When we all read the same newspapers, it means we are all on the same page. When we don’t, group activities become personal activities, the great public conversation ceases, and before we know it, we are bowling alone.
A newspaper is a grand public space, and all these grand technologies that would replace it—cellphones and laptops, iPods and iPads—take public spaces and turn them into private spaces. The net, with all its weblike connectivity, is still essentially a private place. One person with a search capacity. Each of us a webmaster assembling our own personal narrative.
And in our excitement with it all, and dear God don’t think I am not excited too, we think we can abandon papers to no effect. That it is just another summer evening, and we can throw them out with the recycling.
What I am trying to say here is that our newspapers are more than the sum of their parts.
And I know, I know, you don’t have to say it. I am slashing at waves with my sword. But take note: at the same time that our newspapers are folding, so are our broadcasters.
We have to keep the public conversation going.
My father is now ninety-two. It was, I think, Bette Davis who said, “Old age is no place for sissies.” At ninety-two my father has given up a lot. But he hasn’t given up his newspaper. It still comes every morning. His paper, The Montreal Gazette, began publishing in 1785. It was started by a printer named Fleury Mesplet, who came to Montreal with Benjamin Franklin when the army of the American Revolution invaded and occupied the city of my birth. When the revolutionaries came, they dragged a printing press with them from Philadelphia. The first in the city. The idea was that Mesplet would start a newspaper that might convince Canadians to join the Revolution. Franklin and the revolutionary army eventually left town. Mesplet stayed.
My father still gets the paper Mesplet began. He no longer reads it every day, but he keeps his subscription. We, his family, worry that if it stops coming altogether it would be at his peril. While the paper is there, beside his chair, he is still ink-stained, still part of the conversation, still grumbling.
3 April 2009
RADIO
I have loved radio as long as I can remember—even as a young boy, radio seemed like a magic thing to me. I was the perfect audience: awkward, unsure and without a community of my own. The world of radio was a world where I could belong, a place where I was just as good as everyone else. Listening to the radio, alone in my bedroom, gave me a sense of connection to the larger world.
Montreal was a great city to begin a radio romance. It was a radio hothouse, with Paul Reid personifying the elegance of CJAD, Gord Sinclair Junior, the scrappiness of CFCF, and Joe Pyne summing up CKGM. Pyne was the wooden-legged firebrand who more or less invented the call-in show. Before he hung up on them, he regularly invited his callers to gargle with razor blades.
My favourite Joe Pyne story, though it has never been verified to my knowledge, involves the night he supposedly insulted Frank Zappa.
“I guess your long hair makes you a woman,” crowed Pyne at his guest.
“And I guess your wooden leg makes you a table,” Zappa allegedly shot back.
True or not, if you remember Joe Pyne, you will know that that transaction sounds like it might have happened. It pretty much sums up his show. I couldn’t get enough.
The first radio I remember was a white plastic Fleetwood we kept on the breakfast table. Eventually the Fleetwood was upgraded, and on one of the greatest days of my life, I was allowed to take it upstairs to my room and set it on the night table beside my bed. Because it was a tube radio, it would warm up and glow like a flashlight running on low batteries— a comforting thing to have beside you on a winter’s night. Lying in bed listening to Dave Boxer on CFCF, or Joey Reynolds on WKBW, was like lying beside a campfire that could talk.
One night, when I was listening to Danny Gallivan chant the holy passage of a Montreal Canadiens hockey game, I responded to the cheeriness of the radio by inviting it to join me under the covers—I probably thought it would keep me warm. The light from the tubes was even prettier under the covers, and I was so comfy, snuggled up beside it, that I fell asleep, and pretty soon it got so hot that the plastic body started to melt. By all rights I should have gone up in smoke. The only reason I didn’t is that my father was seized by his own impulse that night, an impulse he was never able to explain. Uncharacteristically, he came upstairs to check on me.
I guess he saved my life, and I guess it was inevitable that I would end up working in radio—seeing as how I was sleeping with them before I hit puberty.
6 June 2010
PETER GZOWSKI
Peter Gzowski died on Thursday. We knew it was coming. I spent the early part of the week sitting in my office staring at the walls. Before the tributes began, it was a week of waiting. Today, I just feel sad and lonely.
Peter had a remarkable career. He did great work. Somewhere, a long time ago, he decided it was his mission to uncover the best of Canada, the people and the places, to seek them out and introduce them to the rest of us.
Because he decided this was important work, and because he was so good at it, we believed it was important work too and we went along for the ride. Somewhere along the way, Peter became what he was looking for. He became a part of the best of Canada.
He was the best of CBC Radio, that is for sure.
He was a sort of quilt maker. The individual parts of his quilt were often ordinary. Some of the moments, of course, were extra special: the first interview with Ellie Dansker and the Red River Rally, to name two. But mostly, like any quilter worth their salt, he worked with scraps. It was only when you stepped back and looked at the overall effect that you realized the grandeur of his creation.
People are always asking me what he was like. He was a bundle of contradictions. He wasn’t the guy you thought you knew from the radio. And he was the guy you knew from the radio.
If you didn’t know him, and you met him, you might have been disappointed. You might have thought he was chilly and standoffish. He wasn’t chilly and standoffish. But he acted that way sometimes. People say he was shy. I think he was more private than shy. I think there is a difference.
He was certainly complicated.
He was a man who dealt in the realm of ideas. But he was driven to ideas by instinct and emotion. He was the Canadian nationalist who, more than anything, wanted to have written for The New Yorker magazine.
He was a serious person who liked to play games—especially if they involved words. He was sloppy about his clothes and meticulous about his grammar.
On New Year’s Eve, this year, he provoked one of the guests he had invited for dinner to search through a stack of reference books in an effort to determine whether it was more Canadian to say railroad or railway.
He was more a journalist than a gentleman.
He was thoughtful and he was selfish.
His work absorbed him. He noticed everything—except the world around him. One day, his friend Peter Sibbald Brown went over to Gzowski’s cottage at Lake Simcoe. You didn’t knock on the door up there, you just wandered in, so Peter Sibbald Brown wandered in and found the cottage filled with smoke—coughing, eye-stinging smoke, and he thought to himself, Even Gzowski couldn’t generate this much smoke. He put his hands over his eyes, and staggered in, and found a log had tumbled out of the fireplace and was smouldering away on the hardwood floor.
Gzowski was sitting at his computer in the little alcove where he worked. He had noticed the smoke. But his offhanded response was to crack the window open about a quarter of an inch.
That is how I will remember him, at work in a smoke-filled room. Sitting across from me, perhaps, in a radio studio, with just minutes before we go to air, his head is down, he is ignoring me. He is using a black felt marker to scribble a lastminute note onto his script, rewriting his intro fifteen seconds before we’re on. Just before the control room gives us the go-ahead, he looks up at me with a mischievous smile. That’s how I will rememb
er him.
He grinned like that on the radio, and in his home—pleased as punch whenever he found a question that would shift the spotlight off him. His mission was to make the other shine brighter. He seemed to bring out the best from those he was with.
I will remember him in the early morning at Lake Simcoe, sitting at the end of his dining room table, bare feet, absorbed by the crossword, a cup of coffee going cold beside him, his fingers, already in the early morning, ink-stained. I’ll remember him looking up with that twinkle and bringing something up from the night before. And while you were busy thinking about that, he will ask your opinion about some political issue that is bothering him and you know absolutely nothing about, leaving you standing there wondering whether you should fess up or fake it.
He loved to laugh.
And because I loved him, I loved to make him laugh.
Over a period of about a decade, I had a regular spot on his radio show, Morningside. Of all the things we did together, his favourite was the day we cracked up. I was in the middle of an inconsequential item, and we both got the giggles, and then fell into out-of-control, gut-sucking laughter. Laughter so wrenching that we couldn’t carry on. On the tape of that morning, you can hear us going over the edge and then his desperate attempt to bring us back. We both thought we had crossed some sort of line we shouldn’t have crossed. We felt self-conscious about it until the mail started arriving, and we realized quite the opposite. Everyone listening had joined in the laughter.
That’s what he did best. He sat in his studio, and he let us join him.
27 January 2002
THE PEOPLE
YOU LOVE
I met him at a wedding. He was about my age. He was a strong, charismatic and intelligent man. We sat beside each other during dinner and then, when the dancing began, we sat and talked. We talked about our children. Eventually he told me about his daughter, Kathy.
Kathy was, he said, his perfect daughter—the kind of girl who did well in school, and was quiet, obedient, thoughtful and a delight to be around.
“Perfect, really,” he said, until she turned thirteen and started to misbehave. She stopped coming home at a reasonable time. She began to tell lies about where she had been. When she was pushed, she offered excuses instead of the truth—thin ones at that.
The man and his wife soon enough came to understand why their daughter was lying to them. She was going to raves. She was taking drugs. She was hanging out with inappropriate boys, including drug dealers. She was misbehaving in all sorts of ways. Doing things they never dreamed possible. Suddenly his perfect little girl was a disaster. And he was terrified.
“Completely terrified,” he told me.
I asked him what he did.
“I panicked,” he said.
His instincts told him he should make rules. He said he thought if he made enough rules, if he created enough structure, he could pull his daughter out of this mess. It didn’t work.
He made rules, she broke them. Things got horrible.
At curfew time, my friend would find himself alone in his living room, staring out his living room window at a dark and empty street, pacing around his house with his heart pounding, convinced that he was never going to see his daughter again.
Other nights, he and his wife would get in their car and go looking for her.
“There we were,” he told me, “at one, two, three, in the morning, driving aimlessly around searching for our kid.”
They wanted to find her. They were petrified that if they did, they would find her beaten unconscious, drugged out or dead. She had immersed herself in a world of criminals, of danger, of tragedy, and one that neither my friend nor his wife had any idea how to navigate.
