Tombée

Wrangling a bear cub can't be easy, but it must be easier than this.

It has never been lost on me that my daughter's name is a near-homonym of violence; Violet commits violence to the air-sickness bag that was tucked (probably for years) in the seat-back pouch in front of us.

After the routine rundown of safety procedures, the lead steward also informs us that our plane, and its carrier, are saddened but proud to have one of our fallen soldiers on board. He explains, in our two official languages, that the Colonel aboard had "given her life" for our Country and, presumably, the principals she seeks to uphold in Afghanistan.

Violet eats a bruised banana and I remember my grandfather. "Soldiers don't give their lives, they have them taken from them," he told me many times.

"Elle est tombée en service," is what the steward says during the French half of the address. That's it, I think, a tomber: you know that you might fall, but you sure don't want to.

As the plane taxis away from the gate, I have to press the baby to my chest in preparation for take-off, essentially assuming our crash position, just in case.

Out the window I see that the grounds crews have halted their peculiar vehicles, standing at attention beside them as the plane passes them. A baggage-lift driver is holding a flag over his head, snapping stupidly in the jet wash and barely visible.

"Agua," says Violet, looking at the lake as we ascend. In the hour-long flight, she doesn't lose any fingers and I sweat through my shirt.

When we land, the sober steward announces that in honour of our fallen soldier, it is requested that we passengers remain seated until the coffin is unloaded. Though he doesn't specifically mention that we should be silent, we do. Even Violet.

We all hear the hydraulics of the cargo bay and a great deal of clunking that probably isn't the coffin but sure makes us think about it. What it must be like, a military coffin? Hard and likely aluminium. Probably sturdy. Surely not actually draped in a flag in transit? I wonder if her parents are at the airport.

Strangely, I hope that she's OK down there. Which, how could she be.

Violet has cheese in her hair and I kiss her between her eyes.

Sepember 12th, 2008: LEH, MER, DFW - RIP

On one weekend this past September, between the 12th and the 15th, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Merrill Lynch suffered near insolvency and was folded into Bank of America, and David Foster Wallace died.

A good deal was written about these three deaths and I read most of it. Like many who sit in seats like mine, the disappearance of the major financial institutions that we dealt with, competed with, or simply looked to for leadership (Bear Stearns had already been dispatched to Davy Jones locker in the spring) lead to my spending much of that week staring in rapt horror at my Bloomberg screen and reading about the tectonic shift in my industry.

Despite the hysteria found in most of the newspapers, the disappearance of some of our continents oldest and most venerable financial institutions was met with surprising ennui among those I know who don't work in the industry. And though the breadth of the repercussions of these failings have become more obvious in the following months of economic recession, at the time a sense of schadenfreude was palpable.

Imagine living in a small town, I said to my friends who felt it was time for finance-types take a fall. Imagine that there were five or six grocery stores in that town from which you could choose to shop, though you probably had your favorite one or two. One of those shops suffered from some kind of contamination (listeria?) in its deli department and a number of customers got sick.

You decide that maybe you'll shop at the other store this week until the local paper gives the all clear. But it turns out they have tainted meat too, since they use the same supplier. The first store goes out of business and you are feeling a little iffy about your other store so you start to cross town for your deli slices when you can. Then, without any further warning, two more stores go out of business. Worse still, the two that still have the doors open refuse to sell to most customers.

In a matter of days, your small town has gone from being careful where it shops to simply not being able to buy food at all.

How long do you think this town lasts?

What would you do if you were in the food supply business locally?

These are life-changing developments for consumers and suppliers alike and require a major rethink of past choices and future plans.

And yet, even while these very personally affecting dramas were playing out in the pink pages of the Financial Times, while friends were losing their jobs, the tragedy of David Foster Wallace's suicide transfixed me.

More learned readers and better writers all weighed in on his accomplishments and what his sudden absence meant for letters, but all I can say is I felt a very distinct downtick in the intelligence of the universe. The strange thing about authors (and DFW had actually written about this) is that the nature of their medium gives the impression of a serious intimacy to the reader; the author, or his characters at least, are literally inside the readers mind. To this effect, I really felt closer to DFW than to many people that I know in real life.

And as often happens when you lose something you really don't know how important it is to you until it's gone. DFW was supposed to have been turning out essays and vaguely promising to follow up his masterpiece novel for years to come. I was willing to be patient. And then, all of a sudden, I found myself scouring YouTube for interviews with him so that I might know him better, and quickly.

