The pandemic still rages, everywhere: 65,399 cases in Canada as of this week, 19,598 in Ontario alone, 4,471 people dead – most of them elderly, many in retirement homes and long-term institutional health care settings. The relief of the result lasted for days, like a stretch of good weather. Still, I was surprised either one of them emerged from the bedroom intact. Then he went home and had to stay mostly in his bedroom, isolated with a dedicated worker in full protective personal equipment, or PPE (mask, gown, gloves, shield) for three entire days, until the test came back. A nurse shoved a long flexible wand up his nose and down his throat, an experience people have likened to drowning. “And everyone else was upset, because they didn’t get to go.”Īs it turns out, Walker’s adventure wasn’t such a prize. “He was really excited,” Emily remembers. Now Walker was getting the adventure, alone. Walker and his clan love the van they (used to) take trips all the time. A trip means a journey into the great world, into the realm of the normal and the Other, the vehicular equivalent of Sir Ernest Shackleton setting out across the ocean for an unknown land. In a house where no one is verbal, where routines and gestures and familiar phrases replace sentences and complicated explanations, the Fetching of the Van Keys is more or less equivalent to the second coming of Jesus.
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