A Day Of Wonder

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And Then There Were Three ...

A Day Of Wonder

Snow.

Stormy Monday

There was one heck of a lot of snow.

The school buses were cancelled, the weather reports were for dire and dangerous driving conditions, and people were cautioned to stay home.

When I came up from the gym, I looked out my windows and shook my head. "Looks like we're having a blizzard," I mumbled to the Ficus Benjemina drooping slightly in its draughty corner, "a typical Canadian blizzard of snow and ice."

After a hot shower, I dressed in my warmest pyjamas and made myself a bowl of piping hot oatmeal, which I ate while catching up on some reading that I had been meaning to do. It was a day to hibernate, read, make a phone call or two, and maybe watch a movie on television. It was certainly not a day to be venturing outside.

Then the phone rang.

The name of my son, who was working at a trade fair nearby, popped up on the call display, so I answered on the third ring.

"Josh?"

"Dad, I'm sjhggua."

"Josh, you're breaking up in the storm. Is everything OK?"

"No," I heard, as my son's hysterical voice soared into falsetto and banged in my ear like shots from a machine gun. "I'm stuck. I have to get to Oshawa. Linda is having the baby. I need a ride."

My eyes darted to the white rehearsal of the apocalypse outside.

"Are ... are you kidding?" I stuttered. "It's a blizzard out there."

"Dad, I need to get to Oshawa right away. I need a ride."

"OK," I conceded, "OK, I'll be right there. Meet me out front."

"Hurry."

Hurry? Hurry? The idea of hurrying along the icy streets folded into an image of me in my van wrapped neatly around a telephone pole, my nose broken from the impact of the air bag, my last gasps of breath uncertain at best.

Babies, it seems, have no sense of timing, no sense of propriety, and certainly no sense of consideration for the vagaries of time and place. When you least expect it, boom, they decide it's time to find their way into the world.

So I quickly fell into some warm clothes, grabbed several bottles of water, a protein bar, my cell phone, and in the next instant I was ploughing through snowy streets, trying my best to follow the indistinct tire tracks of others, who, I suspect, had no choice but to be on the roads that day.

As I approached a fortunately vacant intersection, my heart jumped into my throat. Stopping for the red light became something of a circus act, as my van completed a slightly imperfect 360º spin-o-rama. "This is not good," I mumbled to myself, "this is so not good."

Then, one of those voices that always seem to come from nowhere piped up from the deep recesses of my brain.

"Kennedy," it boomed in a deep monotone, "you're a Winnipeg boy. You grew up in conditions far worse than these, and you know how to drive in even the worst weather. Snow? Ice? Pfffft. Mere inconveniences. You have faced far worse. Drive like you were back on the prairies, and get this right."

And so, I did. I made it to where my son was waiting, picked him up, and headed for the freeway, which for all I knew, could have been closed because of the hazardous conditions.

Fortunately, the 401, the twenty lane expressway snaking across the north end of Toronto was open, and Oshawa was just 65 miles away.

To say that my son was wildly excited would be an understatement. As we zigzagged through the transport trucks that carved a path along the highway, he chattered about this and that. I'm not sure any of it made much sense, but I'm guessing it probably did. I was in a driving mode state of consciousness. I could hear him talking, could hear Bob Dylan's album, Tempest, playing on the CD player, but it all fused into one obsessive mission — to get to Oshawa safely, sooner rather than later.

After what seemed a never-ending drive, we made it to the hospital. I pulled into the driveway out front, and I wished my son all the best.

"Aren't you coming in?" the boy-in-a-man asked.

"No," I replied. "This is your gig. I'll come back tomorrow or the next day."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely."

As I watched my son sprint from the van and into the hospital, I was suddenly overcome with a sense of relief. I suppose it was the relief of knowing we had arrived on time, but it was something else as well. You see, we knew this was a baby boy about to shuffle into our lives, and for generations, no boy in my family genealogy has ever had a paternal grandfather, not me, not my father, and not his father.

"You've changed all that," I thought to myself. "You've mended a broken line."

I laughed at the thought. "Don't be so sure," I groaned to myself, "you're not home yet."

Back on the freeway, the snowfall had intensified, but the bad weather and the hazards of driving no longer seemed to matter. I drove slowly and cautiously, anticipating every danger and avoiding every potentially deadly situation one mile at a time.

At some point on the journey home, I looked over the guardrail and watched as blankets of snow settled in drifts across the countryside to the north. Time slowed to a stop and a eerie sense of awe came over me. My thoughts turned over how we live in pockets of experience, some good, some bad, moments of joy and sadness that flicker into being and then drift out of sight like the perilous twists and turns of the wintry road disappearing in my rear view mirror. Still, as long as we live, there is always a new experience ahead, and the birth of a grandson that evening has not only been one of my life's greatest joys, but also an affirmation that life continues beyond the span of a single lifetime.

To be honest, after living a life seemingly always on the brink of tragedy, I never truly believed that I would ever make it this far, and certainly never expected to arrive at this moment of grace. It's a blessing, I suppose, and a confirmation of something that I can't put into words.

All that I really know, and barely understand, is that some days are surely filled with great wonder.