A few years ago Janie sent several Tupperware storage containers over to my house with my housekeeper, who I also hire to keep Janie’s apartment in order for her. She called to tell me they were coming and that they were full of Bunny and George’s old belongings. Things from a lifetime ago. Things they had held on to until the end. I sometimes hate those kinds of things, the ones that meant everything to the departed but nothing in the land of the living. In antique stores and flea markets, I’m always saddened to find the cherished possessions of an old woman—a picture of her dog, salt and pepper shakers, dishes, crafts—a constellation of lost memories thrown onto a table for people to rummage through. I’m sensitive about this shit, and so until very recently I had been unable to lift the lid off the containers full of Bunny and George, or maybe I just knew that I was inside there too.
I was ready. I reached inside one container and found George’s Air Force medals and his formal dress uniform. Fifty-two years before, I’d bundled this stuff up and brought it to my grade one class bursting with pride to show off my war hero’s honours. I reached into another and found Bunny’s old coin collection. I remembered her sorting through these coins in the evenings, after she’d finished the dishes, at the kitchen table back on 36th Street. She’d check the dates, record the details of each coin on a small cardboard frame and then place the coin at the frame’s centre and staple it into its presentable resting place. I held one tight in my fist trying to feel Bunny somewhere inside there.
As I went through the containers marked Bunny and George my breath became heavy and I was hit by the same claustrophobic feeling that came over me when Bunny died. I pictured myself in one of those old black-and-white movies. I was the boxer hitting the mat after the knockout punch, the air temporarily drained out of him. The cards of my life shuffled into order and exposed right there in front of me. I closed my eyes as my mind raced through memories. I thought about the day Thompson was born. How amazed I was with every bit of him. How scared I was for Madeline. How protective I felt of her. I remembered we were driving down King Street into Westdale heading back to the McMaster University hospital. Back to Sandy and the new baby. I looked down at Madeline playing in the front seat with a Barbie I had just bought her. We were alive and electric and we were alone in the world together at that moment. She looked up at me smiling. I was a father whole, connected. I remember all this like it happened twenty minutes ago. Greg Keelor came on the radio singing “Lost Together,” and I broke. I knew how deeply and completely my kids were inside me and think that’s the feeling I missed from Bunny and George. That’s what I missed from Janie. But I had it all delivered to me in kings and aces with my own kids.
I’ve lived in uncertainty most of my life. Running from myself. Running from Bunny and George who gave me everything they had but in the end it wasn’t enough and it wasn’t their fault. Then my happiest childhood memories pushed themselves forward. I remembered being danced around the living room in Bunny and George’s arms to “Till We Meet Again” at the end of Don Messer’s Jubilee, and running back and forth in my playpen in the front foyer of the house while Bunny cooked something up on the stove and George sat at at the kitchen table. I thought about how George, even though he was blind, would come to my hockey games at Inch Park and stand in the corner holding Bunny’s arm, smoking Export Plains and listening to the skates and sticks of the peewees and the other parents screaming and cheering their kids on, and how I would skate by that corner and say, “Hi, Dad, it’s me,” so he knew it was my shift. That one memory flash, that one card flipping through the deck, was what opened my heart to Bunny and George. Broke it wide open, in fact. They gave me a fighting chance and you can’t ask for more than that. The cards flipped by, and I felt like I knew everything there was to know, and I felt like I knew nothing.