To make things worse, he and his wife began to fight—bitterly.
“Of course we did,” he said. “Our daughter was the most important thing in the world to us. We couldn’t agree about what we should do. Nothing we tried worked.”
They made an appointment to see a psychologist—someone who came highly recommended. They told their daughter they were doing this. She agreed to come with them, just once, to see what it was like.
The psychologist told them that their daughter was in trouble. She said that their daughter needed rules and structure. Tough love, the psychologist called it.
Then she said, “You have to get yourself ready to lock her out if that moment comes. And it will almost certainly come.”
When the appointment was over, the man and his wife walked out of the room. They looked at each other, and one of them said, “That is just not us.”
The doctor’s advice struck them as cruel. They couldn’t do any of it. They agreed about that. They didn’t know the answer, but it felt as if the doctor were asking them to treat their daughter as an object, rather than a human, a human who seemed to need something and was striking out blindly.
They went to see another psychologist. The man described him as an extraordinary human being. He said it twice.
“Extraordinary.”
All three of them went. The psychologist met with them separately, the man’s daughter first. She had agreed, once again, that she would go that once.
The psychologist talked to Kathy alone, and then he sent Kathy out and called the man and his wife in.
He said, “I will see your daughter. She is full of big questions and she is having trouble with all of them. I will see her, though I don’t have much hope that I will be able to help her.”
Then he said, “I think I can help you.”
“What?” said the man.
The possibility that he might need help had never occurred to the man.
“What you have to understand,” said the psychologist, “is that your daughter doesn’t feel loved.”
“But I love her deeply,” said the man.
“Listen carefully,” said the psychologist. “You may love her, but she doesn’t feel loved. And she doesn’t hear it when you tell her. It doesn’t get through to her.”
“What should I do?” said the man.
“There are two things you have to do,” said the psychologist. “First, you have to keep her at home. Don’t put her into the position where she might stay out all night. Young kids can die on the street.
“Make curfews if you want to. But know that she won’t keep them. And don’t lock her out. She is going through a horrible thing. Let her do it at home where she is safe.
“The second thing you have to do is to communicate to her that she is loved. You have to praise her, and tell her you love her. And you have to do this over and over and over again. And you have to do it for a long, long time.”
“How can I do that?” said the man. “She’s sneaking around, and she’s lying, and she’s doing terrible things. There is nothing for us to praise.”
“Find something,” said the psychologist. “Don’t criticize her. Praise her. And do it as often as you can. Eventually she may hear you.”
The man looked at the doctor earnestly.
“What,” he asked, “if I can’t find anything to praise?”
The psychologist looked back at him.
“Fake it,” he said.
None of this made sense to the man.
“I thought it was ridiculous,” he said.
He went home thinking he was going to make some rules. And he did. And again, nothing changed.
Left with nothing else to try, he decided to try what the psychologist had suggested. But he couldn’t find anything that he could praise about his daughter.
“So I lied,” he said. “I said things like, ‘Your hair looks nice.’ Though it didn’t. And, ‘What a nice wallet.’”
The more he did it, the more the psychologist’s prescription began to make sense to him. If his daughter didn’t feel loved at home, it would make sense that she would look for love elsewhere. Maybe she had found a community that accepted her no matter how strange she was, or thought she was.
“It was amazing to me,” said th
e man, “that she couldn’t see herself as either loved or lovable. It was like she had a perceptual distortion.”
So he began. And nothing happened. But he kept it up—for days, and weeks, and months.
And then, things started getting better. Not right away, not even slowly. Slower than slowly. It was a year maybe. After a year, Kathy started doing things that the man actually could praise.
“It worked,” he said.
It took almost two years. But it worked.
Kathy went to university. She got a bachelor’s degree. She graduated on the dean’s list and the honour role as well. Now she is in graduate school.
“She grew up to be a kind, sensitive person,” said the man.
Then he shook his head and said, “God, it was so hard. She would bring people home. One night she brought a guy home in a blue bunny suit. I hated this guy instinctively. But I didn’t say anything.”
During the two hard years between the beginning and the end, Kathy saw the therapist irregularly.
The man said, “If you asked her, she would tell you that she doesn’t think it helped her in the least. She would also say that the things we did weren’t helpful either.”
“Maybe that is the case,” said the man. “Maybe all that stuff was only helpful to us. Maybe it just helped give us an understanding of what was going on and a framework that enabled us, at the very least, not to hurt her. It certainly made the dayby-day living easier. We avoided all the confrontations that we couldn’t win.”
Without the intervention of the doctor, the man is sure what he would have been doing.
“I would have been drawing lines in the sand,” he said. “And she would have been defiant. We avoided all that.”
The man said when all this was happening, he didn’t talk about it much.
“You feel lost, and embarrassed, and guilty, and frightened when your child is in trouble.”
The Vinyl Café Notebooks Page 4
