ed_rex

Dr. Seuss' The Bippolo Seed and Other Stories, the volume which seems to have given me an extra hour or two of sleep this morning.

The strangest dream? Maybe not, but strange enough that I actually remember it now (as I start typing this entry at 19:53), nearly 12 hours later.

I had, for some bizarre reason, flown into LAX (Los Angeles, for those of you not hip to airport acronyms | I say, "for some bizarre reason" because I have been to LA once, which was enough. It was everything I had thought it would be: a hypertrophied version of Sudbury, Ontario, all desolate suburbs surrounding a mediocre downtown core. Mind you, the food was better. But I digress), only to find that I had lost both my phone and my wallet.

So there I was, lost in that gargantuan concourse, bearing a single knapsack, no money and no identification.

A nightmare? Well, not quite.

I don't know about you, but a not insignificant subset of my dreams are anxiety dreams, in which I am basically a leaf drifting along an unknown current, heading maybe to disaster, and maybe not.

This morning, not.

Instead, I was approached by a 30-something black woman — very dark skinned, but very American: very large, very loud, very friendly — who sensed my confusion and vulnerability and asked me what was going on. I told her, she disappeared, then soon returned with her family — all equally dark skinned, all as large (or larger), and all as friendly.

She pressed into my hand a wad of bills (I wouldn't check the amount until the end of the dream; it turned out to be hundreds of dollars in new and fancifully slick bills, not the shabby grey-green of real American money) and invited me to come along with her and her family to ... wherever it was they were doing.

It was a dream, after all.

I didn't take them up on the offer right away, preferring to spend some time wandering around the airport and beyond, but I had no money, no ID, no phone, and so returned and found that they still hadn't left. So I went with them.

We crowded into their car, their fleshy American bodies crowding me against a door that was sometimes in the back and sometimes in the front seat, but the atmosphere was always friendly, never threatening, though I was always also fully aware I was a white guy suddenly thrust into a black world.

Until, somehow, we were in Mexico, in a a restaurant which in my dream was a bodega. I was even more lost than I had been at LAX, but once again the woman who had first rescued me told me how and what to order and, at last, I was able to use the money they had gifted me — and when I found out just how substantial a gift it was.

And that was roughly when I woke up. At around 08:22, nearly two hours later than Baobao usually makes enough noise from her room down the hall to drag me from my slumber. She had been busy with a book Mama Raven left her with the night before; but for just how long will forever remain a mystery.

As will the significance of that dream, if any. Nevertheless, it is a rare dream I remember a half-day after dreaming it, so I leave it here, on a semi-private social network(s) for my own posterity. Possibly, it will have entertained some of you, as well.

Photo of Baobao finishing up one of her epic works of kitchen art, taken March 8, 2021. Needless to say, I played with the colours becauz dreamz.

____

*With apologies to Pete Seeger

Note: Forgive me — and please tell me! — if this is a second posting of the same entry. I can't see the original when I check my own account, yet I am still able to edit it. Do you folks see one version of this post, or two?

Pardon me, sir, but that's a beautiful baby you have; can I interest you in exploiting her for $$$money$$$?"

Truth is, I started my daddy blog with at least half an eye on the idea of, somehow, earning some income through it. Hence the Ko-Fi link below most of the articles, though so far, that has netted me precisely zero coffees; between that and the lack of sales on Black Grass (the ebook version of which is currently on sale at the low, low price of only $3.99!), I'm kind of wondering whether I'm cut out for making money through anything but manual labour.

But I digress.

Will this be the photo that launches a fashion career?

Yesterday, I posted the above photo to my Instagram account and today saw the following comment:

What a darling! 😍 We'd love to have this little munchkin to represent our brand. If interested, DM our main account @jenorababies for the details. Make sure to tell them CASSIE sent you."

Now I'd be lying if I told you that Raven and I haven't already, if only somewhat idly, already thought of looking into baby modelling. We know we have an exceptionally cute baby on our hands, and earning (or should I say "earning") some extra money to toss into her education fund doesn't, on the surface, seem such a bad thing.