To get back to thinking about me: even in a week as surprising as that one, I was most surprised that the death of DFW affected me so much more deeply than those of LEH and MER. Sure, one was a person and the other two simply entities, but frankly none of them had been to my house for dinner and two of them represented (indirectly) my livelihood. DFW never once held out any promise that he would help keep my children in jeans. But he did tell me things that I had never known: things about the tennis, things about philosophy, things about addiction, things about grammar, things about obsession, things about myself.

It has taken me longer to post about it than I had meant, but nonetheless I miss him.

The Friendly Giant

Jim is gone. He's not coming back and there is absolutely nothing that we can do about it. There will be no more, no seconds, no matter how nicely we ask. All we can do is look back, because the present is simply too sad.

Jim was among the first adults to speak to me as an equal, as if I too, were an adult. There are about five people in my life who offered me this respect while I was growing up, and each of them I still try to emulate to this day. He listened to me as if I was the very first to speak the adenoidal platitudes of a teen aged boy. He laughed with me, not at me, though often at his own jokes. He swore not freely like a child, but carefully and with precision. He showed me that just because you took life seriously, you did not necessarily have to be serious. He taught me that everyone deserves to be heard, and that everyone is interesting if you listen carefully enough.

It would be hard to describe Jim as an athlete. It was only due to pure luck that he didn't fall down the stairs more often than he did. But by no means did his lanky frame and disobedient limbs prevent him from competing, he simply had to do it in his own way. It's infinitely easier to win at tennis, for instance, if you only play with children. And thrash me he did! Until I turned thirteen, of course.

But over those years, he taught me that telling me how badly he was going to beat me was much better than actually beating me. In fact, since his racket mysteriously went missing a few years ago, his play was sublimely reduced to a simple essence of trash talk. Our "annual" game was since replaced by a brace of Bloody Mary's on the veranda where he would outline all the improvements he had made to his serve the previous winter and what it would mean to me and my (not-so) imminent humiliation.

When I think on this, and all the other jokes we shared, well, wow, it is hard not to feel like I was smiled upon with very special favour. But in reality, I suspect that each of his nieces and nephews thought that *they* were quietly his favorite; that he was particularly mirthful with them; that he sought them out in a crowd because they were the most fun; that he understood them for what they really were; that he was just faking being an adult.

Which, he might have been. Faking. It was clear to anyone of us that he had undergone a marked change in outlook after he took his retirement. His jaw unclenched and his whole demeanor opened up. Others were invited into his world.

I believe I was in University when he hung up his wig (or whatever it is that lawyers hang up: pens? foolscap? it can't be cleats!). Young, ambitious, and aggressive, it didn't make much sense to me at the time. Here I was, doing anything to start a career, and there he was walking away! To help people! Inconceivably romantic. But as I grew older, and learned to hate my first job, I began to find that I hoped that one day I too would wake up, look around, and decide that I had all I needed; that I could contribute to my community in ways that far exceeded the reach of my checkbook.

The last time I saw Jim was a few weekends ago up at the lake (where else). We had brought Adrian over to the Wright dock so he could splash around in the shallows that had been cleared by Nancy and Dad and the great Mr. Mac so many years before. Mostly we just milled around while Adrian generally made a mess of the place. The conversation volleyed about in its typically lazy summertime way: how many more boats there are this year than others; what Nan and Dad used to do to leaches; whether the fish would eventually eat the discarded water slipper resting on the bottom of the lake off the end of the dock; why Jim's canoe was the fastest on the lake, a marvel.

When it came time to pack up the boy and take him home for some supper, I hoisted him up on my shoulders, where suddenly he was staring directly into Jim's eyes. (Jim was, it turned out, one-half an Adrian taller than me).

"So long Adrian! See you soon!" Jim bellowed, smiling wide and giving my six-toothed son a good view of his dental work.

Adrian shrunk into my my hair, tears welling up in his eyes. A small sniffle.

I swung him down and cradled him in my arms so that he was sitting facing outwards, "It's only Uncle Jim," I told the little guy, trying to smooth over the situation, "Jim!" I said.

Sniffle. A tiny moan and a furtive look for escape routes into the woods.

Jim raised his arms high above his head and waved them around, all elbows and freckles. His knuckles dragged through the clouds above and he laughed, "that's right! I am scary! Lookout for Uncle Jim!"

But that's the end of the story: finished in the middle. Adrian will never have a chance to think that he is Jim's favorite nephew. He will simply wonder: who is the laughing, bespectacled man towering over us in all the family photos?

"Papa? Tell me about the friendly giant again."

And I will.