The last lunch

 

This photograph is of me at "my" booth, with my young friend Gabriela (she/her/hers), who was the last employee hired by Bar Verde at the Eaton Centre before Nordstrom's corporate overlords in the Pacific Northwestern United States decided to blow up the work lives of 2500 young people north of the 49th parallel.

I stopped by for lunch this afternoon for the last time, and to say goodbye to some staff members who had become friends. My friend Richard, who was the manager there four years ago, came into town to join me for a beer, a reconnection, and a reminiscence.

Over the course of the afternoon, may ex-staff members dropped by to say goodbye to "their" restaurant, and share a drink for their friends and former colleagues—itself a commentary on what kind of a place Bar Verde was, and what sort of people it attracted, both as customers and as staff.

Folks said some very, very lovely things to me, personal things that wouldn't make sense to anyone who wasn't familiar with the situation and circumstances, but which, at sixty, I treasure vastly.

One pithy observation, however was too good not to share: my friend Clint noted that I was like the late Queen, in that I'd had almost as many Bar Verde managers as she'd had Prime Ministers.

A very bittersweet afternoon, all told. I was glad to walk home through the extended, pre-spring sunlight after saying my goodbyes. This would not have been the ideal moment for pitch-black skies and wet snow.

Harbingers

There are red-winged Blackbirds in the cemetery. I realize that sounds like the first line of a ghost story, but it actually means spring is right around the corner.

The Bible says I cannot support the gays

    

My driver this afternoon was a former refugee who's been in Canada for some years. He had a warm, generous face, even when I could only see half of it in the rear-view mirror, from which hung a plain cross that proclaimed that he was one of the 3% of Christians who formed the population of his homeland.

His sister had named her daughter "Michael," which he said was unusual where he was from. It was a nice opener, and our conversation flowed easily and pleasantly from there.

We touched on the peripatetic and often solitary lives of refugees, be they persons displaced by war, or natural disasters. We talked about the kind of courage it takes to lose everything and start again, alone, in a foreign country. Friends of his had encountered anti-immigrant and neo-nazi violence in Germany, and the terrible sense of dislocation that comes from being so clearly unwanted and resented.

He mentioned that early on in his refugee journey, he had tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists when the loneliness of the desolate interim town in which he found himself became too unbearable.

I suggested that Canada had always been a country of immigrants and refugees, and our history is one of people from somewhere else—wherever else—joining a human tributary that became a country, which became a nation, and that it made us stronger, and how happy he was to be here. Every non-Native is from a family that has come here from somewhere else.

I can't remember exactly how the conversation turned to religion, though it might have had something to do with our discussion of the imperative implicit in Christianity to welcome the homeless and the displaced, and how often that was a dismal failure, for very human reasons.

"I hope I am not offending you by saying this," he said tentatively, "but I cannot support the gays. The Bible tells me it is wrong. I respect them, and would help them, but I cannot support them. It is not in my heart."

It took me a moment to realize that he thought he was unburdening himself to another straight man—a straight man he assumed would share his views, or at least be sympathetic to them.

It felt like very familiar territory to me. I've had forty years of situations like this one in one way or another, and I've reacted in a variety of ways over those four decades. I'm proud of some of those ways less proud of others.

I let him continue for a few moments more, and then I interrupted and gently said, "Well, you know, I AM gay, but I'm grateful that you trusted me enough to share your feelings."

It might seem an odd response, but it had two aims.

First, first, to let him know the he'd just expressed his prejudices to an actual gay man without knowing it—which might not have been the most useful thing he'd ever done, especially in this particular climate—and to let him know it in a way that didn't shame him.

Secondly, to reassure him that he was safe, and that there wouldn't be any retaliation.

The first aim honoured my dignity as a queer person. The second aim honoured his vulnerability as a man who had very likely endured indignities and horrors of which I can barely conceive, and who still occasionally felt very far from home.

His stunned, mortified silence was like a electric shock inside the car.

Every time he apologized I came back with warmth and reassurance. I touched his arm and told him that, from everything he told me, he was a very good, sincere man, and that he probably hadn't met the right gay man yet.

He laughed a bit at that, and the conversation shifted to more neutral things as the ride came to an end. But In the rear-view mirror, I could still see a trace of concern in his eyes—grave concern that he'd inadvertently truly offended.

At the end of the ride, we shook hands. I told him how much I'd appreciated our conversation, and how much richer I felt for having known him, however briefly, and heard his story.

