To Angus On His 13th Birthday

THERE WAS A COMET the night before you were born.
I’ll never forget that.

It was dark and it was cool but the song of spring was riffling through the breeze, whispering, promising. It was the first day of April, just after Easter, just after midnight, and the stars and Comet Hale-Bopp lit up the country-dark sky with stars like exploding fireworks.

As we drove to the hospital I looked up into the night and burned the memory of that brilliant sky onto my organic hard drive, relentlessly wired in that moment to deliver my first child into a shower of white lights, black sweetness and straight fear.

How perfect was that night.

How exquisite is that child.

Now poised on the precipice of a new journey, I worry not because he is walking under a canopy of heaven, my son, with stardust at his anointed feet.

Spring Hills

The spring hills are calling.

Shades of green.

Fresh mint, evergreen dark, spiced olive spruce, crisp paper birch,

pale blue diamonds wink on the water,

cold as the ice that just went out in the lakes of Algonquin.

The north lives here.

Kioshkokwi.

Hugh, Come Back - I Love You

I'VE BEEN THINKING about Hugh Garner a lot lately.

Him and his sweater.

The Yellow Sweater, to be exact.

I read this iconic Canadian short story in Grade 13 at Markham District High School in 1979 when Can-Lit was being shoved down the unwilling throats of all but the most lit-loving teenagers.

I think I was willing.

I took two English courses in my last year at MDHS: advanced and enriched. The math? Not so much. I could spell good, that's all.

In one of those courses a slim collection of Canadian short stories was part of the curriculum. Sorry, can't recall the name of it. It was green, though, and had a collage of literary faces on it: Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Hugh.

Hugh cuts a dashing figure, doesn't he?

All movie matinee idol and 1940s newspaperman rolled into one Brylcreem-slicked package.

Not only that, but my Hugh was a literary bad boy. A working class writer who lived (meagerly) off the earnings from his words, who badgered editors and producers for every nickel he could squeeze out of them. That's not the way things were done in Toronto the Good back in the day. Writers were genteel as a species, not squabbling over money because, generally speaking, they were university professors who looked at blue collars like Hugh with ill-disguised disdain.

Even to this day, people who write about Hugh Garner describe him as an oddity; worse, they slam his career as being spotty, uneven in its quality.

Go ahead, google him. You'll see. (Or start here, but not until you're done, because that would just be rude and I know you're not rude.) One graduate student actually did her thesis on Hugh, pontificating on the violence in his work and how that lessened him somehow.

I'm sure it must have hurt when she sat on that big kosher dill.

Whatever people have to say about him, he had a big impact on me.

His story The Yellow Sweater has stayed with me for 30 years – it was that good. Every time I write a story I think, vaguely, is it as good as The Yellow Sweater?

It never is, of course. But it is the bar to which I aspire.

I have a character rattling around in my head that resembles the salesman in Hugh's piece. He also reminds me of Hugh himself, with his cheap suit, shiny at the seat and the elbows, in a dark gray-green colour, his only suit, worn whenever it is needed. I don't know what this character wants. He hasn't told me yet. I'm thinking he will soon, though. His rattling is getting louder.

Maybe it's not a character.

Maybe it's Hugh, who died in 1979, the year I fell in love with The Yellow Sweater.

The year I fell for Hugh.

Bullheaded versus the Hardheaded

SAM AND DAVE (wasn't that a rock and roll group?) got into it yesterday.

Sam, who is nine, carted his x-box all the way over to our house for the weekend only to discover it had the Dreaded Red Light of Death, which meant it was toast.

Sam was inconsolable.

Never have I seen a child cry so much.

Dave, who hates gaming and thinks the kids waste too much time on it when they could be learning real world skills like piling wood, actually felt sorry for the wee mite. So sorry that he snuck into Wal-mart yesterday morning and bought a brand new x-box game console.

Plus a second controller, wireless no less.

We're talking big bucks here, people.

Sam was ecstatic for about a minute and a half (that's approximately $300 per minute of child satisfaction) and wanted to hook up his old hard drive with his game in it, to the new console.

Dave, aka Bootcamp Dave, said, "Uh, uh."

He was concerned the screwed up hard drive would screw up the brand new hard drive.

Sam said it wouldn't.

Dave said he didn't want to take that chance.

Sam said he was willing to take the chance, but then again, it wasn't his money, as Dave pointed out.

Sam said something else.

Dave swore a lot.

The two started yelling at each other, the nine-year-old barely coming up to the 41-year-old's armpits.

Dave came out of the back room. His face was so red I thought his blood pressure was gonna pop his noodle like a ripe zit.

I'd never seen him so angry.

Sam laid on his bed and cried a lot, murmuring things like, "I wanna go home" and "I want my daddy" and other fun things.

The upshot is, Dave and Sam went back to the store and paid another $80 to buy the game that was buried in the dead hard drive.

Dave is broke.

Sam is happy.

He should have known better than to tangle with a nine-year-old.

(I'm wondering if I cry a lot if Dave and Dave's credit card will take me to IKEA....)

This one's for you, Sam and Dave, with a nod to Man-Mark for inspiration.

I Hurt, Doughnut

I HURT.

My neck hurts.

My back hurts.

My arms hurt.

My knees hurt.

I have spent almost the entire weekend splitting wood.

And now the weekend is over.

And I hurt.