Early in the morning and the sounds of a distant hammer striking wood comes in through the window.
And then closer, there’s birdsong. A long winter finally breaking. Something remembered in the bones, something hopeful returning. And everybody in the elevator at the hospital feels this, too. We’re packed tightly together, but everyone is boisterous and chatty. Like we’re going on an adventure. The porter flirts with another worker, both of them speaking in accents the other can barely decipher. But it doesn’t matter. People are smiling and feeling pretty. Making eye contact and laughing. And the doors open again and a middle-aged couple walk in. The woman looks bulletproof, like she commands vast industries, is crying. The man beside her holds her hand. Biting his lip, he looks down. And the way she stood there, looking straight ahead while the tears ran down her face. So unashamed, so brave. The rest of us fell silent in the face of their suffering. Shuffling about we made a little more room for them, letting them penetrate through to the middle. And so we quietly encircled them, and knowing not what else to do, we stood with them and their grief as we descended through the hospital, and then watched as they stepped out into the day, their lives forever changed.
Michael Murray is nothing without his wife.
Rachelle Maynard. That’s his wife.
Rachelle Maynard is the bomb.
She is the Galaxy Brain, and everything you see here is because of her.
That is the Capital T, truth.
But never mind that, for Michael Murray is truly the Galaxy Brain. He has won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest and is so good-natured that he was once mistaken for a missionary while strolling the streets of a small Cuban town. He has written for the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen, Hazlitt Magazine, CBC Radio, Reader’s Digest and thousands of other prestigious publications and high-flying companies that pay obscene sums of money .You should buy his book, A Van Full of Girls and throw money at Galaxy Brain.