Wind-sprints

 

This afternoon I stopped by the Rosedale United Church office to pick up a pair of sunglasses I'd left there when I did a "Christmas memory" reading last December. It's the furthest from home I've ventured since getting home from the hospital last week.

On the way out, I stopped by the chapel, a place I utterly adore in its pristine Protestant simplicity. The nave was dark, except for the light streaming through the brilliant stained-glass windows.

The church dates from 1914. In the warm months, it smells wonderfully of age—the olfactory patina of a century of summer sunlight gently baking into the wood. It's a sweet, nutty scent I associate with the old Canadian churches of my childhood and, therefore, in part, with childhood itself.

I'm used to Rosedale being full of light and music, full of people, including people I love, but there was something beautiful and holy about the embracing silence and the dimness. I was suddenly awash in memories, and I put them in a good place in my heart. They'll come in handy in the coming months.

Outside, waiting for my Uber, I watched a sixteen-year old boy in a green t-shirt and black shorts do wind-sprints from one end of Whitney Park to the other. Back and forth he raced, almost flying.

He could have no way of knowing how beautiful he was in that moment, in his youth and strength and unselfconscious disavowal of barriers.

He pumped his knees higher and higher with every stride, effortlessly gathering speed. At one point it seemed as though gravity was deferring to him, releasing him into the air, more than that he was merely running.

He shouldn't know any of those things. Part of the beauty of being sixteen is the not knowing.

I smell Toronto summer in the air this afternoon, even if only traces of it on such a cool, misty afternoon. But it's coming. I have been loving this moment since 1982, my first summer in the city.

Watching the boy, I was remembering the summer of 1983 when I trained for the Toronto Marathon, racing myself through impossibly green neighbourhoods just like this one, and in endless circles around the track at the athletic centre at the University of Toronto. I felt immortal, and the future just rolled in front of me like a flat highway with no traffic.

I hope the boy in the green t-shirt felt a bit like that sprinting through Whitney Park this afternoon. That would be as it should be, and all would be right in the world.