About

In grade 9, I played basketball for my school team. I was the last guy off the bench, which is a polite way of saying I was furniture. I was about 5'2" until grade 10, so I was basically a pylon. When I did get in, it was for three minutes of garbage time, and that was about it.

After the first few games, I stopped telling my grandpa when they were. I genuinely thought I was doing him a favour. Why would a grown man drive across town to watch his grandson sit on the bench? He found out from my dad, and he was genuinely upset with me. Not upset that I wasn't playing. Upset that I stopped inviting him. He didn't care whether I got in, he just wanted to be in the gym.

This is a man who drove an hour, for a 7 a.m. soccer game, in freezing rain, to watch a team of seven year olds, and stood on the sideline with an umbrella, smiling from ear to ear like it was the World Cup. It was not the World Cup. Several of the players were facing the wrong way. I'm a grown adult now, and he still comes to my games. He comes to my shows. He always wants to know what I've got going on, and he asks with the energy of a man who has never once found me boring, which is an incredibly generous position to hold.

A few years back he had prostate cancer. They caught it early, he had it removed, and he's been good since. That's the whole reason this exists.

Part of it was also wanting an excuse to grow a moustache, which for most of my life I simply could not do. I tried. What I produced was less a moustache and more a rumour. Now it's my favourite project every year, and I think it's his favourite too.