But we never seriously looked into it other than, on my part, checking DuckDuckGo for modelling agencies in Ottawa. There are some. I never made a call or sent an email.

But now I've been approached and must ponder the matter anew.

On the one hand, I have a long-held loathing for the fashion industry: its labour practices are often (usually?) horrendously exploitative of "Third World" labour and its marketing exploits and creates body insecurities and encourages pointless over-consumption, to name just a few of its sins off the top of my head.

But on the other hand, we live in a brutally exploitative society, and we will soon be a one-income family once Raven's maternity leave ends; we aren't poor, but we are far from rich and so the thought of extra money we can set aside for Baobao's future is tempting indeed. (And for that matter, while I worry about my scruples, I have to face the fact that, for nearly a full decade, my day job has been in the transportation industry, aiding and abetting airlines, despite my fucking terror of what global warming holds in store for my darling daughter's future.)

So here I am ... should I ignore the message or respond? What do you think, hive-mind?

If there's one thing that must be characteristic of all child-carers (if not necessarily all parents; some have nannies), it must be exhaustion.

Now, I feel I have to rush to equivocate: Raven and I have been extremely fortunate compared to many so far. Nevermind that our Baobao seems healthy (if not exactly rushing to hit her developmental milestones; for instance, nearly nine months old, she has yet to sit up by herself or start to pull herself to her feet by holding on to the walls of her crib or playpen; if my parents are to be (independently) believed, I was ,walking at nine months, three weeks), but since she was about two months old, she has slept through the night more of than not.

Magister Domum, with Child: When she was sweet, she was very, very sweet ...

Mind you, a baby's night is not necessarily a grown-ups. My baby is currently awake and demanding between 07:03 and 07:18, not matter if (like Wednesday) she went down for good around 22:30 or if, like yesterday, she went down (after a rough bedtime!) around 22:30, then awoke just before midnight for a feed, and then again around 02:30. And she cares "not a whit" for what time poor Young Papa Geoffrey went to bed.

And because of that, I tried to hit the sack around 23:00 last night, and would have managed 00:00, had she not chosen to demand more food around 23:50. Raven took care of that feed, but I was still awake for it and after it.

Anyway, since I stopped working for a paycheck (which usually saw me home after midnight and lucky to be in bed by 04:00) it has been Young Geoffrey on the morning shift. Which means I am very lucky to finish a night with even a full seven hours of sleep. Usually it's more like five or six.

Again, I'm not complaining, just noting the fact: babies are a lot of work!

But no regrets. The moment Raven squeezed her out, I felt a flood of hormones washing through my system that declared, She [the baby, sorry Raven] is the Chosen One, the most important thing in your life from now on!, and those have not washed away.

Not everyone wants to be a parent, and more power to you! But some are built for the job, and I seem to be one of them.

Post-scriptum: Hivemind! The photo above reminds me strongly of a famous painting; does anyone recognize it and, if so, could you point me to a copy of it? If I could accidentally participate in that art reproduction during quarantine meme, I would do it.

I've been remiss. Badly remiss.

I'm not only a new daddy, I am also an ostensible publisher. A publisher with a new book out, into which I have invested a couple of thousand dollars and uncounted (not uncountable, but uncounted) hours, and I don't think I've really even talked about it here. (Nor have I talked about it enough elsewhere; I have fallen down on the promotional side of the job pretty badly, and can only blame baby and Covid19 so far.)

What follows is, essentially, a draft of a promotional piece. It's in the form of a book review, while also explaining that this book is why I decided to put a few thousand dollars I could ill afford into a publishing venture.

I'm posting it here in part because I want to sit on it overnight and see how it looks onscreen in the morning, and also in hopes of getting some feedback — Does it make you interested in reading the book? If not, why not? How can I make it better?

I am very far being a natural when it comes to self-promotion, and am even less confident about my skills in that field. So any advice on how to improve it will be welcome. (As will any orders, of course!)

My daughter is an infant of excellent literary tastes!
"And my daddy is shameless about exploiting me!"

