Holes in our lives seem to multiply at an unbearable rate

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2024 (358 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you don’t know this feeling yet, you don’t know how blessed you are.

But that blessing won’t last.

Nobody warns you about it either — nobody, I guess, but me, warning you right now.

It’s the end of the year, the end of a hard year for some, a time of resolutions and future planning and hope for others. The summing-up of 12 months that eventually becomes an index of loss, a calculus of the bereft.

It’s like an old-school pellet gun range at an arcade or fair: slip a pellet into the breech, snap the gun closed, aim and knock down a tin duck. Knock down enough, win a small stuffed animal.

I remember them from travelling fairs in Nova Scotia, from the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. The pellet guns always ludicrously hard to shoot straight as if the sights were all set deliberately askew, the carnies skilled at poking your pride and making you keep playing.

Except now, you’re the tin duck, in the company of your tin duck friends and family. And the arcade’s too busy. The flat ringing “Whack!” of pellet hitting tin, and another duck is down. No rhyme or reason as to who or why, just a hole where that duck used to stand. You’re still up, but an occasional distant friend you knew in high school is gone. It gets closer. Parents — whack, whack.

Didn’t see that coming.

And then, as years go by, it seems the marksmanship is getting better.

The latest, for me?

Ken Simmons.

Big man. Big laugh. Big heart. The kind of guy you absolutely want in your corner when bad things were happening. The guy in the office right next door to mine for years at my newspaper office in St. John’s. I won’t fully spell out his response when I would ask him how to deal with the latest professional attack I’d received, or the newest threat of a lawsuit. But that response started with “F” and ended with “‘em.”

“What’s it matter, anyway?” he’d say. If he’d been a professional wrestler, he’d have been “the Pragmatist.” And eventually, it would always work out that he was right.

An absolute rock.

Player of mandolins and other stringed instruments. Unapologetic owner of a long, un-ironic grey ponytail. Maker of stained glass. Lover of riding fast motorcycles, a guy who would come to the office stuffed tight into a black-and-yellow Kevlar protective riding suit you dearly hoped he’d never actually need to rely on. I mean, for years, he was right there, next door. I could have reached out and poked him if I wanted to — though that would have ended badly.

I’ve thought about Ken and about writing this column for weeks now. Pushed it away every time, like a job you know you have to do, but one you will find any reason to avoid.

Have to go grocery shopping? On it.

Suddenly need to find the right-sized nail set to countersink an inch-and-a-quarter finishing nail without bruising and denting the wood? I’ve already got the car keys in my hand. (Ken would have laughed at me for doing that. Leaned back in his chair and roared. I’d be fine with it.)

I’ve been listening to John Hiatt’s Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns, the album with the last song I sent to him — Train to Birmingham. He was already sick, struck by a mysterious brain tumour that defied easy description, but on the face of it, relentlessly optimistic.

He deserved better. He was a force, always, for the basic good.

Others deserved better, too. The relentlessly churning and detailed intellect that was Alan Small at the Free Press. The irrepressible sports editor Robin Short at the St. John’s Telegram. Robin’s compatriot, sportswriter Brendan McCarthy. Telegram desk editor and professional basketball referee Sam McNeish. Newfoundland writer and golden, just golden, soul Stan Dragland.

Never once thought I’d think of anything I owned as my “funeral clothes.”

Never thought I’d feel like I’d been charged with keeping alive the shape of someone else’s smile, the sound of their laugh, the way they straight-armed their office chair away from their desk, like they were throwing themselves backwards out of the side of an aircraft, expecting and trusting their parachute to burst out and buoy above them.

And here.

Damn.

And right here and right now, eight songs in on the album, comes Train to Birmingham.

“But I die a little slower on the train … to Birmingham.”

And that’s what we are, isn’t it? The survivors. Dying a little slower. The keepers of the memories. Bearing witness and holding on.

Spring will come. Grass will grow, and a new year will unfold.

Make the most of it.

There are absolutely no guarantees you’re not going to be the next tin duck to go down.

And something else.

When fireworks shoot into the air this New Year’s Eve, rattling windows and terrifying pets, maybe imagine they are reaching up to somehow touch those we have lost this year and all the years before, letting them know we’ll keep them safe, tucked inside ourselves for as long as we can.

And Ken?

You know those sneaky fireworks that shoot straight up with a thin ribbon of orange sparks and a small, unprepossessing flash, followed only moments later by the sound of a single rib-slapping cannon-clap of thunder that shakes you to the core?

That’ll be him.

I hate this.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at Russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca