The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  I say he when actually I know one thing about this ant. He, it turns out, is a she.

  I have been reading up on ants and have learned they are almost always shes. If there is work to be done, it turns out, women do the work in the world of ants. The men are there for the purpose of procreation and then they take off.

  Anyway, as I said, if she is working, I am not sure exactly what she is working at.

  There was a time when I might have known this. If this was a Victorian January for instance, I probably would have known this. Victorians are renowned for their knowledge of the natural world. They would talk about these things at dinner parties: about their latest birdwatching trip, or their collections of curiosities, feathers and eggs, whatever. It was part of the Victorian tradition to study and observe nature. We don’t do that so much anymore.

  I think 2008 was the year when, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities than they did in the countryside. We city folk are more intent on poisoning ants than observing them.

  Little surprise then that most biologists agree that we are in the middle of the Sixth Great Extinction. There have been five already, according to our understanding of fossils. The last one was the extinction that took out the dinosaurs, and a lot of other things as well.

  And while you get the feeling there will be ants around long after ... well, long after any of us are worrying about ants, and that ants probably don’t need anyone’s help, least of all mine, it did occur to me that the ants in my bathroom might be looking for a hand. It might not be the best time of the year for them to be up and about, and maybe they have been marching around my bathroom looking for something to eat. Scavenging is what the biologists would call it. So I got a little honey and mixed it with water and put out the honey water on the counter beside a small piece of tuna, and I sat down to see what would happen. And lo and behold, within ten minutes, my solitary ant had been joined by five of her sisters. They drank the honey water, but they seemed to like the tuna best.

  And you don’t have to write me, telling me that it is a crazy thing to do, to feed ants. It may be crazy but no crazier than a lot of things I do. As far as I can see, these ants mean no harm to me. And I don’t mind sharing the odd teaspoon of protein. There is enough for all of us in my house. So I have kept feeding them, and I have been watching them, and I have almost figured out where they come from. I suspect that if I keep watching, and even follow along, there is no telling where they might lead me.

  23 January 2010

  KEEPSAKES

  I have a small wooden bowl on my bedroom bureau. It is made of Norway pine. My uncle Hugh turned the bowl in his workshop when he lived on Flinders Island, off the southeast coast of Australia. I knew him by reputation only. I met him once, but that was when I was a boy. I know only that he was an architect, and a sailor, and that he lived in Melbourne, Australia, until he retired to Flinders Island, where he made my bowl.

  I keep the bowl on my bureau because it is my connection to him. And through him, in a way I cannot fully explain, to my father’s boyhood, an event that happened in that faraway country and, therefore, an event that has always been far away from me.

  We hold on to these things—photographs, old sweaters, jewellery, small bowls—in the hope that they will whisper a secret password, the door to memory will blow open and we’ll find ourselves alone, with all our little memories lined up and tagged, and stamped, and stickered, just for us.

  Some come to us as birthrights, some as legacies of love. Some of them lead to a notch in our heart so plain that any fool could see it, there like a scratch across a dining room table or paint splashed on the kitchen floor.

  Sometimes they lead us to memories so faint that we don’t even know we have them. Memories that haunt our hearts like watermarks, and we have to hold our hearts up to the light, and get the angle just right, because the memory isn’t really our memory, and we’re not sure how it got there, only that it lingers in our heart, the way smoke lingers in our hair after we have stood close to a fire.

  These are the ciphers of memory, and when we find them we know they are trying to point us to something important, even if we can’t untangle the meaning. All we know is that this thing we are holding is an important thing, and we should cherish and protect it.

  There is a small wooden bowl on my bureau. It is made of Norway pine.

  2 February 2000

  THE SENTIMENTALITY

  OF SUITS

  I was rummaging in a rarely visited corner of my closet when I came across my blue blazer. The moment I saw it, I was overtaken by a compulsion to put it on. I am wearing it now, as I sit writing, a little overdressed for a guy who won’t be leaving the house today: black jeans, a dress shirt and the blazer. Though in a private nod to my casual impulses, I have left the dress shirt untucked.

  I haven’t worn the blazer for at least a decade. There is nothing wrong with it. In fact, as blazers go, it is a nice one: a pure wool Polo blazer, by Ralph Lauren, with a fetching redand-black pinstriped silk lining.

  I bought it when I worked, briefly, in television, which means it is at least twenty-five years old. But it is a classic design and not unstylish all these years later, especially with the jeans and the untucked shirt.

  I have a long history with blazers. As a child, I went to a boys’ school where we all wore them.

  A blue blazer, grey flannel pants and a white shirt and tie is a good look for a boy. Unfortunately, I carried the look with me into adulthood. A grown man in grey flannels and blazer looks like a poetry teacher at an English prep school. It took me a while, but I now understand that this is not a good look for an adult, which is why the blazer was in the back of my closet. My question is, Why have I held on to it? For decades?

  First, I would put forward, because of the sentimental attachment. I have had a blazer in my closet, or thrown over my bedroom chair, pretty much since I was eleven years old. I am not sure what might happen if I didn’t have one. Something bad, probably.