When civilizations collide on the open prairie

Black Grass, a novel by Carl Dow

If you suspect a familial relationship between author and publisher here, you're right. Carl Dow is my dad. And his novel Black Grass is why I became a publisher in the first place, even though it was not The BumblePuppy Press' first book So take this review with as much salt as you see fit.

Truth is, when he sent me an early draft of Black Grass, I didn't even want to read my father's novel. Some 25 or more years before that he had asked me to read a radio play he'd written, which I did and which I told him was, in a word, terrible.

I didn't see another piece of fiction from him for a very long time.

So it was with a lot of trepidation that I started to read the manuscript one night, but it was with tears in my eyes that I finished it as the sun was rising the next day.

Black Grass is a bit of a portmanteau of a novel: part adventure story, part war novel, part love story, with a dollop of history both (as J.R.R. Tolkien put it) true and feigned.

Set north and south of the border of what would become the states of Minnesota and North Dakota and the future province of Manitoba, our hero is none other than Gabriel Dumont, who would later become Louis Riel's military leader.

Carl Dow's Dumont is a heroic figure of the old school: multi-talented and illiterate in seven different languages, with a warm smile for children and the ability to kill in regretful cold blood when necessary; a sceptic among believers, and the prairie Métis' Chief of the Hunt, he is a man who loves peace and wants, most of all, to live a nomadic hunter's life, even as the weight of history threatens all that he loves.

His encounter with that future history starts in earnest in the form of a damsel in distress, Susannah Ross, and the bounty hunters she has led on a chase all the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Run down at last, Susannah faces gang rape and then a life as a bond-slave until Dumont intervenes, taking the city woman into the heart of his nomad's world, even as an army of several thousand Fenian raiders masses south of the border, determined to conquer the land held by the Northwest Company, convinced the local Métis population will welcome them as liberators.

If the the opening scene is almost a cliche, Susannah will prove to be far more than the pulpish damsel in distress she at first seems. As a visitor from "civilized" Halifax she serves as a 21st century reader's eyes into the alien world of 19th century nomads, and also a formidable and complicated character in her own right.

The married Dumont and the widowed Susannah enjoy a pretty modern friendship with benefits; Carl Dow's sex scenes skirt the line between too coy and too explicit and also manage to to avoid competing for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award. In Black Grass sex is, above all else, fun.

Similarly, the novel is rich with organic, character-based humour, including some laugh out loud moments. For a short novel whose maguffin is the battle between a small band of Métis hunters and an even smaller, tensely allied force of Chief Sitting Bull's Dakotah Sioux against several thousand heavily-armed American invaders, Carl Dow manages to give the reader plenty of time to experience nomadic life without war or drama.

Black Grass is that rare and fabulous literary beast, a genre novel that successfully straddles several genres at once — action, romance, historical, all folded into a trip into a mostly pretty accurate depiction of a now-distant past. (And what isn't accurate is convincing. When I was done reading the novel in manuscript, I was hopping mad about what — I thought — my education had neglected to teach me about the history of Manitoba.

I'll leave to other readers the pleasure of figuring out what Carl Dow has taken from history and what he has invented as history.

Black Grass is a novel that will surprise and delight you — and maybe, occasionally, make you cringe or even offend you. But, as the late British writer L.P. Hartley famously put it, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

Black Grass is available in paper and ebook editions from the usual online vendors, or your local bookshop. For an autographed copy of the first edition, please visit the publisher's website (that's right here!).

The following is the latest entry in my fatherhood blog, The Adventures of Papa Zesser, posted earlier today, in which I reflected upon pain following a miserable night, even as my Baobao played happily behind me as he wrote; a far cry from the agonized howls that rang through the air 12 hours before!

Sleep the pain away. Baobao seems to feel no pain after enduring (and inflicting) agonies last night

Inconsolable: Reflections on pain and the agony of the teeth

My darling Baobao,

Mama tried. Tried to get a picture of her daughter's first tooth just prior to its first appearance through the gum.

The first pain I can really remember (really, but also only sort of; see below) is from when I was probably eight or nine or, just possibly, 10 years old. I had an ear-ache, and I can vaguely remember screaming in pain as my parents rushed me the 15 or so kilometres to the Emergency Department at one of the hospitals in Sudbury, Ontario.

