Will You Go to the Bank with Me?

Mr. Stevens, an elderly man who stands a head shorter than me, is helping me to cross the street.

“It's safer to cross here,” he says, placing his hand gently on my elbow. “You have to be careful when there's construction.” I follow his lead as he steers us across an empty portion of the street just before it turns into a busy intersection, a visual confusion of traffic cones, temporary road markings, and piles of tarmac and gravel. I do not look left or right for oncoming traffic, my body implicitly trusting his judgment, his hand a reassuring pressure upon my arm.

Under the overcast, late-morning sky, we reach the other side. Mr. Stevens lets go of my arm. We walk side by side toward the entrance of the bank. Earlier this morning, Mr. Stevens had asked me to accompany him there. The automatic doors, sensing our approach, slide open in a single swift motion. He goes to stand in front of an automated banking machine. “I need to find my card,” he says, reaching into his front, then back pockets. “I think I've lost it. There might be a hole…”

I wait, standing several steps behind, as Mr. Stevens inserts a card into the machine and begins pressing upon the screen. I notice two brown-red spots on the back of his blue-striped shirt just above where it is tucked into the waistband of his dark blue jeans.

My feet wide, my shoulders pushed back, I feel protective of him. I am standing guard.

2

During the months I spent immersed in the inpatient psychiatry ward as an ethnographer, I often stood at the periphery of hallways and rooms, watching the staff and patients live and work at a rhythm shaped by the ebb and flow of symptoms, the application of therapies and medications, the pressure of administrative needs, and, weaving through it all, the pace of human life and conversation.

In the day room, a tall, African-Canadian man is talking to two Asian-Canadian women. Standing, they look intently at the yellow plastic patient identificatio