That November, on the first day of the month, we’d gathered in a bar to watch game seven. It was as if there’d only been one thing on the city’s collective mind for the past month. The LCD displays on the streetcars read Go Jays Go! and friends had driven down from Ottawa that same day.
“We just wanna be in the city when it happens.”
The Imperial Pub, the last piece of character on an increasingly sanitized stretch of Dundas Street East, was to be closed, razed, and turned into a towering new development. When they announced it in September, the student paper called it “the end of an empire.”
We’d driven up to Guelph in October to see her. It felt strange, considering that wasn’t the city that I’d always known to be hers. It was where the home she’d been supposed to move into was. It’s where the hospital was. We got lost in the winding corridors of the aging building. A kind orderly helped us find her. We showed her printed photos of weddings, landscapes, and friends. She told us they looked lovely. They did.
The bar was packed well beyond what could possibly be considered fire-safe. Gaze focused on whichever screen met the eyeline, the crowd was alive, and things couldn’t be better. Bo Bichette crushed a three run shot to put the Jays ahead 3-0. Things got better.
The Imperial wasn’t a good pub. On one occasion, when we asked why our beer was so rarely properly cold, we were told, without a hint of irony, that it was because the brand we were ordering was an “upstairs beer.”
“The downstairs kegs are the cold ones.”
We had to ask to be pointed to the “downstairs beers.” On the day its closure was announced, we discussed it with a reverence that would’ve been appropriate for one of the seven wonders of the world.
When we rushed back to Guelph in November, there were no printed photos that looked lovely. It wasn’t any of the easy-to-explains: cancer, stroke, aneurysm, etc. As far as I can understand, it was a combination of the medication she’d been taking for decades to keep her upright (arthritis, and lots of it) and her unwillingness to eat anywhere close to her daily protein requirement. She was a small woman made smaller. Her false teeth looked large in her head. Her hair somehow did not betray her enough to show a single grey. She was frustrated. An independent force muted by illness, whose endless thoughts and opinions had to stay in, for the first time ever. Mom’s voice was shaky.
“Tell her what you want her to hear. She can hear you. She knows it’s you.”
A slow trickle of one-run innings by the Dodgers evened the score at four runs apiece. We paid the bill in the seventh. “If they win this game,” Ethan had said, “We’re getting the fuck out of here quick”. We’d heard stories of the kind of city-wide party that could be in store. The game went into extra innings.
We went to the Imperial one more time. It took an hour to get served. Where were all these people two months ago? Julian and I shared the fish and chips, served on paper plates. I tapped the door frame on the way out, with a menu under my sweater and a pint glass in my coat pocket.
Meg went first, her bedside manner composed and intentional. She knew what to say. When she’d told her all she needed to, I sat on the left side of the bed. Savanna took the right. She was locked into a metronome of movement, rocking her head back and forth. I held her tiny face in my left hand, and the movement slowed. She’d once held me, the first of her grandchildren, minutes after my birth. I stared forward, and I told her she was okay. I told her I loved her. I told her she was okay. I told her I loved her. I cried. Hard consistent tears that polka dotted the hospital sheets. I kissed her forehead. To my right, Savanna was immersed in a similar ritual. Her eyes were closed. She strung together vague yet unmistakable sounds. She told me she loved me. She told me I was okay.
Alejandro Kirk’s bat cracks in half. The ball bounces right to the shortstop, who taps second base in stride. He barely strains in getting the ball to the first baseman, who throws up his arms, and runs to embrace the pitcher. The bar is quiet. The booth is piled with empty glasses. The table feels sticky against my forehead.
The lights are off at the corner of Bond and Dundas. In the newspaper, there’s a rendering of the building that will grow in its footprint. It is white, bronze, and glass. There’s no jukebox. There’s no pool table. There’s no fish and chips.
At 4:25am, as my Mom holds one of her hands and my Uncle holds the other, my Dad reads to her. Just a few hours earlier, she’d seen the sunset. Mom had made sure she’d seen it. She breathes in. She breathes out. She rests. It’s Remembrance Day. There are still nineteen days left in November.