July and August, when it was really hot and all the windows were wide open all night long, I used to lay awake and time the trains, or try to count the cars by sound. Every two clacks was a single freight car passing by the open fence at the end of the street. Three quick clacks came from each of the cars on the passenger trains. I used to drift off to sleep imagining where they might be going, who might be on them and what it would be like where they finally stopped.
As un-epic as my tales were next to his, I shared these memories with Smoothy. Surprisingly, he listened without a saying a word. Very quietly. Very intently. At first I thought he was just being kind and trying to respect my own appreciation for the adventure and imagination of locomotive travel. But when I was done talking he asked me about something in my story that had nothing at all to do with trains or tracks.
“Were they big windows?” he asked.
I was perplexed by his question. “What windows?”
“In your room,” he said softly, “…the ones kept open in July and August. Were they big windows?”
“Um, well ya,” I stuttered back, “the windows in my room were big, but the part that opened with the screen was kinda small.” I was baffled by the strange detour in the conversation.
“Was it your room? I mean your very own room?” he dug deeper.
“Well, sort of. I shared it with my brother when I was little,” I replied.
“Oh, but still, not with the furnace or the washing machine or anything, right? Just your stuff, right? Did you have your own stuff? Like, what kind of stuff?” He began to burst with strange and detailed questions, longing to hear about my childhood bedroom.
My stories of imagining train travels were lost on him the instant I mentioned having a bedroom. My room. My place of childhood belonging. A place I dreamed and wished and imagined from, like most children. A place where, most of all, I was safe.
My moment had come. “Did you have a room as a kid?”
Lost in the moment, he answered before he meant to. “Well, I guess, well, not really. A small space in the basement. No windows though. No way out until the door was unlock….” Before he finished the word, he stopped, recognizing that he was saying much more than he had ever intended.
“Never mind,” he cleared his throat.
“Anyway,” he continued in an about-face manner, “I sleep under the stars now. The sky is my window, and I come and go as I please.”
While tragedies and atrocities occur around the world, packaged for our convenience in sound-bite morsels on the evening news, there are households in every community here at home filled with their own silent horrors. Not squabbles and struggles. Those are the property of every household and every relationship. But horrors, true horrors. The streets are filled with people, young and old, who carry the haunts of indignity, humiliation, embarrassment and abuse in the creases of their hearts and minds. It is unimaginable to most people that anyone would lock their child in the bare blackness of the basement. But still, it happens. Despite the assumption that it wouldn’t happen on my street or your street, still, it happens on someone’s street.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “I never thought much of the courage of the lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.” But there are some, like Smoothy, who have had to live through terror both inside and outside of that cage.
And this is why—all faith persuasions and alternative logic aside—I can only believe that God is the only hope any of us has for complete healing. Or at least as complete as possible in this lifetime. Because only he will ever know our deepest hurts and darkest secrets, and the tortures a soul has endured while on earth.
It is incredible the things most of us take for granted. Plain old things like breakfast cereal in a clean bowl, a clothing basket full of fresh laundry, a clean towel after a hot shower, framed pictures of a family holiday. Or even a small sliding window and an unlocked door. The list is endless. Things that a boy dubbed Smoothy would never take for granted, then or now.
As twilight fell and the fast and furious exchanges slowed, Smoothy dropped his guard completely. He fell asleep beneath the pines. Another gift to me—the trust that he could rest in my presence and know that he was safe. I sat at his side and thanked God for all the open windows and unlocked doors in my life. And I pleaded with God that Smoothy’s path would only know such light and freedom for the rest of his days.
After an hour he awoke, as though an alarm had gone off. The sound of hitching cars linking up down below were his cue to press on. He sprang to his feet, gathered his meagre belongings and lit his pipe.
“This is my ride, friend,” he nodded towards the tracks.
He shook my hand and said merrily, “Keep on fightin’ the good fight!” A shock of a statement to me, as the phrase had meant so much to me that I had it tattooed on my shoulder many years prior.
I smiled sadly and responded hesitantly as he ran towards the lowest section of the easement and jumped the rail: “You too, friend.”
He didn’t respond, so I guessed he hadn’t heard me. So I shouted it again. But he was busy working out the timing of his long strides against the side of a boxcar while it gathered momentum. Then, just as he had himself in perfect sync with the slight opening in a freight door, he turned back, winked with a giant nod, tipped his hat and called out, “At least I’ll go down swinging.”
He leaped. And he was gone.
I leaned back against the giant rocks at the sides of the Memorial to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada. Massive nuggets of rock carved from the Rocky Mountains where the workers had toiled and transported to this place in honour of them. I felt a digging in my back, thinking it was just a rough edge in the boulder. I turned and looked. And there, mounted on one of the eight-foot chunks of mountain was a tiny plaque. Written on it in both English text and Chinese script: “One by one the walkers vanish.” With only a guess at its profound meaning and the history of the words, in that moment its significance was monumental to me. One by one indeed, I have watched the walkers, runners, crawlers, hiders, seekers and Smoothys vanish.
There wasn’t much time to gather up the abundant blessings of knowing Smoothy, apart from one. The one we all have the opportunity to share. The one that can come from knowing someone for a lifetime, for a season, in a chance meeting or for a few hours beside the railway tracks. The blessing bestowed on others by those, like Smoothy, who live out the priceless challenge of Mother Teresa:
“Let no one come to you without leaving them happier and better.”
I was left happier. Better.
4. No Jesus: October 1999
Correen had lovely round blue eyes. They were only exposed when she dropped her guard and raised her head, which was rare. But when they were, it was like catching beams of sunlight through storm clouds.
She camped with a hodge-podge of misfits and runaways, each with their own dark story, secret glories and unique approach to survival.
Among the teenagers camping between the steel I beams beneath the Gardiner Expressway was a young man in his early twenties who loved to talk about Satan. He was new to the streets—weeks at best. New enough to maintain his commitment to pointy, waxed eyebrows and the shiny blackness of it all. He wore a long leather duster-jacket covered in pentagrams and