He told me that he was likewise grateful for our talk, and that no one ever talked to him on these rides. To most people, he was a back-of-a-head, getting them from one point to another.

No one is obligated to take another person under their wing for fifteen minutes, or to listen, or to care. In fact, doing so flies in the face of the urban ethos we think of as common sense. We're generally taught to avoid it, and no one would judge us for avoiding it.

But I had space this morning. His vulnerability was as visible as a spray of stars in a summer night sky. His need to connect was guileless and without any agenda other than connection. And he was a good man, his momentary misfire notwithstanding. I could see that as clearly as I could see the sun on the sidewalk outside the car window.

I didn't live with cancer for ten months without learning a thing or two about human frailty, or the miraculous healing power of kindness, compassion, and openness. There's always time to be a comforter and a conciliator, and to make space for the possibility of someone else's pain.

Maybe the next time he thinks about "the gays" he'll remember our warm conversation instead of whatever he's been taught. Maybe he'll recall our fifteen-minute friendship and realize he doesn't know enough yet about queer people to buttress his negative image of us.

Or, maybe not. In either case, it cost me nothing but good faith.

As for his clumsiness with the gay thing—people are sometimes clumsy. There are different types of activism. After forty years of roaming this earth I'm more convinced than ever that love and compassion are the most radical forms of activism of all.

Calling for genocide, but "not really"

In an odd way, I applaud Michael Knowles for placing his genocidal fantasies front and centre, in a way that even the Nazis didn't quite dare to do in the beginning.

Knowles' position is a lot more honest than that of the folks hiding behind specious, purposefully-vague "threats to women's spaces," or sports, or bathrooms, or classrooms, or scary stories about "experimental surgeries," or "radical hormone treatments," or "radical gender agendas," or "dangers to children." 

Or, in the case of Ted Cruz, warnings about transgender witches piloting jetliners and not knowing how to keep them from crashing.  

Last year, 6000 children in America died by gun-related violence. You can guess how many gun laws have been introduced to protect children from guns. On the other hand, two months into this year, 340 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in statehouses across America. 

Anti-trans idealogues have never cared about "protecting women," and they have used children as human shields in their crusades. This has ever been about anything other than the eradication of a vulnerable 2% of the population that they find aesthetically distasteful. 

I'll say one thing for CPAC—even if it's the place where decency fears to tread, if you want an up-close, unvarnished, unapologetic, stripped-of-artifice look at what 21st century Republicans are really about, that's the place to see it. 

Answering the Knock at the Cabin

I wanted to sit with my feelings about M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin (2023) for a bit before rendering some thoughts

First off, I loved the film in the way that you can afford to love a film when your memories of the superb novel upon which it as based, in this case, Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the World, are locked away in your mind. 

Mr. Shyamalan did, in fact, take several liberties with the story, which has understandably disappointed some folks, though they bothered me less than I expected they would.

I found the essence of the story—the devastation of a very 21st century family under unimaginable emotional assault—to be intact. That was the most important thing to me, along with sterling performances by Jonathan Groff as Eric, and Ben Aldridge as Andrew. There was a surprisingly solid one from Dave Bautista, and Kristen Cui was wonderful as Andrew and Eric's daughter, Wen.

Would I have preferred that the film hew to Tremblay's novel more closely? Of course I would. The novel is, frankly, perfect, and, in the film, I missed the nearly-intolerable tension and mounting dread that undergirded it. 

But to be completely fair, Shyamalan still made an excellent film that packs an emotional wallop nonetheless, one that stands on its own merits and didn't dishonour the source material.

I think people should absolutely see Knock at the Cabin, but I feel strongly that they should also read The Cabin at the End of the World as well—preferably first. 

As for me, my copy of that glorious novel is right where its supposed to be—on my bookshelf and in my heart. No film, however skilfully rendered, can touch the experience of having read it.

After the March blizzard

"Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendour of winter had passed out of sight,

The ways of the woodlands were fairer and stranger than dreams that fulfil us in sleep with delight;

The breath of the mouths of the winds had hardened on tree-tops and branches that glittered and swayed

Such wonders and glories of blossomlike snow or of frost that outlightens all flowers till it fade

That the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night than the day, nor the day than the night,

Nor the winter sublimer with storm than the spring: such mirth had the madness and might in thee made,

March, master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite."

—from "March: An Ode" by Algernon Charles Swinburne 

 

The good place

 

I'm saddened tonight by the news that Nordstrom is shuttering all its Canadian stores. 

I didn't shop there—I was not their target market—but the restaurant at the top, Bar Verde, was one of my favourite spots in Toronto for seven years. 

Centuries ago, there was a wonderfully unpretentious restaurant on Church St. called Café California. The owners were friends of mine, and it was where I could usually be found, either dining alone, working on my journal, or entertaining friends. 

The staff likewise became friends over time, and the owners' daughter, Angie, became like a beloved niece. I watched her grow from a precocious little girl into a lovely, intelligent young woman. I wrote about her in Other Men's Sons in an essay called "Eloise on Church Street."

When the restaurant closed, I was bereft. The last place I ever expected to find its replacement was on the top floor of a American department store anchoring the Eaton Centre.

I must have been visiting Bar Verde since at least 2017, if not earlier. I can count the tenure of at least four managers, off the top of my head, and many more wait staff, all of whom I was on a mutual first-name basis with. A handful, I count today as actual friends. 

Every December, I loved to watch the Christmas lights in the mall from the restaurant's vast floor-to-ceiling windows towering above it, and it was always my first sense of the Christmas season. 

I have a particular memory of stopping by the restaurant for a later dinner on the evening of the launch of Best Canadian Essays  2016, which contained one of mine, and being brought a glass of champagne from the manager, to celebrate. 

Every January and February, when the restaurant was quietest, I re-read Peter Straub's Ghost Story while the snow fell outside in sheets. In the summer, it was a cool refuge from the heat and humidity. 

But Christmas always came again, and the coloured lights of the mall shimmering below my table had a bit of an Irving Berlin quality in the weeks before we left for Palm Springs, and our Christmas with the California family.

The staff always made space for me to read and edit manuscripts over carafes of Diet Coke and coffee. During COVID-19, I always felt safe dining there because of how luxuriously spaced the tables were. A dear friend of mine and I had dinner once a week, for years, and helped each other through some challenging times. 

Sunday has been a throwaway day for me since my boarding school years, and the perfect rainy Sunday late-afternoon was spent at the farthest booth in the back, adjacent to the bar, with only my own company and a great book 

When I got my cancer diagnosis last spring, my first get-well card was a massive one, signed by every member of the restaurant staff—with personal messages of love and support, not just generic signatures, and it was accompanied by two massive jars of their signature tomato basil soup, which they knew I loved. 

That summer and fall, I stopped by after each doctor's appointment and procedure (the hospital was ten minutes away) and did so after every "chemo Monday," when Flo 2 was unhooked, and I most needed to lose myself in a crowd of people, and just feel normal. Even thinking of it now, I'm in awe of each small but resonant acts of kindness along that route. A middle booth eventually became colloquially know as "Michael's booth," and it always seemed to be free for me, no mater what the weather, internal or external. 

I was dining there tonight with Jenny when the staff got an impersonal bulk email from head office, announcing the closure. Moments later, it hit the national news. 

The emotional disconnect between the cold, antiseptic language of the press coverage and the shell-shocked faces of the about-to-be-unemployed staff was heartbreaking. 

The CBC reported tonight that roughly 2,330 people will lose their jobs. 

I guess that sounds like a small, anonymous number—unless of course, you can put names and faces you love to that number; and especially unless you vividly remember some of them embracing you and shedding tears upon hearing the news that you were cancer-free, and all the genuine tenderness, softness, and affection during the dark months that you weren't.

We all make the places of our hearts that are not our homes—restaurants, bars, bookshops, galleries, and more—which are occupied by people who are not family, or even, necessarily, "friends" in the accepted sense of the word, but who are both receptacles and sources of kindness and goodness—places that we leave happier than when we arrived, and where we always feel welcome: the archetypical "good place."

To people who don't know me well, the only thing more bewildering than the fact that this latest iteration of my "good place" is a restaurant at the top of a department store is how genuinely sad I am that it's coming to an end. And I'm bad at endings.

When you're open-hearted, and open to people, and open to their lives and stories, they trust you with those stories. And, as any writer can attest, the sharing of a life story, or of life stories, is one of the most bonding of human experiences, and the listener and the teller become part of each other in some small way forever. 

That's colder consolation than I'd like tonight, but I'll still take it.

Goodbye, Kirk

We lost our friend Kirk Rogers last night.

Kirk was the ultimate refutation of the notion that Facebook "friends" aren't real friends. He was that, and more.

