.

“Yep,” I told her.

“Is that a yes, then?” she asked.

“Uh huh,” I said.

“Is that a yes?” she repeated.

“Yes,” I said, wondering if we had a bad connection or something.

“Are you happy with the terms of the contract?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Is that a yes?” she asked.

“Mm hmm,” I agreed.

“Is that a yes, sir?” she asked.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You actually require me to say yes?”

“Yep,” she replied, rather ironically.

“Is that a yes?” I asked her.

“We need to know unequivocally that you agree with the terms of the contract,” she informed me.

“Okay,” I said.

But I thought it a bit of a silly rule.