  I own other articles of clothing like this, clothes that I never wear anymore but feel attached to nonetheless. There is a brown corduroy jacket, for instance, that isn’t, but looks just like, the brown corduroy jacket that my first-ever girlfriend, Joanne, made for me. How can I throw it away? It’s a stand-in, yes, but it stands in my closet as a symbol of young love. And speaking of love, there is also the suit I was married in. I bought it, on a Friday night, in between flights, at Brooks Brothers in Boston. Racing to the store from the airport in a taxi, I bought the entire wedding kit in no time flat: a white shirt, a muted tie and the dark blue suit.

  I had tried to buy a wedding suit before I left home. My friend Suanne still tells the story of how I called from a downtown men’s store, stuffed, pathetically, into a sleek Italian suit.

  “Come and tell me if it is all right,” I begged.

  Suanne jumped into a taxi. “Holt Renfrew,” she barked. “It’s an emergency.”

  When she got there, she looked at me and sniggered. “It looks like that suit is wearing you,” she said.

  By the time I hit Boston, I was suit-less and just one flight away from my own wedding. I was desperate, and therefore flushed with both pride and relief when I got the job done.

  Pleased as punch that I had pulled it off, and with time to kill before my plane, I wandered down Clarendon Street and, eventually, into another men’s store, a stylish place called Simon’s, where a flamboyant young salesman took me under his wing, poured me a glass of ouzo and asked me to show him what I had bought. He took one look at the shirt and tie I had chosen and wrinkled his nose.

  “Is this a wedding? Or a funeral?” he asked. “Are you happy about this?”

  It didn’t take much for him to talk me into a happy shirt and an exuberant red tie that I was almost too shy to wear.

  The shirt long ago vanished, and the lining on the tie is gone, and, sadly, I am no longer married, but the suit is still in my closet, hanging there loyally, with the co
nviction I lost. And though, perhaps appropriately, it doesn’t fit me anymore, it is a silent reminder of a great good thing, and it is not going out. Not ever. It has a lifetime membership, and I have packed and unpacked it each time I have moved, with a tinge of melancholy but never regret.

  There are other things like it. A shirt that was once in style but isn’t anymore. I don’t wear it either, but I did to great effect for a while.

  “Look at you,” said a pretty girl one night. “That is a stylish shirt.”

  There is a velvet jacket that I bought from a vintage store, that I could once pull off but wouldn’t try to these days. And other stuff too.

  There is part of me that believes if I threw any of these things out, or dumped them in a Goodwill box, it would be daring the world to turn on me. You think you are too good for that blazer, Mr. Fancy Pants? Well, deal with this then. And there would be a huge economic conflagration, and I would lose my job, and the ability to pay for power and, more importantly, heat, and I would be huddled in my basement freezing. And if I only hadn’t thrown out the blazer, and all those sweaters, at least I wouldn’t be so cold.

  But it is more than that. There is also my apprehension that if I were to throw the blazer out, blazers would immediately come storming back into style. Everyone would be wearing blazers, and I would have to go out and buy another one, and every time I put on my new blazer, I would be consumed by self-loathing for having thrown out the perfectly good one.

  Part of it is crazy, and part of it is utilitarian, but most of it is sentiment. The sentimentality of my suits. My wistful and sad-eyed connection to cloth and to the memories and moments from my past that are worn into the knees and the elbows. The things that were, and the things that could have been. The rips in my sweaters, the holes in my heart.

  3 April 2009

  THE MORNING PAPER

  Newspapers have always been a big part of my life. When I was a boy we subscribed to two. We would read the morning paper at the breakfast table. My dad got the front section. My brother and I fought over sports and comics. If there was time, we traded sections.

  Our second paper came in the afternoon. This was in the 1950s, when there still were afternoon papers. It seems quaint now, like a second mail delivery. We had those too, a service left over from the days when writing a letter was the most efficient way to get a message across town. Catch the morning post for the afternoon delivery. Please come to supper.

  Anyway, our second newspaper arrived, like a dinner guest, just before dinner. And when it did, the family would gather in the living room and read it. My father would sit in the same chair every night and, whisky in hand, offer a mumbled commentary on what he was reading. There were lots of crooks in my father’s paper. He always found plenty of stories to confirm the opinion, which he expressed at night, but never lived by, that the world was full of liars, crooks and cheaters.

  My paper was different. My paper was filled with enticing ads for films I was too young to see, stories about heroic hockey players and want ads with an endless list of things for sale that I was desperate to own. Pets for Sale was my favourite section. I followed Pets for Sale with the intensity with which I follow political affairs today. And of course, the advice columns: Ann Landers in the morning and her more restrained twin sister, Abby, at night.

  At the end of the day, after supper, we would wrap the day up the way we began it, with the newspaper. Every day we used that day’s paper to wrap our garbage. Plastic garbage bags had yet to be invented. So in those days you wrapped your garbage in newspaper and dropped it in your steel garbage cans.

  Garbage was my father’s job. He tackled the garbage after he tackled the dishes, which in retrospect he should get credit for. That was a long time before even Ann Landers was advocating that sort of manly contribution to household affairs.

