Toronto-Shore Leave

I.
A week ago, I drove through the night in a rental car it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to turn on. Eventually, my high beams tunneled through the darkness, their outer radius revealing dense forest, small, sleeping towns and the thick granite walls of the Canadian Shield, blasted through a century ago to make this route possible. In seven hours, I passed three southbound cars. Only as Toronto’s dome of light became visible in the far distance did the roads begin to fill out.

II.
When I was a child I remember driving back from somewhere or other with my family and dozing with my head against the window. I opened my eyes and saw a fingernail moon hanging low in the sky. I was surprised to see that it travelled with me, perfectly framed in that pane of glass, never getting nearer, never getting further. I wondered what it was that made me so special, that the moon should choose me, a small boy in Canada, to accompany home that evening.

III.
Last night I watched Pain and Glory, the latest Almodovar film, in which Antonio Banderas plays an aging film maker plagued by depression, insomnia and various physical ailments. He says that on the nights when he is suffering from more than one of these things, he is a religious man and he prays. On the nights where he has only one, he is an atheist.

IV.
I long ago quit fooling with the notion that I was any different from the rest of the herd. But I did notice, last week, as I drove the seven hours home to a fridge full of beer kindly curated by a close friend, that the same fingernail moon from my childhood was sitting there silently in the driver’s side window for much of the time. To think! It had singled me, of all people out on this occasion,to accompany home, on his long journey through the dark night.