I’ve had a few days now to think about Taral’s passing. It’s still kind of hard to make it real. Not for the reason you’d expect—that he was always around and now he’s gone—but essentially the opposite. I saw so little of him in the past several years that his being gone is still pretty much just a conceptual thing. I guess that’s just how it’s going to be for me.

It’s not that it doesn’t sadden me. It sure does. ‘Unique’ is an overused word… it needs to be held in reserve for moments like this. Taral really was unique in my experience. He really wasn’t like anyone else I’ve ever known. That the option to tap him here on FurAffinity, ask if he’s available on an upcoming Saturday and get myself down to Parkdale is now gone forever is finally really beginning to settle in. That comfortable forever-mañana, no longer a tomorrow, has become the forever-yesterday. I wish now that I’d availed myself of it at least a little more often.

So why didn’t I? I had a long absence from Taral that ended not quite ten years ago, and at that point I began seeing him not exactly regularly, but often enough. Five or six times a year, anyway. Getting to his neighbourhood and trying to park there was kind of a chore, and he was rarely up and functional before two in the afternoon. More than half the day was effectively shot by the time the visit was just starting. Given his circumstances for most of the time I knew him, the onus was definitely on you to make the effort and visit him. Crossing the continent on a plane to go to a con he’d do at the drop of a hat. Crossing the city on a bus to hang at your place for the day? Not so much. At least not in my experience. So the day I was down there and knocking on his door and phoning from the hall and getting no response for most of half an hour, when he’d known I was coming, was kind of the last straw… though not that I thought so at the time; it just turned out that way. I never again could quite muster the urge to plow through traffic for an hour only to risk being stood up at the three-yard line. I wish I had. But I didn’t. Given that I’m told that that same lack of response was what prompted his unfortunate discovery for another, far better friend of his than me, I find myself now ashamed that, at the time, the idea he might have been in trouble rather than just sleeping through an appointment with me didn’t occur to me. It’s a good thing he never had to count on me.

There’s also the aspect that, quite frankly, I found it hard to see him the way he’d become. It was pity… I never told him that; I don’t think he would have wanted it; but it’s true just the same. When I first met him—he seemed old to me at the time, yet he was considerably younger then than I am now—he was, sure, heavy (look who’s talking), but he was robust, impressively full of energy, charging around and in love with long walks. His predilection for not taking public transit wasn’t down to meanness or anything—though he was picky about how he spent his money—but genuinely did come down to his opinion that why should you ride anyplace that was within comfortable walking distance? And for him, back then, that was upwards of two or three miles both ways. But by the time I was back seeing him again, he wasn’t like that anymore. The intervening years had taken a real toll on his health, and by then it was taxing on him just getting around the tiny one-bedroom apartment he occupied for roughly 35 years. Gone were the brisk walks around Parkdale with their running commentaries on history and societal observations. He had a motorized chair scooter he dubbed “Travelling Matt” after the eponymous Fraggle character. He was harder of hearing than before and his dental problems, already an issue when I met him in his early 40s, by then were abysmal. He got around—he insisted on it—but it sure wasn’t easy or anything like as enjoyable for him. Or, I confess, for me. In spite of that, he didn’t wallow in self-pity; he cursed the darkness a lot but he also lit all the candles against it he manageably could. He didn’t seek pity but he was glad to accept a leg-up. He was never a martyr; he was always practical about his limitations, be they circumstantial, financial, or physical. But still, it was hard for me to see him reduced to that, and one more reason to hedge on hooking up.

That said, I don’t remember him ever inviting me to swing by, either; at least not in recent years, so the fault’s not all on one side. Rather, we corresponded through notes on FurAffinity or email. It wasn’t often, but frequent enough that there was a sense of a long, protracted conversation that could easily be picked up whenever one or the other of us found something worth saying. So I guess that’s something, at least.

I guess that’s enough of confession and excuse-making for now. Let me tell you about the man I knew. These are, please remember, my own personal recollections and impressions… they’re subjective and by no means meant to be definitive. Taral was a complicated person, like anyone else, and he touched everyone who knew him in his own unique way (there’s that word again). So, here goes.

Despite living in more or less the same city, I knew Taral first more by reputation than actual acquaintance. The owner of the suburban comic store I frequented knew my tastes and one weekend I found in my box a small hand-produced fanzine; a few sheets of 8½”x11” paper photocopied, stapled together in the middle and folded over. It was unlike anything I’d seen before; it purported to be an interview with Rocky the Flying Squirrel—or rather, the rodent actress who played him, “Jasmine”. The author, also the artist, had taken a simple childish cartoon character and imbued him, now “her”, with an interesting, well-rounded life, very faintly nodding to June Foray. I was enchanted, impressed with both the art and the writing. The creator was one “Taral Wayne”. With a name like that, I assumed he was some young man of perhaps mixed English and Arab heritage.

