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.