The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  A brand new pair of sneakers, sneakers as heady as dandelion wine, a pair of Ray Bradbury’s “Royal Crown Cream Sponge Para Litefoot tennis shoes,” and when you put them on, you bounce like a kangaroo, and when you run, you run like a gazelle. Is it a pair of sneakers you need as you run to school?

  Or what about lunch? What about lunch every day for a year? If I packed you a lunch of carrot sticks and raisins, and peanut butter sandwiches on soft white bread, with lots of jelly, the way you like it, the bread so fresh you dent it with your fingers just in the unwrapping. I thought if I wrapped your sandwich in wax paper and wrote little notes on the paper with a black felt pen, and slipped in some chocolate from time to time, that might do the trick.

  I thought. And I thought. And I thought I could be your wordsmith, your shoemaker, or your chef.

  But none of them seemed right. The shoes didn’t fit. You forgot the lunch bag on the bus. And who needs more words anyway? There are words enough to go around.

  And that is when I decided to give you this eraser. It is an original Pink Pearl—a little plug of pink rubber, with a point at both the ends, and a broad side too, the perfect size for mistakes, big or small. It will fit in your hand, whatever size your hands are, whether you are four or forty, five or fifty, and is something that will work today, and work tomorrow.

  Best of all, it has, deep in its rubbery little heart, memories of a rubber tree in some thick forest. A gash in the bark. The drip, drip of sap. But more than that: the worried frown of a chemist too.

  Because your eraser has been vulcanized, my friend. And even though I don’t have the slightest idea what that means, I do have the deep conviction that if we all carried some small vulcanized thing with us at all times, we would have an easier go of it. And be less prone to explosive anger, road rage, yelling and the gnawing anxiety of our fears.

  This is for you.

  I wrapped it in this brown paper to give to you this morning, this first day of school. And I hope you will understand when you unwrap it that life’s greatest treasures are the simple ones.

  Take its measure, roll it between your fingers, put it in your pocket. It is all you will need to get through the year safely.

  It will give itself up to correct your mistakes. Its sharp edges slowly rounding like a piece of sea glass, until all that’s left of it are little pink smears on the pages of your life. What more could you ask of anything?

  If I am right about this, with this eraser in your bag, you can risk it all. Exams will mean nothing to you.

  They can roll out the big numbers, and all the arrhythmic poems, and you will knock them clean out of the park.

  This year you get the pink eraser from the deep thick forest. I give it to you with my love, and these instructions: take it with you everywhere. You never know when you are going to make a mess, or where, just that you are bound to mess things up.

  Don’t mind mistakes.

  Mistakes are how you learn.

  You have an eraser.

  Go ahead, make messes.

  Then ... clean them up.

  Try again.

  6 September 2009

  AUTUMN

  We saw that snow fell on Saskatchewan this Thursday, and as we stared gloomily at the television reports and the video of cars spinning their wheels along the Trans-Canada Highway, someone remarked what a glorious October it has been here where we live. I, for one, will be sad to see this October go.

  Every morning when we woke, I would get out of bed and head for the window, thinking our luck couldn’t hold. Then I would open the curtains ever so cautiously and find myself staring at another blue sky. When I went down to fetch the morning paper, the air was always thin and cool and comfortable. Every day by noon it was nice enough to eat outside.

  We followed the progress of the back garden with delight as it slowly turned into a thing we listened to rather than looked at, all tawny and brown and full of wind rustle. Just to be alive this October was enough.

  Autumn is the most olfactory of seasons—the time of year I am most doglike. October is the month I follow my nose rather than my feet. The barnyard smells of woodsmoke and decomposing leaves give the neighbourhood an honest, country feel.

  Yesterday the moon was a sliver of fingernail floating in the deep purple of the late afternoon. This October has given us autumn at its best, and in my books autumn at its best is as good as it gets.

  On Tuesday there was a rusted pickup parked in front of my office filled with a bunch of garden tools and about a thousand ornamental cabbages. I rushed home to get my camera and anyone who was there to come and see.