Several years passed before I found out any different. As I came into the fandom back in those primitive days just prior to the dawn of the internet, I began to encounter more and more of his work. I remember being in touch with a Georgian artist who really had it in for Taral, and to curry favour with him, a friend and I did a parody of Plush—a fanzine of Taral’s that the Georgian guy sent to us—that we called Flush. Not long after that, Taral reached out to me personally with greetings and extending an invitation to a fan get-together at his home. I made the journey with some trepidation, half-expecting a public dressing down… not to mention the fact that his address made it obvious he lived on the 21st floor of some building. But, of course, it all went well, and if Taral ever saw Flush, he was far too big and sanguine a personality to be bothered by it. The buzzing of gnats to a moose.

What I encountered was not a young artist, but a seasoned middle aged one. There was nothing of the Middle East about the man, self-titled “Taral”; he was in fact of a thoroughly Scottish background with the given name Wayne and the family name Macdonald; a name I heard him use in reference to himself in the thirty years I knew him probably less than a dozen times. He wasn’t ashamed of it so much as he outgrew it. It was the name of his father… a far lesser man who let down his family in general and his son in particular in nearly every way that wouldn’t actually result in prison time. I never got the impression that Taral hated the old man; he simply took him as an object lesson of the sort of person he didn’t intend to be. And if Taral was never well-off or lived as large as he would have liked, it was due to the shots he called, and called with his eyes wide open. He might have lamented his circumstances but I don’t think he would ever have changed any of the major decisions he made in, and about, his life. That was something I genuinely admired about him.

He was quite open to me about his younger days, even when we were first acquainted. I once made an off-colour joke to him that resulted in him blithely mentioning he was still a virgin; to him, it wasn’t embarrassing, it was simply a fact and one he felt entirely fine with disclosing to a relatively new friend. I was always impressed with his candor. He had a way of stating things plainly that, even when they were less than complimentary, never felt petty or cutting. He was just calling it as he saw it, without venom or rancor or, on the other hand, false flattery or obsequiousness. When Taral paid you a compliment… which in my own experience was pretty rare… it really meant something. You tended to remember it.

But the days of his youth were days of extreme financial and residential insecurity. Taral’s family moved around a lot, often to stay ahead of creditors. In the city, out of the city; into the countryside that fueled his imagination. An open field in a neighbouring town, long since vanished beneath a subdivision, became the site where, circa 1970, his imaginary alter-ego/significant other, Saara Mar, first landed when she “discovered” Earth from the Kjola perspective. I recall him once taking me past a veterinary clinic on Bloor Street near Islington Avenue where his family both lived and worked in the late 60s, when it was still kind of the boonies. It was situated on the very banks of the Humber River, and as a teenager Taral spent the late summer night-till-mornings exploring the river and its tributaries, wearing perforce very little or nothing at all, experiencing the water, the soil, the rocks, the mud, the vegetation. There’s more than a little of the romance of those moments of total freedom reflected in themes he returned to again and again in his art; things that resonated with me. I envied him that; the places and the times he lived in when he was young.

Though, as I’ve said, not the circumstances. As I recall, it was in that same place and time that he more or less abandoned public education. It wasn’t that he couldn’t keep up; far from it. He found it boring and a waste of time. They were loading him with pedantic busywork that was intellectually far beneath him, and so he simply quit. Some years ago I heard the word “autodidact” in the Tragically Hip song “It Can’t Be Nashville Every Night”, and I was driven to look it up. I discovered it means someone who’s self-taught, particularly on academic matters. Before I ever closed the dictionary I was thinking of Taral. It was exactly the right word. Taral’s skills, Taral’s knowledge, Taral’s concerns and grasp of the world… they were largely his own discoveries, or even his own inventions. Probably more than anyone else I’ve ever known, Taral Wayne shaped himself… right down to the name he adopted.

Taral’s father was not only unreliable—financially and maritally—he tended to be belligerent when he was drinking. One evening when Taral was about 20 his father was being abusive towards his mother and he finally popped the old man and laid down the law. Things changed after that. His father drifted away, but his mother and sisters never resented Taral for it. It was overdue in everyone’s minds… God knows, maybe even his father’s. Taral did see him every now and again for many years afterward, but eventually lost track of him. He casually wondered about the old man to me from time to time; what he might be up to; was he even still alive.

But his father abandoning the family saw them move to assisted housing in Willowdale where Taral lived for about a decade. It was there his career as an artist took flight, including things like creating that Rocky interview that first brought him to my attention. As time went by his sisters married and moved out, leaving Taral alone with their mom. When she passed away, the city decided the place was too big to justify just one person living in it, so they moved him out of it and into the one-person apartment down in Parkdale that, as it turned out, he was to live in for the rest of his life. He’d only been there a few years when I first met him.