Since then, I have broken a leg, torn a hamstring and thrown my back out more often than I care to remember.

And yet, the amazing thing is that there seems to be something built deep into our systems that, almost the moment the pain stops, more or less erases our memories of that pain. It’s my hypothesis that it is an evolutionary development “intended” (evolution doesn’t actually “indtend” anything of course, but it’s a useful way to describe its processes) to ensure that women are willing to have more than one baby; I suspect that if women remembered child-birth in all its actual agonies they would never be willing to bear a second one. Men like me simply benefit from that natural amnesia as a pleasant side-effect. But I digress.

Last night was perhaps the hardest since we brought you home from the hospital now more than eight long (and short) months.

As my friend Sarah commented on Facebook after I made a brief post last night,

Teething really is awful, especially the first ones. Not only do you have sharp blades of enamel pushing up through your skin, your mouth, until this point a soft point of comfort and contact, is now filled with these blades. No wonder they cry

“No wonder they cry” indeed!

And, my god, but did you howl! “Inconsolable” (another word I only now really understand) is what you were while the pain was happening.

Your mother and I took turns in trying to console you, though. I through song and gentle rocking in my arms, your mum through distraction, letting you sit at table on her lap, and toss place-mats and trivets to the floor, over and over again between bouts of screaming and tears.

We knew you had a tooth coming in, and you had no fever or any other sign of something seriously wrong, so we were (mostly) comfortable in simply doing our best to comfort and distract you — and hoping that you would grow tired enough to sleep sooner rather than later.

"My work here is done!" Photo of baby Baobao having successfully pulled two of her father's books from their shelf.

And for a wonder, you did! Probably, your misery (and ours, let’s be honest!) last no more than a couple of hours — I shudder in sympathy with those babies (and parents) whose incoming teeth create even more pain than you suffered last night! I think it was around 01:30 when you started showing signs of exhaustion and your mum took you upstairs to bed. (And again, she was wonderful with you last night! For someone who gets easily frustrated over small things, she is absolutely fantastic in a crisis. I hope you’ll be able to remember that when she’s giving you a hard time for not picking up your dirty clothes when you’re a teenager.)

Not only did you finally go to sleep, but you slept through the night for the first time in a couple of weeks, letting me sleep in until nearly 09:30, when I took you down for a bottle of your mother’s finest. After that, we went to my office, where we shared a couple of happy hours before a mighty big poop put an end to the fun.

Watch on YouTube

For all I could tell, you had no memory at all of the agonies you had gone through last night. I only hope that all your future pains will be as easily and quickly forgotten!

Love you always,

 

Papa Z

What about you folks, who are still at least lurking on such archaic social media as LJ/DW?

I'm back! What about you?

A view from the self(ish) perspective

Young Edifice says goodbye to his baby as he prepares to venture out into the plague-emptied streets of Ottawa, afternoon of March 25, 2020.

I feel as if I'm tempting fate to type the following, but here goes ...

Presuming we don't get sick, the semi-lockdown we're experiencing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic has barely touched our lives except for one thing: I am out of work.

Out of work, but not disastrously so. Raven is still on maternity leave, at either 90% or 100% of her salary (I think the latter), and I have learned sufficient frugality from her that I actually have a couple of thousand dollars in the bank — something I was unable to accomplish back the days more than a decade ago when I earned twice what I do now. And it looks as I will be eligible for some sort of government package that will cover my lost income at least until August — which is when our plan had me leaving work to become a full-time dad anyway.

And in a worst-case scenario, if we both somehow lost our jobs, we live in an apartment owned by non-profit housing corporation and so, would be eligible for a rent subsidy until we were back on our feet.

Long story short, I don't think any of us are sick, I want to stay home with my daughter and I might get paid to do so for the next four months, and I now have more time to write and to work on being a publisher — yes, if you're looking for something good to read, click this long link!.

What's not to like?

Not quite eerie ... but close

Photo taken around 14:45 on March 25, 2020, outside a grocery store at the corner of Bank and Somerset Streets in downtown Ottawa

Oh yeah, there's plenty not to like.