  “It is so beautiful,” I said. “It fits the season perfectly. As if it had been art-directed rather than driven into the neighbourhood.” But like October, by the time we got back, the truck was gone and I didn’t get my picture.

  John, the cat who lives two doors down, is by common agreement the strangest cat in the neighbourhood. John is a stray who showed up a few years ago and moved in with Gary and Pat, although he spends most of his time sitting, like a loaf of bread, in the middle of the road. So far he hasn’t been hit. But John is the colour of marmalade and, more to the point, the colour of the leaves that now pretty well cover the street. John disappeared early in the week, and Pat and Gary spent an hour poking through the leaves in the gutter on both sides of the street believing that John had finally got his just dessert. He showed up the next morning. Tim, who lives next door, had let him into his house and gone out, forgetting John was there.

  Soon we’ll face the dark rains of November and then the snow that hit Saskatchewan, but until then we’ll keep a weather eye for that truck full of cabbage and we’ll savour the smell of smoke and the carpet of leaves that this morning covered everything in sight.

  5 November 2000

  PIANO TUNERS

  The weather has turned. We have done all we can to get ready. The wood is stacked, the pump is drained, the window washers have come and gone, to wherever the window washers go when the weather turns (just try to get someone to wash your windows in December). The roofers have gone too, south no doubt, along with the butterflies, and the blackbirds, and the bluebirds, and all the other birds with brains enough to get out while the getting was good. The legs are off the picnic table, the boat is out of the lake, and when he knocked the other day, Pius, the letter carrier, was wearing mittens and a hat--as sure a sign of winter as any.

  There is no turning back now. Those who are going are gone. There is nothing left for us to do but stand by the windows we should have washed and wait for the cold rain we know is heading our way, knowing in our hearts that when the rains are finished with us, the snow won’t be far behind. Everyone says winter is going to be easier this year. Easier than what?

  I know. I know. There are plenty of people who look forward to winter. Skiers, snowshoers, men with snowblowers, women with skates, someone somewhere who has a favourite winter coat they just can’t wait to wear.

  But there are plenty of others on the other end of the seesaw, clinging on for dear life. The gardeners and the golfers, the sailors and the street vendors, the little girl who lost her gloves at recess and walked all the way home with her knapsack, her bare hands so cold they ached.

  And, of course, the piano tuners. No one longs for spring more than people who tune pianos.

  Because of all the hardships that winter brings, to the plant you left outside that you should have brought in, to the pipes you should have drained, to poor old you; all that is nothing, a trifle, when compared to the sorrow this winter will bring to the pianos of the land.

  Winter has murdered at least half the pianos of the country. And when you consider that a nine-foot concert grand, the piano of choice if you are planning a concert, can cost as much as $150,000, that is murder most foul.

  If you want a piano to last more than a decade, you have to baby it. Like the piano at Place des Arts in Montreal, for example, which more than one pianist has told me is their favourit
e piano in the country. The piano at Place des Arts has its own humidity-controlled room where it rests, between shows, like a bottle of Burgundy’s best.

  I was talking to my friend John yesterday. John is a piano player. And I can tell you, like all piano players, from Tofino to Twillingate, John is suffering his annual bout of pre-winter despair.

  It’s winter’s dryness that gets them. If you let a piano dry up, it can die in a decade. The soundboard has a natural arc. And if the soundboard dries, the arc flattens and a piano won’t resonate. A note that could sustain for thirty seconds will disappear just like that. And don’t get me going about dry pegboards.

  There are corpses everywhere. And that is why pianists like Anton Kuerti arrive at concert halls with their bags of tools and dive into the bowels of these pianos in a desperate attempt to rebuild them before they play them.

  But sadly, like summer and autumn, and most everything in this wintery world, once they are gone, you can’t get them back.

  We arrived at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo last month to find a note from piano tuner Jürgen Goering waiting for us on the piano bench.