Taral was interested in me as a young local artist. I was flunking out of animation school at the time and ended up with spotty employment in the industry, but the hobby work I was doing attracted enough of his attention for him to call me down to where he held court for us all and bring me into the fold. He largely lost interest in what I did after a while, which I admit has always bothered me. Like him, I put a lot of work and a lot of time into world-building, and I was proud of what I came up with. I wrote long stories about characters I cared for passionately and I put a lot of effort into my art. Can I be brave and honest enough to admit I desired his praise and attention and was resentful that he withheld it from me and lavished it on artists who—by my estimation—put far less of themselves into what they actually did, and yet lit Taral up and garnered his attention and correspondence and collaboration. There’s no accounting for taste; I just wasn’t quite his. I was a peer, I suppose, but not an illustrious one. So when he loudly complained, as he was occasionally prone to do, that he deserved better from the Hugo awarding committee than to perennially lose out to the latest popular flash-in-the-pan fan artist, let me just say that in a different context I understood just exactly how he felt, and I indulged myself in a little quiet schadenfreude every time. But that’s just between us, wink wink.

For myself, I was always fascinated with the world he created, even if that fascination was never reciprocal. He called it Willow Run: an alternate Earth with a rather different history, geography, and a vast array of non-human sapient beings living peacefully, even romantically, beside and among us. He had maps; towns, countries, landscapes with interesting little wonders hinting at adventures that simply couldn’t be had in our own mundane world. He had characters of all different species that he made up, from godlike Kjola down to humble house gamins. He spent hours designing the houses he imagined suitable for his real-world friends to inhabit in this world of his imagination. The one he cooked up for me was the upper floor of an old house, a walk-up apartment with several cozy rooms that was situated above a storefront on the main drag, if memory serves. That was quite a gift. If he didn’t care much for the imaginary world that I inhabited, at least he thought enough of me to make a place for me in the midst of his.

What frustrated me about it was that, having created this vast canvas upon which to work, he did practically nothing with it. One of his biggest frustrations expressed to me was how little regard the world gave him as a writer. I spent quite a bit of time trying to gently needle him into taking this magnificent vehicle he’d created, all chrome and fins and molded accents, out on the road. But having built it, he never seemed to be able to think of where to take it. He’d never risk denting its perfection by taking a journey in it. It just stayed parked in his files, in his sketches, in his head, and went nowhere. And now it never will.

Instead, a great deal of his creative efforts went into franchises created by other people, which always astonished and bewildered me. Strong female characters—particularly cute ones—held a special fascination for him, and early into our acquaintance, the Power Puff Girls became the locus of his muse. He drew them. Plotted stories about them. Lived them beyond their world all the way into his; he had a penchant for mashups that I just never shared… for me, a worldset is a worldset, each hermetically sealed and self-contained, and never the twain shall meet. Not him. His Saara Mar was just as likely to wind up on an adventure with Scrooge McDuck on the moon, the two of them flanked by Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles, as she was to be with his own Tangel or Petl back in Willow Run. After that, Sawyer from Cats Don’t Dance caught his eye and was drafted into his efforts for a time. In recent years, he largely immersed himself in the world of Fraggle Rock, writing himself into the scenario in the thinly-veiled self-insert of Darl, the human-cum-Fraggle paramour of Kiki who, I gather, slowly goes native under her guidance even as he exposes her to the wonders we’ve wrought in “Outer Space”. He shared these stories with me, among scores of other people, and seemed forever disappointed and frustrated by the lack of response and engagement they inspired. I can only speak for myself, but… Fraggles? First of all, it’s somebody else’s world, and one that was largely explored, mapped out, and mined out when I was still in high school. Try as I might (at least initially), I found it hard to invest much time or interest in what was, in truth, Taral writing about an idealized version of himself engaging with stock characters (the Adventurous One, the Impulsive One, the Pessimistic One, the Nurturing One, etc., etc.) from 30 or 40 years ago in a world that, even back then, I found a little claustrophobic in terms of scope and potential. I kept waiting for him to get bored with it and maybe, finally, start building something with all that timber he created almost as long ago in the form of Willow Run. But he never got tired of the Fraggles, and in the end, that’s the creative home he moved into and lived in for the last decade or so of his life. What can I say? It made him happy. I only wish the wonders he genuinely created in and of himself had given him as much joy and provided as much inspiration. It’s selfish, I know, but I would have enjoyed that. I would have adored it.

