MUSEUM: A SHORT STORY

He didn't know what made him think of it, but that morning he was recalling a moment 38 years prior, give or take a year, while he was in exile in Canada over his resistance to the Vietnam War.  He was standing across the street from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, after having weaved his way through side streets from his apartment over on Huntley Street.

He was going to the ROM as a reminder of his education.  He had intellectual interests, in other words, despite working as a stagehand now in television, not an intellectual activity.  As he stood there in the snow across from the museum, he asked himself whatever would become of him.

When he escaped from his unjust conviction for refusing the draft, it seemed he had lost everything he had ever been.  He was adrift.  Would he now be a stagehand, nothing against stagehands, for the rest of his life, living in a modest apartment that he could not afford really, on Huntley Street?

It was because he could not imagine himself now as anything other than a stagehand, at least not for a long time, not until he recovered psychologically from his exile, that he was headed to the ROM, that stimulation.

As it happened, he never did make it to that museum just across the street.  He is still standing there, wondering whatever will become of him, even though he now knows.