Matthew turned 60 yesterday—a milestone, for both of us. He was due on my birthday two weeks later but he arrived a little early, I’m happy to say. He weighed 4 pounds, 5 ounces and he survived, though I had to leave him in the hospital until he got up to fighting weight (5 pounds).

The rest is history - almost. One thing and another, I wrote a lot about him over the years.I used to do a 90-second spot for Berkley Studio of the United Church of Canada, 900 words that I wrote and recorded in two or three--week batches, for broadcast Monday to Friday on independent radio stations across Canada (and Australia, pirated). I called them 90-second homilies from your Big Sponsor in the Sky. Later, three chapbooks were put together from the thousand or so scripts I had written. I called them Bathroom Readers. Anyway, I guess they were my first blogs, and Matthew was the subject of a lot of them.

I wrote a biography of him, The Book of Matthew (1984), reporting on what he (and I) had learned. He inspired a chamber opera, Boy in a Cage (1987), with music by Ken Nichols. Matt helped me with Jason (1991) a one-man, one-act play. I knew the events and the goal of the play when I took a tape recorder and asked him questions to do with some of the plot because I wanted to catch his speech patterns and attitudes. Unlike these other works, a film, Six Lost Hours, written in 1993, was never produced. I revised it on request in 2020 just in time for it to disappear under Covid-19 clouds.I live in fading hope.

Matt didn’t disappear though he didn’t live with me. I had always hoped that he could be independent, not a burden to his siblings but a welcome guest. At first he lived in a group home and then in 1987 he moved into an apartment with an (assigned) partner in the Apartment Program run by Community Living Toronto (for challenged people). He might have stayed there but on March 20, 2020—just last year but it seems longer—his older brother ordered Matt to live with me for our mutual safety for the duration of Covid-19.

So we have each had to cope with a new learning curve: to live with each other after all these years. I have learned again his strengths and his weaknesses. I have been humbled and ashamed of my frequent impatience and I have been awed by his forgiveness and his sweet nature. And his sense of humour, thank goodness.

He is thirty years younger than I am, less two weeks. We have been blessed with extra time, together. I wish us both a good year ahead. You too.

And welcome to my first Blog-of-the-Week. I‘lll try to be more faithful.

I have had three consultations with a pain doctor: one in person and two by phone, and he guided me off a terrible drug prescribed by my family doctor last summer when the pain was at its worst. I want to cope with my chronic pain (degenerative disk disease, sciaitica), with as few OTC drugs as possible and as few side effects as possible.

I’ve googled a lot of exercises and advice, especially after the pools closed—in my apartment as well as the city. I managed to stay ahead of my disability as long as I was swimming every day. It’s hard fitting in exercise. I do a few flights of stairs and a couple of corridors in my building. My son Matt and I have a fear of the outdoors (ice and snow) after we each broke a limb (my wrist, his ankle) the year before Covid.

What I did discover, just last week, is neither drug nor exercise.

Years ago I wrote a collective play with Theatre Passe Muraille about Reverend Russell Horsburgh. (You can look him and me up. My play, The Horsburgh Scandal, was published by Black Moss Press in 1981,) I had several interviews with Horsburgh before he died of bone cancer. He told me that when he gave a sermon, his pain lifted above his head and he could preach with a clear mind. When he finished it descended. I thought of that this past fall.I gave four virtual readings of my new book, Endings: A Book for Almost Everyone, and I made the same discovery. The pain lifted while I was talking, focusing on something outside my body.

Now, in the winter of our Covid disaster, with the sparse spare time I have, I have been turning to some fresh writing and new ideas and I feel better, lifting the pain away for a while. Someone I read once said that when you feel fine you actually don’t feel anything at all. that is, nothing hurts. You’re still here, still you, but the pain or malaise or whatever it is, is gone--temporarily.

It’s called Distraction Focus. I hope I can turn it into an addiction.