He was a glorious contradiction in so many terms—he was a burly leather-clad biker who was also a brilliant ornithological photojournalist, whose bird photography was the work of a true artist. He was a self-described "conservative" with one of the kindest, keenest, most open minds I've ever encountered, with a largesse d'esprit that was one for the books.

Most importantly for me, personally, he was the first of my male Facebook friends with cancer who stepped forward when I received my diagnosis last May.

As a true New Englander, he did it in private, with no ostentation or flourish.

He was there for me constantly throughout the past year of treatment. I derived enormous comfort and inspiration from the fact that he'd made a full-on trip to Europe in between treatments, and I decided that, if Kirk could do it, then our trip to Europe in the fall of 2023 was going to happen, no matter what.

When my pathology report, post-surgery, was full of good and hopeful news, Kirk was euphoric. It occurred to me many times, in those weeks, that he couldn't have been entirely human if he hadn't also wished that he'd had the same good news about his own cancer journey. It can't have been completely easy, but his heart and his decency were so epic that there was nothing in him for me but joy.

I'm grateful for the intense exchange of emails we had towards the end. Kirk sounded very strong, and even a bit protective of my healing, with was a striking grace note in a man who knew he was dying, and who had, in fact, been given no more than a few days to live. I'm honoured beyond words that he spent even a short bit of the time he had left reassuring me that I was going to be OK.

I will always regret that we didn't get around to having that beer, that conversation as two artists, that bonding time in which we might have gloried in how two men of such different backgrounds, and lives, could have had so much in common, and what that said about the overall possibilities, for human beings, of coming together in friendship.

The phrase "a good man" is overused to the point of caricature, but that's exactly what Kirk was, and that made him pure gold.

If you're a friend of mine, but didn't know Kirk—and if you've read this far— please don't say that you're "sorry for [my] loss." It's not my loss—it's his family's loss, it's our great mutual friend Cam Lag's loss, and it's his fellow riders' loss. I don't want to insert myself in their grief. I'm just a blade of grass that shook slightly when a 747 passed overhead. The 747 was Kirk Rogers, and all the abundant love and goodness with which he was so generous. Share your sympathy wth them instead, or just say "Rest In Peace," and mean it. I sure do.

Sleep well after your hard-fought battle, Kirk. And thanks for showing me how it's properly done—with dignity, strength, and great, great style.

Snow day

 

Where history goes to die

 

On September 4th, 1967, with blistering dignity, 15-year old Elizabeth Eckford, the first Black student to integrate a Southern high school, overrode what must have been terror, braving a gauntlet of hate-filled, taunting, screaming white Arkansans as she attempted to enter Little Rock's Central High School. She was prevented from doing to by National Guard soldiers, acting on orders from Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. As she fled, the mob threatened to lynch her. This photograph by Will Counts became one of the iconic images of the Civil Rights era. On January 10th, 2023, her very first day in office, Arkansas' newly-elected governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, introduced an Executive Order banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Ironically, the history behind this classic image of the desegregation battle could technically fall under her banned material guidelines—proving yet again that institutionalized bigotry in the hands of the powerful is where history goes to die.

From the current issue of Winterplay magazine, a Christmas memory or two

 

Bring Christmas on

 

The Hero M.D.  and I received the very best early Christmas present yesterday.

The post-op pathology report from my surgery in November was off-the-charts good. My margins are clear: of the 25 lymph nodes examined, none of them had a trace of cancer. There was no metastasis and no perforation. The tumour was entirely removed. The operation was an unequivocal success. I am, for all intents and purposes, currently cancer-free.

Or, in the words of my brilliant and kind oncological surgeon, Dr. Chadi, I am "macroscopically free of disease," meaning that if any cancer remains, it is undetectable to the naked eye.

No one is going to say "cured" for another four or five years, but I am as close to that now as it's humanly possible to be. In January, I will have one final operation that will allow me to fully return to unfettered public life.

It is only hitting me now, in small degrees, that the shadow on my life since Friday the 13th of May, 2022, has lifted. I am also coming to realize the degree to which I had restricted myself from thinking about any kind of assured future. That's the nature of this cancer beast.

The next four years are going to involve medical vigilance in case the cancer returns, but I'm OK with that, because I'll be living the entire time, and not taking any of it for granted.

Bring Christmas on. I'm ready for a joyous one. May yours be similarly joyous.

