The other day Jones and I left the apartment and began walking up the street.

Almost immediately, as if they had been waiting for us, as if somebody had shouted, “GO!” when we came into view, the garbage trucks rounded the corner and started their noisy procession down the block. These massive green vehicles appeared like some renegade parade, and my five year-old boy was very nearly glowing with excitement.

Yet more proof of magic in this world.

These beasts had hydraulics on either flank, suggesting a capacity for robotics and multiple transformations. And the hunger inside!! The incredible, masticating jaws at the back of each truck, crunching and chewing through every thing they came in contact with! And the mysterious men who fed them! Lean, athletic, weathered, they hung off the vehicles, often by one arm, as if defiantly hitching a free ride to some forbidden place. And then jumping like Spidermen from their perches to the pavement below, breaking every safety rule your parents had ever taught you– was simultaneously heroic and scary. Jones shone with admiration as he watched.

This, a small, beautiful respite from the Covid shelter-in-place that had once again been imposed. The case numbers, once again, as high as they had ever been in Toronto.

One of the sanitation workers looked just like Jesus.

He really did.

We’d seen him before.

Bearded in the appropriate Jesus-style, he had waist-length brown hair and was about the same age as the deity. His eyes were always hidden behind wraparound sunglasses, and his facial expression never changed, thus giving him an attitude of solemnity. On this day, as he swayed off the back of the truck he was holding onto, he seemed to be watching us. After ferrying the trash cans back and forth for a bit, he nodded at us and then approached. He held a small, foam toy of a garbage truck which he wordlessly showed to Jones, who desperately wanted it, and then to me.

A moment passed.

He knew what I was thinking.

“We keep them in the glove compartment, to give to the kids,” he said.

And then he just looked at me, waiting.

Jones, also looking at me, waiting.

Suddenly, everything in this moment so complex.

This mask-less garbage man, he finds a man on oxygen and his young son on a beautiful afternoon in the midst of a pandemic and gives them an offering.

What of his unknown life?

The needs that drive it, the absences that may one day undo it?

The totalizing culture of fear we now live under, the isolation it nourishes within. Jones and I masked-up in our nice neighbourhood, protected. All our filth and contagions spirited away by men like this one who stood implacably before us. And each night, as if praying to some God of material comforts, we receive Amazon-delivered bounty the very next day.

But it’s not like a prayer answered, not at all, in fact.

And in this moment I am thinking about a million things at once. How if in trying to protect us from the unseen threat of the virus, I am sheltering my son, myself, even this stranger, from the kindness that exists in the world? Was this moment before us actually the Providence we sought?

This man with the face of God, as unreadable as stone, neither moved nor uttered a sound, he just watched as I wrestled with my mortal concerns.