  Welcome back to Vancouver Island, read his note. You know you are on the west coast when the piano technician comes in by rowboat to tune the piano for your show.

  Well, there will be little rowing between now and spring. Worse luck.

  Get out the vitamin C. Get out the hot water bottle and get out the humidifier. And if you happen to know a piano tuner ... get out your hankies.

  23 November 2008

  APPROACHING WINTER

  I received a note earlier this week from Pond Inlet in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory. My friend Ruby wrote to say that the sun has disappeared from the sky. But my sun prisms, wrote Ruby, are still hanging in my window. What Ruby didn’t say was that where she lives, a land of twenty-four-hour darkness, the prisms in her window are hanging as an act of faith as much as anything.

  Even here in the south you can sense the days shortening and feel the darkness of winter, which has already settled around Ruby’s house, coughing its chilly way out of the arctic with little you and me in its sights.

  The wind and rain battered Vancouver this week, and in the east the skies have been low and grey. I spent last weekend with my back to winter, my toque pulled low, raking the last of the leaves off the deck. Then I headed down to the lake and covered up the boat, something I should have done weeks ago, chastising myself as I fumbled with the blue plastic tarp.

  It’s getting dark. It’s getting cold. It’s been windy and wet. And we all know it’s going to get darker, and colder, and windier before this winter is finished with us. To make matters worse, I just ate three Girl Guide cookies. And I’m sorry, but I don’t even like Girl Guide cookies.

  But, as you stand there on your corner with your umbrella blown inside out, and as I head down to my basement to see if the boots, and the mitts, and the scarves are anywhere to be found, there is something we should both remember. Up in Pond Inlet, in Ruby’s house, that sun prism is still hanging in the window, and every once in the while, even in the dark arctic night, it catches the headlight from a snowmobile, or a water truck rumbling by, and each time it does, it gives off a brief flash of spring.

  We spend our summers trying to get outside as much as we can. These are the nights it’s good to be home.

  There is still a month to go before the darkest day of the year, but with every passing day, we are not only moving closer to darkness, but to all of the festivals of light: Kwanza, Hanukkah, Diwali, Christmas. And to your birthday, for that matter, and to the happy day when the sun rises just that little bit earlier, lingers a little longer.

  19 November 2006

  HIBERNATION

  I like winter, so I am always excited to see it come. I like to ski and to skate, and on a good night, I even like to shovel snow. There is a lot to enjoy in winter—fires and hot chocolate to name a few others—but every winter, by this time, no matter how happy I was at the beginning, I begin to wonder if maybe the fires and the hot chocolate are the best part of it, if the best part of being cold is getting warm.

  There have been Marches in my life when I have wondered if I am solar-powered. By the beginning of every March, I always feel like I need more sun than I have been getting. And although I enjoy winter, I would be lying if I didn’t tell you there have been Februarys when I have wondered if I wouldn’t have been happier as a bear, so I could hibernate. Now there is a bit of genetic modification that someone should take a close look at. Do we really need to clone sheep?

  If a geneticist truly wanted to make a contribution, she should take a look at hibernation. If you were watching latenight television, and someone came on and offered a hibernating gene for three easy payments of—well, I am betting she could just about name her price—I for one would be reaching for my chequebook. Imagine a day in November, when it has been raining since dawn. It is now four-thirty in the afternoon, and getting dark, and you are standing in the kitchen looking at a wet dog, when someone comes on the television and says, Would you like to go to bed for three months? I’m reaching for my pyjamas, calling the kids into the bedroom and telling them this: I am going to slow my heart down to about a beat a minute, and there is nothing in the world you are going to be able to do to stir me. I am not going to wake up until April, and when I do, I am going to be cranky, and hungry, so you better be careful.

  I don’t care what the kids do. The kids can stay up if they want. That’s what they always want to do anyway. They can do science experiments with me as far as I care. They can stick my hand in a bucket of warm water to see what happens; makes no matter, I am just going to keep on snoring.

  How much would I pay for that gene? I don’t know, but I know I’d be buying.

