Continuing Warren Kinsella's theme for today, I got thinking about what I was doing 20 years ago today.

Before continuing reading this post, please get the song "Mad World" by Gary Jules into your head, as the background music to this post. To help jar your memory, it begins "All around me are familiar faces..."

It's strange how important events can magnify our memories of what we were doing when...., for instance many people remember what they were doing when they learned JFK was shot or when the Challenger exploded.

For me, it was a strange period in my life 20 years ago. On August 10, 1984, i was in a bad accident and left paralyzed (only for a few weeks), and spent the rest of the year in hospitals. On September 4, 1984, I was a patient in Toronto at the OCCC (Ontario Crippled Children's Centre), later known as the Hugh MacMillan Medical Centre, and now the Bloorview MacMillan Centre or something similar. I was 16 years old, and sitting in the common room, having taken over control of the television so I could watch the CBC election night coverage. I was a strange 16 year old I guess.

Anyway, all around me were children with diseases like Spina Bifida, MS, missing limbs, and other ailments. So far as I know, I am the only person to have ever been a patient in that hospital and make a complete recovery to live as a normal adult. I know I'm getting off-track here a bit but sometimes it's amazing how easily children can learn to cope with new situations. My first day in that hospital I sat with my mom having lunch, looking around me at other kids drooling all over themselves, and thinking "is this my life now?". Within a month I had made friends, figured out how to break into the research wing of the hospital on weekends (and send the elevator down so all my pals in wheelchairs could come up to that floor too and join me in my explorations of that forbidden zone), and I had also started dating a girl my age who was gorgeous with a great body, except was born missing legs below knees and no hands.

Years later, now I've moved to Toronto and have been living here for 5 years, and it makes me a bit sad that I have no way to contact any of the kids I was friends with way back then. I'd really love to see some of them again, including Mike something, a hilarious comic, standing all of 2 feet 9 inches.

But back to my story. On Aug 12, 1984, Brian Mulroney was scheduled to make a campaign stop near my home, and I had been looking forward to that, but of course 2 days before that date was when I had my accident. So this Tiny Tory was pretty happy on Sept 4, 1984, when CBC's election results over the night were so completely favourable to my party (I think it was 211 seats we won that night). I was so excited I even managed to ignore the teenage boy in front of me with some brain problem, stretched out and drooling on a gurney, wearing a cast that covered the entire lower half of his body, and who had somehow figured out how to get his hand into the cast and who was quite obviously masturbating and making some loud grunting sounds while he did it.

I remember being thrilled when I saw my own name splashed across the screen, as a candidate named Michael Wilson won his Toronto-area seat. I was in the nurses' station later the next day, the same day Warren Kinsella started law school. I was discussing the election results, and I made a comment that now that I (meaning Mike Wilson) had been elected, maybe I would become Finance Minister and give all the nurses a raise. I was half right anyway.