Michael Murray & Elizabeth Tevlin
Heaven, and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Intentions in the world, and a source of light

08/12/2009, a text exchange between Michael and me. I mainly exist to set up Michael here.

ET

I liked your blog, regardless of what you’ve been told. I also reread your thread about your impending visit to Ottawa, which sent the entire city, as far as I can tell, into a lather of trying to get you to come to their event! There was: Montebello, the Elmdale, Dominion, the obviously superior bowling idea, a variety of heartfelt excuses, and the Mercury Lounge. Not even counting the slowpokes who chimed in after the fact. How does it feel to be so adored? That having you show up at a certain venue bestows a certain cachet on that scene, a golden glow that boosts the self-esteem of other attendees? I’m asking.

MM

Elizabeth: I would say that the city was aflame. It was a little bit like a Senators playoff drive, I think. That sort of intensity, that sort of excitement. But that’s neither here nor there, as you asked how it made me feel, not the city of Ottawa. 

I’ve always been loved and cherished, nicknamed “Little light of Wonder” from an early age. My mother likes to tell the story of watching me leave the house at the age of eight to mail a postcard, and she says that before I got to the mailbox at the end of the street, there was a parade of 7 kids following me. I have been asked to be the best man at a wedding 16 times. When I was in the hospital recovering from a hernia, the entire shift of nurses would regularly hang-out in my room. We talked about TV and relationships, mostly, but sometimes things got pretty heavy, and I’m not ashamed to admit that sometimes there were tears, both theirs, and mine. 

But I don’t want to give you a resume of my popularity (declined being Head Boy of Lisgar Collegiate two years in a row), I just wanted to provide a little bit of context for my answer. Elizabeth, it’s always been this way for me, so it doesn’t make me feel any way other than the way that I am. How am I, you ask? I am George Fucking Clooney. 

ET

…um, yeah… impressive. 

MM

PS: I liked watching you play the ukulele. 

ET

Thank you. My only regret is not being able to watch myself play. 😉 

But for you, just once, rather than walking into a room and turning all the heads, what if you got to see yourself entering that room, and witness what everyone sees and admires?

MM

Elizabeth: You know, I’ve often thought about that, in fact, at various points in my life I was even very attentive to it. I remember once walking into the Lieutenant’s Pump on a Friday or Saturday night with a bunch of friends, and in our company was an unusually beautiful woman. She was the sister of a friend, and we all knew her, and so even though we were perfectly aware of her beauty, she was just Leslie, who we had once known as a kid. 

However, the attitude in the bar completely changed upon her arrival, and all eyes–both male and female–were immediately trained upon her. Men came in waves to our table, each one trotting out their best lines, and I was utterly stunned. I had never seen anything like that in my life, and as this was taking place it dawned on me that this was all she knew. This was her life. People always looked at her and approached her. That was the way the world was. 

Ever since, I’ve had a weird kind of sympathy for the sort of entitled narcissism we sometimes see in the beautiful. They have always been the center of attention, and they’ve never known anything different. I mean, such a thing must corrupt you, and must make the journey to becoming a decent person, all that much more challenging. On a more personal note, when I was sick and then recovering from cancer, I wanted nothing to do with a world that would have recognized me, and by that, I mean my past, where I would see pity or revulsion in the faces of people, where I once saw affection. As a result, I went to an abandoned local pub every night, where I would enter, alone, night after night at the same time. Anti-social, yet polite, I would sit alone at a table reading and writing while sipping scotch. At a certain point, I realized that I had become a curiosity and that the eyes of the bar were often upon me. Who is he? What is he doing? Why does he always sit alone? I, still trying to become healthy, still trying to become a writer, to find love in this world, kind of enjoyed the validation I found in their curiosity, realizing that when they saw me, they didn’t see a person who had been afflicted by illness and uncertainty, but as a kind of end point. You just never know how people feel on the inside. 

I’m lucky, one of the luckiest people on the planet, I think. I grew up in a nice area full of tons of boys–good, loved kids– my own age, and we all became best friends. We traveled through primary school, junior high, high school and university together–pretty much as the cool kids– and as a result, I’ve never suffered the typical social insecurities that accompany growing up (many others, yes, but not that). As such, when moving through the world, I’ve always expected to like people, and for people to like me, and at a certain point I realized that whatever imprint I had on earth (and I thought long and hard on this matter while sick with cancer) was that I wanted to generate light in this world rather than consume it. 

Michael Murray