  I think my plan would be to get up just in time for the playoffs, which is pretty much how it works now anyway.

  3 March 2002

  SALT OF THE EARTH

  There seems to be more salt on the streets this winter than there used to be. Or at least on the sidewalks. Or at least on the sidewalks of my neighbourhood. My evidence for this observation is purely anecdotal and would not impress a scientist. I rest my claim not on the back of rigorous observation but on the back of my dog. Or, rather, her paws. Barely a night passes when I am out with the dog that she doesn’t begin to limp, and we don’t have to stop. We have worked out a routine that we both understand. She holds up the leg that hurts, I take off my glove and pick out the salt crystal that is causing her distress.

  Some nights, when it is too cold for a sensible man to be squatting on the sidewalk cleaning his dog’s feet with his bare hands, I have wondered about buying her a set of the little dog boots you see small dogs wearing from time to time in the city, but I can’t bring myself to do that. We may live in the city, and I may enjoy my city life, but I have worked on a farm, and it is hard for me to do anything that might bring a smirk to the face of a farmer.

  Here in the city where I live, homeowners are responsible for shovelling the public sidewalk in front of their houses. A growing number of my neighbours, it seems, are turning to salt, rather than shovels, to fulfill their civic duty.

  You can hardly blame them. That’s the tactic the city has chosen to keep the roads clear. Salt has become the first, rather than the last, line of defence in the war against snow.

  Toronto is so committed to salt that the city is ringed with seven salt camps. These camps are set up like army bivouacs and include trailers that are staffed around the clock, complete with cots and kitchens—camps of truck drivers paid to stand by so the moment snow begins to fall, they can run for their salt trucks. City officials expect them to be on the road within five minutes of the first snowflakes.

  The same officials say they have tested and rejected other alternatives. Calcium magnesium acetate is too expensive. Sand, I am told, is not without its own environmental problems. They even tried a liquid called MAGIC, a byproduct of the beer industry that they s
prayed on the streets, with mixed results, sadly.

  Toronto has 118 salt trucks in service this winter, and those trucks will dump in the neighbourhood of 125,000 tons of salt on city streets. My neighbours will add to that.

  It is a practice the ancients would find beyond belief. Homer called salt divine. Plato named it a substance dear to the gods.

  But Homer and Plato lived in warmer climes and at a time when salt was so highly prized, and so difficult to obtain, that religious significance was attached to it. A meal where salt was served was sacred. It created connections and the Arabic phrase, There is salt between us.

  The Greeks, the Romans and the ancient Jews all used salt in sacred ways. While the Germans fought wars over saline streams.

  Some academics believe the oldest roads were the salt roads that the clattering salt caravans followed through the Sahara and the deserts of Libya. One of the oldest roads in Italy is the Via Salaria.

  So it seems that in some way salt has always been linked to roadways, although in the ancient days the roads were there for the salt, rather than the other way around.

  Today, Canada is the fourth largest producer of salt in the world. From salt mines in Windsor and Goderich, Ontario, from Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and from the Magdalen Islands, Canada produces more salt than it needs—enough surplus to export tons to the United States.

  This salt, the salt we send abroad and the salt we see on the streets, the salt we pass around our tables, the salt that I pick out of my dog’s paws, all comes from ancient deposits, remnants of long-forgotten oceans.

  And now, I read, that if the mines ever ran out, there is enough salt suspended in the world’s oceans to make five fullsized relief models of Europe.

  So we don’t feel profligate when, in the darkness of December, we greet snow by scattering salt at our feet. And, as we do, we may well be reaching back to some ancient memory, and saying, in our own way, that these streets where we live are holy streets, worthy of keeping clear; and the white florets of salt that marble them in the cold winter mornings are there to remind us that we are the salt of the earth; and the trucks criss-crossing the city in the winter nights are prayer trucks, reminding us in the dark of the winter, when the snow piles around us, that we have nothing to fear, that we are not alone, that we are here for each other, for there is salt between us.