  The point is that our days were bracketed in newsprint. It came in the front door by morning and went out the back door by night.

  Even when I crawled into bed, I took the newspaper with me. Instead of reading the adventures of the Hardy Boys, like everyone else I knew, I travelled in the world of Ken Holt—the son of a globe-trotting foreign correspondent and a newspaper boy himself. Ken and his buddy Sandy Allen, he of the newspaper-owning Allen family, were my heroes.

  And now, some fifty years later, little has changed. I have managed to find my way to one of the only cities on the continent with one, two, three, four daily newspapers. I subscribe to one, buy the others from time to time, and have a fifth, The Guardian Weekly—a summary of Le Monde, The Washington Post, The Observer and, of course, The Guardian— mailed to me once a week.

  I have lived my life with newsprint.

  I love my work on the radio, but it could have been otherwise. Just out of college, I was offered a job by the feisty and crusading newspaperwoman Margaret “Ma” Murray. I saw her interviewed on television during a political convention, and I was smitten. So when I graduated, I hitchhiked across the country from my home in Montreal to the interior of British Columbia, to the town of Lillooet in the Fraser River Canyon, where Murray ran The Bridge River-Lillooet News. She was in her eighties at the time and had announced her imminent retirement. I went to offer her my services.

  “You don’t want to retire,” I told her. “You want to slow down. If you hire me, we can make it work. Together.”

  Honest to God, I said that.

  She took me home and fed me lunch, and then, wonder of wonders, she offered me a job. Minimum wage, no overtime. I was inexperienced, wet behind the ears and stunned.

  “I have to go home and think about this,” I said.

  She said, “You’ll need some sustenance for the road. I’ll make you a sandwich.” She picked up a chicken breast, bone and all, from the bowl on the table and slammed it between two pieces of bread.

  “Here,” she said, holding it out.

  It was the last time I saw her. I started hitchhiking home and, a few days later, frozen and ignored on the edge of the highway in the middle of a miserable November rainstorm in the middle of British Columbia, I gave up the ghost, left the highway and climbed on a train.

  There was a girl involved. I missed her. When I got home, I was offered another job, and I chickened out on Lillooet.

  And so ended my newspaper career. I have often wondered what might have happened if I had thrown caution to the wind. I know one thing for sure: I would have been one of those reporters who hung around the press room. And by that I don’t mean the news room. I mean around the presses. Twenty years later, when I was a young man married to a different girl and working for the CBC, whenever I got a late-night twitch for news (this was in the years before you could surf the net), I would head down to The Globe and Mail press room on Front Street around midnight and snatch a copy of the next morning’s paper before I went to bed. You can’t do that anymore. Or I can’t. They have moved the presses to the suburbs.

  Newspapers got me going. And I have made my way, or most of it anyway, as a journalist. But I have never been a newspaperman. I don’t think I have ever had anything published in a newspaper, not even a letter to the editor. Nevertheless, newspapers have been a constant in my life, and if I hadn’t stumbled into CBC Radio, they might well have been my life.

  I love newspapers. I love getting up in the morning and opening the front door and finding one on my stoop. I have never seen the guy who delivers it. I have no idea who he is. But I trust him, and he has never failed me.

  I love the gestalt of the front page. I love carrying the paper to the table and reading it while I wake up.

  And later in the day if I find myself alone with nothing to do and feeling anxious because of it—say I am meeting someone in a restaurant for lunch, and I arrive first—whereas other people might buy a drink and settle down to wait, I start looking for a paper. They calm me. They reassure me. They make me feel safe and sound.

  There is much to recommend newspapers. Others have written about these things better than I, s
o I will not repeat them.

  But I would like to say two things. The first is that I like newspapers because they exist in space, but not in time. They happen out of time. In fact, they literally stop time. Every day the newspaper jams its wrench in the cogs of the clock and says, This is what it is like right now. And by doing that, it asks the same of all of us. It asks us to step out of time too and consider the things that are happening and what they might mean to us and to others. It asks us what we think about all that.

  The second thing, and perhaps the most important thing, is that a newspaper is a shared experience. On every level. Not only the shared experience of a boy listening to his father grumble about the news. Or two brothers squabbling over the sections. There is all that, but there is more.

  When our cities are full of newspapers, they are, quite literally, on every corner. You don’t even have to read them to know what they are on about. You just have to walk around and they will seep into you like ink spilled on a blotter, and in the spilling, they will stain your mind. And that means we are all ink-stained—those of us who read the papers, and those of us who don’t. We are stained with the same stories, and because of that, all of us, living together, can carry on a common conversation.

  And this act of sharing the experience is arguably as important as the experience itself. More important, maybe. For it is in the sharing that we foster fellowship. And that is what creates community. If everyone has their own private newspaper, as the webmasters would have it, we may all be as well informed, quite possibly better informed, but we will become a society of solitudes, each of us lost in our private prejudices. And rather than argue with each other over what might and might not be the common good, we will drift away to the islands of the single issues and soon be lost in the forests of alienation. And soon enough, instead of grumbling at the paper, we will be grumbling at one another, and engagement in the world of politics will seem meaningless to us. Why even vote?