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well traveled and wiser with years, cradle them patiently in our hearts and minds, feel the lives within them, then, then we realize how very much of the people we have become, lives within the stones we ignore.

    Y
ou know the old joke about men crying when we come out of the vagina and then sixteen years later, crying because we want back into it? Well, I cried because I wanted back in right away. My ma said I cried all the time and I believe it’s because I really didn’t want to be here. Not with them anyway. You only ever saw their public faces, the eerie little social minuet they performed for propriety’s sake. Her, all caked in the ghoulish makeup she used to hide the bruises, and him, sober out of the fear of being found out, all cranked on the morphine he scored from an old army buddy. He said it was for treatment of the Wound. What a joke. No one ever saw the Wound, of course. I never. But he talked about it all the time. He’d be drunk and stupid, telling tales about the virgins in Pu San or some such place, or the fist fight in camp the night before the assault on Hill 68, and he’d get all teary, saying it would have all been different except for the Wound. He’d have been a hero except for the Wound. He’d have held a civilian job except for the Wound. He needed to drink or needed a shot of morphine because of the pain of the Wound. After he died I learned that the Wound was caused by his being drummedout of the army for drunkenness and that he’d never been to Korea at all. He was a desk jockey who filed the papers that sent guys there and shipped them back. That’s how he knew all the names of places and battles. He typed them all the time. He couldn’t stand being a soldier without a war, so he made our lives one. Nice, huh? I was never a son. I was a prisoner of war.
    So, needless to say, I was glad to get out of Toronto. Not that coming to a place called Mildmay was my idea of a good move, but any place was going to be better than those sorry streets. And actually it’s not the streets themselves that I hated. It was the me that walked them. And my life. I lived all my life learning how to shift gears. I’d be coming home from school or the library (where I did my living) and I’d be feeling pretty good. I’d just spent a few quality hours in a book and I’d be on fire with new ideas, information or some story. I’d feel like a real kid, motoring in the passing lane of life. Then I’d get to the door of wherever it was we were living at the time. My hand would pause just as it was about to grab the doorknob, like reaching for the stick shift. I’d scrunch up my eyes and heave a deep breath before I opened that door. Downshifting into neutral because I never knew whether I’d have to make a sudden getaway or if I could park and idle for a while. He’d either be passed out, drunk and slobbering, drunk and ranting, slapping my mother, drunk and crying, hung-over and sick or even, on occasion, sickeningly lovey-dovey and wanting to hug me with his drinker’s breath and tobacco stench. Wonderful. So I guess part of me held out hope that a new town would change things, change him, change us.
    And my mother? Well, they say that love is blind but in her case it was totally insensate. Her idea of protecting me was to tell me not to disturb him. Great. He’s got a choke hold on me, feet off the floor, and she’s telling me not to disturb him. He’s passed out in a puddle of puke on the kitchen floor and it’s “Don’t disturb him.” She’s got another ice bag on her face and “Don’t disturb him.” She was in love with his necessary fiction, the soldier he created for the world because he couldn’t tell them what a loser the real one was. Or maybe, in their first days, he showed her a side of himself that I never saw, something that swam under all the bullshit drunkenness that she alone could see, and maybe she held on because she thought that it would break the surface one of those