the antidote to everything

Good morning. It’s Monday smak i the middle of september, beautiful here, I have a buggered shoulder right now due to competitive yoga, just kidding but hmmmm, there’s def a grain of truth, a grind of truth, that’s what I did to my shoulder, my daughter informed me that we should all be able to do eleven pushups, who the fuck comes up with these numbers, and I took on the challenge without asking my left shoulder’s permission, or perhaps without proper chatarangua form, and it went pythaaannnng, and so I can;t swim I just stand there and occasionall fall onto my back and squirm a bit, but these mid september days and Lake Ontario are divine.

Thanks for being here.

Again last night I got the nightmare in which I set my childhood table for three. I know it doesn’t sound like anything more than a dull dream but I woke up shattered.

After my brother Harvey went missing, we didn’t eat at the table any more. How could we? I am an atheist, mostly, but god bless any family who has lost a child, for vacancy is the most haunting thing of all – and I should know – all of my nightmares that summer featured vacancy in the shape of my little brother.

I was the nightmarer; he, the sleepwalker. He was ten the night he sleepwalked out the door.

Our back yard turned into a forest, then a cliff, then the lake. Everybody showed up to search for him in the tangled acreage – kids and teachers from school, my father’s coworkers, strangers from neighbouring towns, my mother’s sewing bee and book club – they even closed the Red & White, the cashiers were still in their uniforms, the sullen stock boys rearranged the forest.

I thought for sure we’d find him curled up in some frond like a Cabbage Patch Kid, it was too awful to consider the alternatives, so we went through every possibility in that forest and then every impossibility – we peered through decayed logs into which he couldn’t possibly have squirmed, we climbed trees completely inaccessible to him, we searched burrows too small and empty little nests. Our neighbours and friends walked hand-in-hand through galaxies of crocus that could not have concealed him

I remember looking down the throat of a wild tulip.

Yellow tape crisscrossed the end of our lawn the next morning, we heard boats and voices and rumbles that made my body convulse in advance, before I was able to interpret them.

In a vacant moment, I imagined my police officer neighbour secretly catch and release my flopping brother like a too-small trout.

They dragged the lake for three days and then called it off.

People continued to search the 26-acre forest, every time I looked there was a flash of skin or plaid, an eyeball or eartwist, and every time I thought it was Harvey coming home. The mixture of hope and its absence was like dying, but the nightmares stopped – I think my horror receptors were full.

A few weeks later my mother caught herself setting the table, we all had our vacant moments, and she quickly positioned her sewing machine along Harvey’s edge of the table, spools of thread where I sat, a tape measure for her, a wide open pair of scissors for my father. After that she sat with her back to us, sewing seams of nothingness in front of the window while my father churned in front of the television. He signaled me when he needed more ice. I did nothing but play alleys on the carpet.

Between the whir of the sewing machine, the presence of ice in my father's whiskey, and Walter Cronkite's whispering doom, my alleys glided with careful velocity, and I listened for the door, for Harvey’s return.

 People say it’s better to know than to not know and I heartily agree with this as long as the knowing is the good kind.

I tried to present both hope and no hope in this story so you could sample those desperate days of 1968, the year I became aware that each soldier on the nightly news was somebody’s brother.

It was Crazy Hattie Murphy who found Harvey wandering way down in Regency the morning after he walked off, he was awake but lost, he was only ten as I said, she took him home and fed him possum and dandelions – she was not like some kook from The Beverley Hillbillies – she kept him locked up all summer.

He escaped by mistake. There’s really not much that can deter the sleepwalking mind once it decides to go for a walk. He came back to us on a full mooned night in October, he slid silently through the door and to bed.

During our stand-up breakfast the next morning, it was a cool Sunday, my brother Harvey came down the stairs and stood in a pool of isolated sunlight.

I remember that moment above all moments. I think about it all the time. It is my antidote to everything.