Oh, well. If he was a little impenetrable in terms of why folks weren’t enraptured with his work in the world of Fraggle Rock, I have to give him credit for the depth of his perception when it came to the great sweeping arc of the real world. There are a few observations of his that bare mentioning here, I think. For instance, I remember long ago discussing Quebec separatism with him. I was of the opinion that was an open sore that would never heal: a significant fraction of each new generation would take up the cause and it would start all over again every 10 or 15 years or so. But Taral said no; he saw it as largely a spent force—that it had achieved much of what it set out to do, that Quebec had acquired a large degree of autonomy and secured its language and culture within Canada, and that younger Quebecois would largely think of it as a fait accompli and see themselves as having the best of both worlds: ‘a free Quebec within a united Canada’, as the joke used to go. Why gamble all that just to get a flag on a table at the UN? And from the looks of the last 30 years or so, he seems to have been right. Later, when I said the US was going to just walk into Iraq, get what it wanted, and be done with the place in six months, he told me he saw the thing as a quagmire that would eat up American lives, American money, and American resources both political and materiel, and that it would be so for years, a lot like Vietnam… all to no great success. And, again, he turned out to be right. More recently he told me that the future he saw for the United States wasn’t one of open and official split, right and left, urban and rural, into two actual separate countries… that the US was just too big, too entrenched in the mind, and too useful a ‘tool’ to dismantle. Rather, he said, states would simply increasingly go their own way, ignoring the federal government whenever and wherever they could, forming internal alliances and seeking their own understanding and engagement with the outside world insofar as they were able. And in recent years, it really has started to look like that. Liberal states kept legalizing pot, no matter what Washington said. Conservative states kept cooking up new approaches to ban abortion and insist Christianity back into the schools and other aspects of public life. Right now there’s increasing pushback… maybe the last gasp of trying to, in Lincoln’s words, make the place “all one thing, or all the other”. It might succeed. Or the fever might break, sort of the way it did in Canada with regard to Quebec, with a blasé live-and-let-live shrug of disengagement. Time will tell, but I’ve been impressed that he called that shot and to a large extent, that’s what I’ve seen. What I mean is, that’s a pretty good batting average for a high school dropout who never went to college, only read and observed and thought. I’ve always lamented the professor and best-selling visionary he might have been if he’d had the ambition and the perspicacity to jump through the hoops society demands of those who get there. I really think he could have made it. He was that caliber.

So four thousand words later, how do I sum this up? If you’re still with me, what should I leave you with? What’s the thing I’m really going to remember about Taral? The wit, the intelligence, the talent? The self-assured, uncompromising probable-genius who spent his life buying up the treasures of a childhood he yearned for but never had? A solitary man who leaves behind scores of friends who’ll miss him and cherish his art for years to come? All of that was, and remains, enviable. Not one person in ten thousand can lay claim to that. But finally, it’s not those things that touch me the most, the deepest.

One of the last times I saw him, Taral and I went out to an Indian restaurant in his neighbourhood we both enjoyed. My treat, of course, despite the government benefits of his “retirement” kicking in to the point that he took up a hobby of collecting Roman coins, some of them gold. Like I said, he was picky about how he spent his money (not yours, though). As we ate, Taral did most of the talking, as usual, and the conversation, if I can call it that, turned to the reminiscences of his youth, a subject I’ve always enjoyed and was happy enough to indulge him in. He took us back to a time when he was old enough to be perceptive and responsible, but still young enough to be denied any real say in things or effective agency to act. The family was living somewhere rural again, happily looking after a large array of pets… cats and dogs, needful strays and trusting hearts. Then once again, circumstances reared their ugly heads and compelled the Macdonalds to pack up and move on. The notion of the pets coming with them was, of course, out of the question. One of the last acts of his father on that occasion was to have all the pets gathered up and euthanized. Taral related all this to me in that matter-of-fact businessman’s baritone of his.

Now, Taral was not really a person I would have said wore his emotions on his sleeve. Sure, he could get bold and even animated making a point or ridiculing the absurdity of some person or situation, but maudlin and sentimental he was not. So when his storytelling abruptly stopped and he set down his fork, I took notice. I watched in amazement as his eyes misted up, and he glanced away, and for ten, maybe fifteen terrible, beautiful seconds, I held my tongue as this man, this archetype of self-possession and actualization, became again the storm-tossed boy in that little family lifeboat, captained by a profligate drunk; powerless to prevent a monstrous act of heartless disregard masquerading as compassion. It was that moment, and heaven knows how many others like it, that made the man sitting across from me… now just a memory himself. A man who took for himself the power to say who he was, what would matter to him, what he would and would not do, and what his life would be, all to the best of his abilities and the limits of his resources. And some of us, we got to know him, and even call him friend.

Unique. That’s the word.