Free Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox

her husband Jake. The camera pulls back and we see that they're all grouped loosely around an overstuffed sofa upon which sits Nana, sipping from a beer mug that dwarfs her tiny hands. She lowers it, revealing a small wisp of foam painting her upper lip. She says something now, perhaps to herself, but more likely in response to a remark from off-camera.
    There's no sound of course, so I have no idea what exactly the group has been laughing and gossiping about. But I do have personal knowledge of one frequent topic of conversation at many of these family gabfests: me.
    Still tiny and decidedly hyper compared to the other kids in the family, I was considered something of an oddity. My parents would often share the latest twists and turns in the strange saga of their youngest son: a doctor's recommendation that I be administered growth hormone, a teacher's insistence that, as good as my grades were, my overwhelming appetite for stimulation needed to be tamped with a course of whatever the equivalent of Ritalin was in those days. (Dad nixed both suggestions.) Since the aptitude I demonstrated was for the arts, it was hard for anyone to imagine me holding a real paying job.
    â€œYou weren't going to be a laborer,” my mother explains. “You weren't going to be a union guy. That wouldn't have suited your personality, never mind your physique. You were the dreamer and the artistic type. I mean, years later I see that, but at the time, I can't honestly say that I did because it was just something that had never been in either side of our family.”
    And so there was much chin-rubbing and worried conjecture about what would become of me. This is when Nana would always chime in.
    â€œDon't you ever worry about Michael,” she'd intone with a calming certainty. “He's going to be fine. He's going to do things you can't even imagine. And he'll probably be very famous one day.”
    And then with a smile, and no doubt a twinkle in her eye, she'd add, “And when he is, everyone will know him as Michael.”
    In most circumstances, this would be written off as the indulgence of a doting grandmother, but you have to remember Nana's position in our family. It was accepted, after all, that Nana was something of a psychic. She'd had The Dream. She'd come down the stairs that morning in Ladner thirty years earlier and announced that Stuart was alive. So, if Nana said it, who were they to argue? I mean, if they woke up in the morning and the sun was shining and Nana said “rain,” believe me, they'd all spend the day packing umbrellas. Unlikely as it seemed to everyone else, maybe Bill and Phyl's boy Mike— Michael — was going to be okay after all.
    SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER
    Burnaby, British Columbia—1972–1979
    August 22, 1972: I was in the pool when I heard the sirens. My folks were both at work; Dad as a police dispatcher in Ladner (his postretirement job) and Mom as a payroll clerk in a cold storage plant on the waterfront, so the summer day was like a blank check that I could fill in however I wanted. I might have gone to the movies, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes for the second or third time, then headed down to the lake on my new bike with its sleek banana seat and high-rise handlebars. It was a scorcher though, so I opted for the unheated waters of the swimming pool. Maybe I'd go over to Nana's later, I thought, scrounge some lunch.
    It was around noon the sirens started; I remember being unsettled by the sound. I climbed out of the pool, grabbed my towel, pushed through the gate in the chain-link fence enclosure, and climbed the stairs to our second-floor apartment.
    I barely had time to dry off and dress before the phone rang. Mom said she was leaving work early. Nana had had a heart attack.
    Nana was the first real person I knew to die—not an actor or an American politician, but someone whom I loved, whose voice, touch, and laughter were as familiar as my own. Of my father's