Missing peace

I'm a lucky guy. Anyone can see how fortunate I am. There is plenty of food on my table. There's art on the walls. I'm in my own home. I am surrounded by friends, who are wonderful, supportive and talented people. I have the love of my daughter and my lady to keep me glad. We celebrate the birthday of my cat, for heaven's sakes. I've got it good.

Of course we all know being well fed and well loved doesn't make a person happy. But in my opinion, any complaint I make is a direct insult to the 99% of the world's population who are plainly worse off than me. If I can't be happy with what I have, I suspect there's no hope for happiness anywhere. So I work at it, and the results are good.

Good is good. Good may even be as good as it gets, at least for a householder with commitments and responsibilities and goals and aspirations. There's a reason why shamans live alone, and monks and nuns live in cloistered poverty. It's hard to bring your spirit to the next level with earthly things weighing you down. I understand that. I can bear the weight, I think.

I suspect I'm always on the path, even when I think I'm staggering around off in the bushes somewhere. I'm at peace with my journey for the most part. I'd like to achieve enlightenment, to raise my consciousness (or rid myself of its nagging chatter) and to become some kind of integrated being. The only trouble is I can't see how I would do that without turning my back on the world.

And so I muddle along, the man who has everything, relatively content to defer my shot at perfection so I can get a few things done in the real world: Grubby, gritty reality. So be it. And I put on a happy face, and I feel happy.

Today my troubles amount only to this: I have misplaced the picture I took of Terry Fox, running up the yellow line along the middle of Highway 17. I've told the story and sung the song, so many times and with all my heart, and now it seems the picture has gone.

I'm trying to understand this, to accept it, to let go. And I do, almost. I just call it my missing peace...

Run Britney Run

This past Saturday, after a "Songs of Canada" workshop at Troutfest, a lady came up to me and told me "Run Terry Run" really hit her. She said her stepdaughter was a Terry Fox cancer survivor. These days, kids diagnosed with the type of cancer he had have a very high rate of survival and a lot of people feel that Terry Fox has everything to do with that. I'd heard that fact before and I was really happy to hear it again in such a special context. It's a sweet moment that I won't forget.

But I wasn't prepared for what happened later. I had just done "Run Terry Run" on the mainstage as an impromptu tweener, and I was backstage putting my guitar away. A pretty teenage girl came up to and said she really liked the song. No, this is not a frequent occurrence, and I must have looked quizzical. Then she said her mom had met me earlier... I was speechless as I figured it out. She gave me a big hug while I was still standing there blinking and try to stammer out what a miracle all of it was.

We hung out a bit later in the afternoon, Britney and me, and her stepmom and her sister too. Everyone was in shorts and Britney didn't seem shy or concerned about the jagged zigzag down her right leg. It's a battle scar. I think she's even proud of it. She should be.

We both agreed it was a good thing to make sure and get the leg brace in this photo. It just seemed right.

Run Britney Run!

Fox on the Run

At one point this past winter, I had my students do a writing exercise. To round out the numbers, I joined them in writing a short story based on a photograph. Here's what I came up with. Some of the images and ideas are taken from other writings I've done about Terry Fox, especially my short story "Reading to Peter," which was shortlisted for a Writer's Union of Canada short story award some years ago.

This is a picture I took of Terry Fox running down the middle of Highway 17 south of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. It's not the first photograph I ever took, but it is the first photo I ever took that I still have. I was eleven years old the year that Terry Fox did his run, and he was my hero. The moment that he ran by that day in the summer of 1980 is one of the most important memories of my life.

That whole summer was about Terry Fox. My mom was in the Cancer Society, so we were following his journey as a family from the time he dipped his artificial leg in the water that April in Newfoundland. By the time he got to Ontario, I had Terry Fox posters on my bedroom wall and a Terry Fox t-shirt and a boy's earnest belief that this guy was the most important Canadian hero ever.

Terry Fox ran through my hometown, Parry Sound, Ontario. He actually stopped at the Esso gas station on Highway 69 at the top of Murray Pt. Road, where I lived. The town did a big reception for him and Bobby Orr's mom & dad gave Terry one of Bobby's Canada Cup jerseys. My buddy's little brother collected up 800 dollars to give to Terry Fox, and there was a picture in the newspaper of Terry taking this big pickle jar full of money from little Peter. It was a very big deal.

Only I missed it. I was out west with my family, camping our way across the country with an old tent trailer. I remember being bitterly disappointed that I wouldn't get to see Terry Fox right in our own neighbourhood. And besides, people out west hadn't really caught the fever yet. They didn't quite get it.

Still, I got to see Terry in the end. My family was on the home stretch of our western trip, heading south to Parry Sound from Sault Ste. Marie after a visit with my grandmother. The day was bright and sunny, and the traffic was light along the winding two-lane highway. There was an air of expectation in the big family station wagon as we made our way along. We knew we'd see Terry Fox that morning; we just didn't know where or when.