I'm home from the hospital (again)

Someone missed me, clearly. Not just tonight, but during this whole process, which has often separated, for hours, a senior Labrador who can't manage stairs very well anymore, and his dog-parent, who's spent increasing amounts of time upstairs, lying down, when the chemo-related fatigue kicked in. This evening after getting home from the hospital, what I really, really wanted was a shower. But what I really needed was to spend two hours with him downstairs, stroking Beckett's fur, touching his face, talking to him using my special "Beckett voice" while we waited for the Hero M.D. to come home. Eventually he ambled over to his bed, whacked his tail on the floor a couple of times, then fell asleep. It was good communion.

The last words of Elijah McClain

This afternoon in Aurora, CO, the amended autopsy report on the death of Elijah McClain was released. The 23-year old Black man was injected with ketamine by paramedics following his restraint by police. McClain was stopped after purchasing a bottle of iced tea at a corner store.

Someone had called the authorities, reporting a Black man wearing a ski mask and waving his arms. According to his family, McClain wore a ski mask due to a blood condition that often left him feeling cold. Police put him in chokehold, applying pressure to his carotid artery and injected with the powerful drug against his will.

Seven minutes later, he went into cardiac arrest. Less than a week later, he was taken off life support and declared dead.

I ask forgiveness in advance of my Black friends and readers, and indeed any African American person reading this, who may experience pain at reading yet another example of this ghastly assault on the humanity of POC, particularly the young men.

This is not intended for you. It's intended for people like me, people who might otherwise have sighed and said, "What a tragedy!" then move on to the next news item.

Every time I leave the house, particularly at night, I'm aware of the privilege of my invisibility—in spite of my queerness, my age, or anything other component part of my most visible identity. I can buy iced tea, or Skittles, anytime I want, at any hour.

I could wear a ski mask if I want to, and if I was stopped by the police, I could clarify my position, perhaps even take the upper hand with a slight change of tone, or a different voice, or a veiled comment about lawyers, or that I have connections in the media. Truth be told, I might not even have to. All I'd have to do is take my ski mask off and let the police see my skin colour.

For now, I'm haunted by this transcript of Mr. McClain's final words, the vulnerability of him in face of the all-powerful authority figures who ultimately doomed him.

His words break my heart, and, ironically, even the fact that I have the luxury of having my heart broken by the terrible humanity and fragility of those words is, itself, a form of privilege. I can afford to be horrified and appalled instead of feeling what can only be a ghastly, 400-year old unhealed wound, barely bandaged by an awful sort of familiarity—a familiarity I can only imagine, but never claim to truly know.

No community should have to absorb tragedy after tragedy in the hopes that it effects change. And the job of the change shouldn't be on them— it should be on us.

September morning, over coffee

 

I woke up this morning inexplicably missing my parents. I don't dwell in the past, as a rule, but this journey upon which I've been forced to embark has many detours and side-roads that usually come at night, in dreams. For some reason, I've lately found myself immersed in memories of my mother, and how she loved Christmas, and how, when I was very young, before I started to become an actual "person" who could objectively be liked, or disliked, or argued with, or found "difficult" or "complicated," we had this perfect communion, she and I. All of the early lessons I learned about morality, or kindness, or always putting others first (a tricky lesson—very good for a child, a less useful baseline for an adult) came from her. She had cancer in 2001, but she died from a heart attack, effectively beating cancer at its own game. She was an intrepid woman, and she would have had some wisdom to share right about now. My occasionally very difficult relationship with my late father notwithstanding, there have been so many times in the past four months when I have imagined how great it would have been to be able to pick up the phone and call him, and discuss what I'm feeling, and what I'm going through. None of this is that sentimental business about wishing you'd told people how much you loved them, or "saying the things you needed to say." We did all that, for better or for worse. Articulating feelings, thoughts, impressions, or opinions was never lacking in the Rowe family. But among the great gifts of being sixty is the vast gulf of time between the pain of the past, and the reality of the present, a reality in which you know who you are, and you can (finally) see, and embrace, the fragility and humanity of people who, at one time, held so much power. And this morning, what I wouldn't give for the feel of my father's old Viyella shirt against my face, or to catch a whiff of my mother's Je Reviens perfume, a final touch of magic dabbed on before she left the house with my father to look impossibly glamorous for other people. Or for the scent of her Christmas cookies in the oven, the ones with the almond frosting, that always heralded a time of light in the darkness, of beauty, of colours, and of a brief moment in time when everything was, literally, perfect. Nothing is ever perfect, and yet, sometimes, it just was.