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“Wasn’t that something?” his father says. “Boy oh boy, that coach is never going to live that one down. You know, Wayne has never said a word to me about it.”

More skittering, with the sunroom crammed with family photographs — there is Wayne on his wedding day, with Janet Jones on his arm — as the destination. “Sit down, sit down and get comfortable,” says Walter, gesturing at the oversized leather furniture the hockey star bought for his folks after Phyllis Gretzky was diagnosed with the lung cancer that eventually took her life in 2005.

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Walter pauses, just then, stops moving and considers a question, about all the hard knocks he has had in his life: losing the hearing in his right ear in a workplace accident; losing the bulk of his memories from 1970 to the 1990s because of a brain aneurysm; losing his wife to cancer and now, another cruel blow, a formal diagnosis this month that the tremors in his left hand is Parkinson’s disease.

“You can see it shaking,” Walter says, holding his arms straight out from his body and watching as the fingers on his left hand trace circles; a constant, involuntary dance.

“I don’t even think about it,” he says. “I feel blessed, truly blessed, because everything is special to me, because I know what it’s like not to have something.

“Time for me from the early 1970s until about the year 2000 doesn’t exist anymore. I remember some things, in flashes, but much of it I don’t.”

Meet Walter Gretzky for the first time one day and he probably won’t remember you the next. Ask him to tell you what he did yesterday morning, and he can’t. Listen to him tell you a joke about the parade in Toronto in two weeks time — to practice just in case the Leafs ever make the playoffs — and he might tell you the same joke again 15 minutes later.