On a personal level, we had intended to visit Raven's parents and family in Macau in April but that plan — obviously — is on an indefinite hold.

Much more seriously, people — quite a lot of people in some places — are dying. Many others are seriously ill and still more people are losing their jobs and anxious that they will lose a lot more than that.

And I believe, too, from information derived via The Other Place, that at least one of you has symptoms of Covid-19 and is feeling understandably anxious because of it, so the situation is hitting me on a personal level as well, if at some distance.

Here in Ottawa (see photo above), life goes on but in an eerie sort of half-normal fashion. A lot of stores are closed and the streets — even close to rush hour — have a Sunday feel to them, while queues to get into grocery stores are now the norm. (I also went to the Beer Store yesterday — yes, booze has been deemed an essential service; and rightly so, as the last thing an over-burdened medical system needs is to have its emergency rooms crowded with alcoholics suffering from delerium tremens — and found it nearly empty.)

People are mostly being very good about keeping their "social distance" from one another and seem to be dealing with the situation with consideration and good humour. That said, our just-in-time supply system is having serious problems keeping things like toilet paper in stock, as has been widely noted throughout much of the world. The toiletry section of my local supermarket reminds me of the empty shelves we so often found in Cuba.

And here we are ...

Photo of Young Edifice holding his daughter in what might have been the final snowfall of the season., Tuesday, March 24, 2020.

And so the entire world lives in times more uncertain than ever. A global economy based on suicidal fossil fuels and with a production capacity that far exceeds demand, while the rich hoard an ever-greater percentage of the whole is now being stressed by a deadly new virus that has spread across the world with shocking speed.

I think that most of us, myself definitely included, feel on a gut-level that things will soon (or soonish) go back to normal, and maybe they will.

But will they?

On the one hand, governments in a lot of places are instituting emergency measures that provide them with powers they may be loathe to relinquish, while on the other, many of capitalism's contradictions are ever-harder to paper over.

Can the climate movement become a fully-fledged anti-capitalist movement? I dunno, but I can dream ...

Me, I'm doing my best to hunker down and raise my daughter as if the world is a safe and wonderful place and will only get better. I will dream.

Meanwhile, how are you folks coping with the situation?

Wednesday, November 28th, 2019

My darling daughter, on the morning of her 100th day on this good earth. Photo and costuming by Raven.

My darling Asta,

It will, of course, be quite a few years before you are able to read this letter and, probably, quite a few more than that before you are able to appreciate it. It will even be five or six years before you are able to simply read these words at all.

Nevertheless, I write them, for you and also for your mother and I.

Today marks the one hundredth day since you came into this world, since I saw you emerge from between your mother's akimbo thighs, all damp and slimy and gelled with blood and mucus, howling outrage at the shock and indignity of being pushed from the comfort of the womb, the only home you'd known for the nine long months of your brief life.

You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and it was all I could do not to begrudge your mother the joy of holding you against her bare chest — skin to skin, they call it, a far cry from the old days of my childhood, when babies were immediately taken from their mothers, weighed and measured before being taken out to show to their waiting fathers, then placed in a plastic [cradle???] for more examinations before, finally, being introduced to their mothers — before, nearly two hours later, I had my own chance to hold you close to myself.

How can I express to you just how tiny, how helpless, how absolutely precious you were during those first, exhausting anxiety-riddled days? How can I explain that you have, with each passing day, become that much more precious to me, and to your mother, even as you have taken up more space, grown stronger, more (dare I say it?) human?

Well, it's true. When you first emerged, you were a tiny, squalling thing — during those rare moments when you were awake and (of course) eating.

To a large extent, that is still a pretty good description of what you are and what you do. You sleep, you wake up to eat, you pee and you poo. But as time goes on, you spend a little more time awake, a little more time noticing the world around you.

I would like to say that I'll never forget the first time I saw you smile, but the truth is, I'm not entirely sure when that was. As with so much else, there is a slow transition to your actions. "Is that a smile?" we would ask each other, "or just gas?"

By the time we were certain that you were smiling at us, you had probably been doing it for a while.

