What is a Wonderwall?

Wonderwall:  A barrier which separates the mundane from the Transcendent Reality. A true Wonderwall will always have a crack, or a slit or an opening which allows anyone a glimpse of what lies beyond the Wonderwall.

Suspend any disbelief you may have for a moment and consider a wonderwall to be a glimpse into the present on another plane, or maybe a parallel universe, or some such hocus pocus. Was there a wonderwall, invisible and elusive with its hairline crack on Bloor Street in the Yorkville area of Toronto, when Darcy Sheppard and Michael Bryant collided on August 31, 2009? Had there been would either man have acted differently?  Probably not so with Sheppard, who was quite intoxicated and irate for God only knows what reason.  Bryant however, with so much more to lose than Sheppard ,would have chosen a different path, setting in motion a different set of events that night.

I would believe that much more readily if only Bryant wasn’t working with Penguin Publishing to release 28 Seconds, his account of that fateful summer night. Whatever he has received in the way of an advance on royalties hasn’t been released but you can be certain it’s a tidy nest-egg.  Bryan claims he is going to donate a “portion” of the book sales to the Pine River Foundation, an adolescent mental health and substance abuse clinic. What percentage of those profits, he hasn’t said.

 It seemed as though the Wonderwall was well sealed on that evening; even Sheppard’s former girlfriend attested to the fact that her late boyfriend “had been drinking heavily earlier that evening“. Perhaps she was offered a “monetary incentive” to accuse the late father of her child to substantiate Bryant.  Et tu, Brute?
Soon after the “incident”, as the papers described it, the public was duly informed about Sheppard’s unfortunate profile: 33, the father of 4 children;  born into a low-income Métis family in Alberta,; at 5  adopted by another family then returned to the adoption agency and foster system at 10; criminal records for both his juvenile and adult histories, and (gasp) substance abuse addictions. Certainly the villain in this scenario had to be Sheppard?

Publishing Director Diane Turbide claims Bryant ”has never lost sight of the fact that a man died.”

In hindsight, perhaps, alas, without foresight.

Where is that Wonderwall when you need it?

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