I don't exactly remember the order of the towns along that highway. Serpent River Reserve, Iron Bridge, Blind Bay, Thessalon... I don't know what is where, now. But we were south of Desbarats when we saw the cop cars rolling slowly up the gravel shoulder with their cherry tops turning, and we pulled over in a rock cut to wait for the big moment. My mom, my dad, my sister and I all stood there in the sun. Cicadas were whirring and the day was sort of hanging in the sky the way it always does in late August. We stood for a while, and then Terry Fox came running up the road with sweat pouring down, and an expression of complete commitment on his face. He was pounding his way westward, hoping to hit the coast before the snow flew that fall. He really thought he could do it, and everybody else did too.

We just watched him run. He was running right along the dotted yellow line, like he was hoping to connect the dots all the way to B.C. He was tanned and tough. His good leg was huge. His artificial leg banged like a screen door. I can still hear the sound. My mom managed to stammer out "Keep it up! This is just great!" through her tears. I raised my little camera, held it steady until Terry Fox ran into the centre of the frame, and took a picture.

The sun set on that August day a long time ago. Terry Fox ground to a halt outside Thunder Bay, as everyone knows, just a few weeks later. There's a statue along the highway there now. It's become a place of pilgrimmage for me and pretty much everyone else who remembers.

The run goes on. People from all over the world take part every year. They can usually beat the kind of cancer that Terry Fox had now, maybe thanks to the money he raised. It's a great story, even though the hero dies.

When I got my pictures developed and put them in my photo album, I took extra time with the Terry Fox one. I put it on its own page. I wrote his name in full, Terrence Stanley Fox on a little piece of paper underneath. Years later when I was tossing out pictures, I saved that one, and I'm saving it still.

It's a moment, frozen in time. But for a frozen moment, it sure seems to keep growing. It's wound through so much of my life now. It touches everything.

In fact, I hardly ever see the actual picture anymore. In my mind's eye, it's so clear and present, I don't even need to bother. About once a year I go digging around for that little 3 by 5 snapshot, to show it to someone. I'm not kidding when I say everyone who sees it gets choked right up.

It's in an envelope, in a drawer somewhere with some other pictures I wouldn't like to lose. I keep thinking I should get it framed, but I never have. I haven't even scanned it. I don't know why.

This is a picture I took of Terry Fox running down the middle of Highway 17 south of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Can you see it? I can. I can see it with my eyes closed.

Aftermath

Screaming home from Hugh's Room in a cab after midnight on my fifth night out drinking in a row, I had to suddenly bail out because I couldn't handle the ride.

I told the cabby to pull over right away. I said I'd decided to go to my girlfriend's place. I left him ten bucks for a six dollar ride, wobbled into an alley and puked all over the pavement. Then I sat down on the curb, threw a pack of cigarettes I'd bought earlier into a heap of garbage, put my head in my hands and I called Molly. I told her I'd hit the wall and I couldn't get home for a while. We talked for about 20 minutes, me leaning on some old worn-out fence next to a puddle of my own vomit, telling her I was fine, I needed this, I thought it was coming and now I knew, and it was all okay.

Then I walked home to Riverdale from Dufferin and Dupont, one step at a time. It only took me til 2 am.

Molly was asleep when I got there. I woke her up to tell her I was fine.

I'm fine.

I'm thanking my instincts, actually. The alarm went off late, but that's better than not at all. I really think I could have died in that cab. It felt like a rocket car to hell.

I'm fine.

I miss a meadow. I miss a Labrador puppy. I miss a fourteen foot aluminum boat. I miss a beaver pond and an old dirt road. I miss pine needles on the forest floor, a sixty foot hemlock tree to climb, summer sunshine and cicadas. I miss it all, but that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is, I'm MISSING it all while it rolls beneath my wheels.

Two guys at the coffee shop today: One gets a dollar in his change. The other says, "Hey, it's a Terry Fox! You gotta keep that one." The first guy bobs his head happily and pockets the lucky looney. And I remember how this morning, putting on my jeans, I checked to make sure mine was there.

Last night I told Melwood Cutlery how Stuart McLean had read my short story about Terry Fox in Gus' barbershop one morning years ago, and how he'd taken the trouble to read his favourite line back to me. Melwood asked if I remembered the line, and I did:

"I felt sad that the road was so long and hard, and the oceans are so far apart."

Twenty-six miles a day to get back home again... to get back home again.... to get back home...

It's not just the length of the road ahead. It's keeping it between the ditches on the way. The rock cut walls are jagged and cruel and they don't care if you run into them, or how hard.

I've been lucky to have shoulders on both sides of me to collapse on when I have to.

Today I woke up alive and aware and awake, and I got myself running again.