And so it is, and so I think you will find it in your own life: those moments of certain phase changes, when one thing becomes another, will be few and far between, and sometimes you won't even notice when they do occur.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After all, you are even now only 100 days old, and if you smile when I make a funny face, if it seems you appreciate when I rock you in my arms and sing you to your surprisingly dream-filled sleep, you are still a creature that spends most of her time in that sleep, still mostly helpless (if ever so much stronger!), still an eating and peeing and pooing machine ...

Yet here it is. I don't think I can begin to tell you just how much joy you have brought to my life.

It doesn't hurt that you have been an easy baby (so far! *Daddy Zesser crosses his fingers and knocks the proverbial wood*). You seldom cry but when you are hungry. You sleep when we travel (except — of course! — when you get hungry again!) and you are not bothered when meeting new people, your cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. Not to mention how brave you were when you received those first two, shocking, needles in your tiny thighs; it was almost as if you understood we were having you vaccinated "for your own good", as parents have been excusing their cruelties since time immemorial.

But that cruelty was for your benefit, and though it pained me to pain you, I have no regrets, nor will I when we do it again in less than a month's time.

But I digress.

I am at work as I type this, Asta, time away from you of which I begrudge every minute of every hour.

But even if you cried more than you do, if you fought your diaper changes instead of cooperating, if you struggled in the bath instead of smiling and letting us wash you up and down, even if you made everything harder than you do, I have no doubt that I would still love you more than I had ever thought possible.

The ancient Greeks had the right idea when they decided that more than one word was needed where English has but one, love.

The love of a parent for a child — of your father, for you, is a reality on an animal level. I fell in love with you the moment you came into the world. (Do I repeat myself? Well, I repeat myself; I am full up, I overflow.)

That love has only grown with the passage of these 100 days I am celebrating now.

That decade of days has been the richest I can recall, and quietly every bit as intense as the halcyon days of my teenage years, when I believed I was metamorphosing from boy to man. (Little did I know that maturation is a project that lasts — at least it did for me; perhaps it will be different for you — many years beyond adolescence! At 54, I don't know that I am even now done growing up.)

And I look forward with awe (and a little dread, too, but that is a tale for another letter, or maybe, many letters, to come) to watching you grow and learn and blossom. I yearn to be there for your first tentative foot-steps, your first words, even your first No!.

But all that is the future.

Happy 100th day, my darling girl! I hope (and believe) that your mother and I have done a pretty good job in making your first three months and a bit just about as happy and healthy as possible. If your smile doesn't lie, you think so, too. Or at least, you have no complaints.

I love you desperately, daughter mine. May you live to enjoy one thousand times one hundred days, and may I see you through at least a tithe of those!

Farewell to Steven Smith

Photo of Steven Smith with his wife and daughter. My guess is it was taken circa 2014 or 2015. Provenance unknown, snagged from Facebook.

Yes, this catching-up day continues with a second death, that of Steven Smith. He was 56 years old.

The notification was both concise, stark, and moving. I'd like to quote it, but his wife posted it under a Facebook friends' lock, so I will not break that confidence. Suffice it to say, that the first person to befriend me after I came to Toronto as a 14 year-old boy died this past July 6, 2019.

I found out on the 9th of July and on the 10th, I posted the following.

__________

My news feed is replete with the word, shock. And shock is very much what I have been feeling since, some time this afternoon while on a down time at work, I learned that my oldest friend, Steven Smith, had died this past Saturday, of a heart attack.

Two or three years my senior, Steve was probably the first person to befriend me when I moved to Toronto to attend SEED Alternative School.

He was loud, he was funny, he wore his insecurity on his sleeve, making his weakness into a strength.

As teenagers, we shared interests in politics, science fiction and chess. We marched for peace, contemplated trips to Africa to search for Mokele-Mbembe, talked literature and music.

Steve welcomed my very insecure 14 year-old self into his (o! they seemed so much older then!) group of friends and, in so doing, changed my life irreparably - for better and for worse (but mostly for the better, I still believe) - opening door after door after door for me.

Somehow, for a while, I became his confidante, listening with wise nods and occasional noises meant to say, "Go on," as he spilled his heart about loves, both requited and un.

