Glenn Kubish

A group of us, I think Blatt was there and McIntosh, too, were on the 11th floor of the Tory Building where Professor Carmichael was talking excitedly about the Challenger crash, his eyes magnified by his glasses as he made an ancient point. Carmichael translated the explosion's skywriting from the Greek. Daedalus and Icarus, he said. It's Greek mythology on CNN, he said. Flying too close to the sun. The sky was always a thing for me. As a boy growing up in the north end, I was routinely sent outside by my mother to lie on the lawn and look up at the sky to look for the shapes of animals in the clouds when I was bored, which was pretty much all the time. There wasn't much else to do in those summer days. It was still a few years before you could buy the Coleco Electronic Quarterback at Eaton's or Woolco. So, the big book of analogy illustrated in endless blue and puffy white it was. I found elephants and dogs and lions. In those days, the Canadian Forces base at...

I remember sitting on the examining table in the doctor's office and feeling the concept of immunity sinking in a bit. The doc had taken a pen and drawn a single line on the table's thin tissue topping.  I had asked about shingles. Could I ever get it again? What could I do to prevent ever getting it again? The pain from my shingles episode a couple of years before had been at times unbearable. Those were the hours it felt like some tiny invaders under the torso splotches were slowly pulling a tiny pipe cleaner tipped with tin foil through my blood vessels. Yes, I got the vaccine, but could it ever happen again? The doctor said, yes, it could happen again, and then drew two more figures. The horizontal line was the virus. It stayed in my body. It would always be there. The downward-pointing crooked lines represented my immunity. When my immunity was lower than the strength of the virus, he explained, when it dipped below the base line, boom, welcome back shingle...