In time, we grew apart, as friends almost always do, though never in anger.

The last time I saw him was at his home, the same house he had lived in when we first met. This was shortly after he had married Anna, a year or two (or three) before the birth of their daughter. It was a party, and I was at a low point in my own life. There were a lot of people there and we didn't talk that much before I took my quiet leave.

Since then, I changed cities and our occasional intentions to get together (a canoe trip three years ago; drinks or food last fall) didn't work out. But I wasn't concerned. "Next time" was forever just around the corner, a permanent promise.

But of course, nothing is really permanent. Not a star, not a stone, and certainly not a life.

I mourn his passing, and my heart goes out to his family. Maybe you have to actually reach middle age to understand the depth within the truism, that life really *is* short, all too god damned short.

Rest in peace and power and laughter, old friend.

I took this photo of Steven Smith in the basement at 224 McCaul Street, in Toronto, late winter or very early spring 1982.

__________

Steve was a political activist, father to a nine year-old daughter, husband, and tireless Facebook radical, willing to engage (and engage!) with just about any and everyone about politics. I sometimes thought of him as a personal attack dog, the way he would leap to (usually) support something I'd posted when someone would deign to disagree with my wisdom.

He was also a heavy smoker, and he was not the first of my peers to die of a heart attack. A cousin, an ex-girlfriend, an acquaintance from the days when I hung out at open-mikes in Toronto, all perished of the same damned thing — cigarettes. And I'm sure there are others who's deaths either passed me by or elude me just at the moment.

Needless to say, I attended the funeral and wake, taking a train to Toronto.

The service was very well-attended, with some mourners having to find seating in the gallery of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields church on College Street. Unlike my uncle's funeral in May, this was a much more chaotic affair, with an open mike for people to speak until time ran out.

I won't try to reconstruct the service at this late juncture, but will note that Steve was mourned as he live: by an incredibly diverse group of people, ranging from the obviously upper middle-class to people who might have been homeless.

And, he had a very distinctive, phlegmy chuckle (think of Sesame Street's Ernie, if he was a smoker) and at some point about mid-way through the service, when someone on stage mentioned, someone in the pews immidated it. And the entire crowd cracked up; I only wish that we had all been quick enough on the updake.

The wake was something else again ...

Unlike my Uncle Marcel's closed casket funeral, we were told to expect to see Steve's body at his wake.

As usually happens at weddings and funerals, for those on the periphery, the event is as much about renewing old acquaintances and friendships as it is about mourning. After the church service a few of us — which quickly became about 20 — hied ourselves to the corner of College and Bathurst and Sneaky Dee's, where cheap food and beer where consumed, and around 4:00 PM, my old friend Caron and I stopped at the local beer store then grabbed a cab.

The yard of Steve's three-story Annex house was crowded, and so was the hallway that led to the living room, past the first-floor bathroom and into the kitch. I dropped my case of beer among a crowd of bottles and comestibles, too a bottle for myself and then headed back out to the front yard.

Caron asked me if I'd "seen Steve". I shook my head, no. "Where is he?"

"In the living room," she said, "you walked right by him!"

I had to find out, of course. And now, forewarned, I saw him, laid out on a table under the small living rooom's window.

Photo of Steven Smith lying in state on July 26, 2019, the night before his final journey, to be buried outside Killarney Provincial Park.

I've only seen one body before, that of a cousin I barely knew, when I was asked to identify his body (another victim of smoking, he died in his mid-40s, heart attack). I hadn't been sure how I would feel upon actually seeing the corpse of a man who had been my friend.

But in truth, it was remarkably healing. Three or four times over the course of the evening, when the room was quiet, I found myself stopping to simply commune with him. Or with myself, I guess, when you come right down to it. Yet I reached out to touch his cold, waxy hand and found that comforting, too.

There is a lot to be said for having the opportunity to say goodbye, even if the conversation is entirely one-sided.

__________

And yet, life goes on. Next up on catching up: Birth!

It seemed a standard thrown out back, if a little long in the healing. But still, eight days in, Young Geoffrey felt well enough on Sunday afternoon to engage in gardening. Gently, carefully, bending only from a seated pose upon a stoop, he nevertheless pulled weeds, dug earth, planted bulbs.

And felt ... optimistic, as to bed he went on Sunday night, more flexible than he had been for eight full days.

Young Geoffrey awoke up on Monday morning early, bladder bursting, back more stiff and sore than it had been since the first day of his attack, now nine days prior. Five minutes he strove (ten, if his sweetie has the better timer) to exit his bed and — grunting painfully with every step — make his way to the toilet to void his bladder.

The pain was now not only in his back, but lanced like permanent lightning, from base of spine to right buttock, then along the back of his thigh to the knee. Agony beyond any he had known before ...

Ahem. Enough of poetry and rhythm.

Raven said we We're going to the ER, and I didn't argue for a moment. I've had back pain before, I've torn my hamstring, I've broken a leg (yes, I've had my right orbital bone shattered, too, but that didn't actually hurt much at all), but I've never felt such agony, at least none that lasted.

Raven called a cab, and I managed to make my way out to it unaided. Made the mistake of sitting in the back seat, no way to recline or ease the jolts from Ottawa's austerity-riddled roads.

By the time we reached the hospital, I let five month pregnant Raven heft the over-night bag I'd packed in case ER refused to let me go home that night.

Thank god, and as I'd hoped, the 8:00 AM Monday Emergency waiting room was sparsely populated. We waited no more than a couple of hours before we found ourselves assigned an examination room. Thank god it was a short wait for the ER doctor to appear, because my pain only got worse and worse.

He checked me out, tested me (lying on my back on the table) for strength in foot and leg and determined that, I had sciatica, a nerve problem in my right leg. But when I tried to turn and sit up, I ended up on my knees on the floor. I needed the MD's help, and Raven's, to get back up onto the table.

He told me I'd be getting a shot for immediate pain relief, and wrote out a prescription for a Naproxen/muscle relaxant combination (Vimovo 500&20MG, according to the label), and for not 5, not 10, but 15 god-damned 1 mg doses of hydromorphone, a full-blown narcotic. Yes, serious pain relief.

Meanwhile, before the initial shot took hold, I really had to pee. I mean, I really had to pee. I managed to get to my feet on my own, but the pain was so severe I couldn't take a step, and finally a saintly orderly found a pee-bottle and Raven held it for me so that I wouldn't piss my pants. First time for that indignity, but I guess it won't be my last. #GettingOldSucks

Anyway, to make a long story short, when the shot finally kicked in, I exited the room and soon enough the ER doctor (a youngish, middle-Eastern, or East-Indian looking man who was super sweet, he shook our hands three different times) sent us off with my prescriptions, and we limped towards a cab and home. Grabbed some breakfast, then Raven (who had called in to work and used one of her Family Days) went down to our local pharmacy (one of whose owners was on my soccer team this winter, strictly by the by) and filled the prescription.

When she came home, I gobbled my pills and limped up to my office. They hit hard, they hit fast and the rest of Monday was a blur.

Tuesday, I took two more doses (as prescribed), worked on the exercises the ER MDeity provided, and Wednesday, I only had one of the Naproxen/muscle relaxant combos, along with more reps of the exercises.

Thursday, though (as I had Wednesday) I awoke with a viscious "hangover" from one of the drugs, I felt well enough that I cycled close to 8 kilometres to my family doctor's office, for an unrelated appointment, sans any medication at all.

Friday, same. No drugs, no pain. Knocking the proverbial wood as I type this on Sunday, it's over.

And if I take any lesson from the whole ordeal (other than that I need to strengthen my core), it is this. I remember a close friend who has also had back problems, telling me that he had to take to the streets to find pain relief. No Emergency room would dose him. But I imagine that when he visited an emergency room, he was alone. Me? I was well-dressed, and accompanied not just by my doting wife, but by my pregnant doting wife.

Would I have received the scrip for fucking narcotics without her prescense? No way to know for sure, of course, but I have my doubts.

And that's the story. If you're ever in need of serious pain relief again, dress well and, if you can, bring a respectable-looking woman with you.