“First time Dougie and I ever fought,” he said loudly.
During the editing Doug had made him clean up a phrase. He was still stewing about it.
It was, it turned out, the punchline to his story about the Christmas parade in the fictional foothills town of Shelby, Alberta. The way Mitchell wrote it, Canon Midford had organized the parade and had made the obvious choice for who should play Santa Claus: Art Ulmer. Sober.
It was Rory Napoleon’s idea to take the antlers that hung on the wall behind the Arlington Arms reception counter— elk—and strap them to the pair of two-year-old bays that would haul Santa into town. In his shoe and harness shop, Willie MacCrimmon fashioned special horn-holding bridles for the barely broken bays.
Everything worked as planned, until the reindeer bridles Willie MacCrimmon had made slid down and over the horses’ noses on their way into town. They formed, as Mitchell told it, a sort of elk horn necklace that bumped alarmingly against the horses’ chests and spooked them. By the time they got to the town square, where every child in Shelby was waiting with their parents, Santa’s sleigh was wildly out of control, snort clouds of steam puffing from the horses’ nostrils as they dragged the wild-eyed Santa past the review stand at a gallop.
“Whoa, you bay bastards,” screamed Santa’s driver on the page, as printed by McClelland & Stewart.
In the bookstore, Mitchell scowled. He looked at my boys and then at me. Then he picked up a pen and crossed the words out. With a flourish, he then replaced them with the words Doug Gibson had removed. Now Santa flew by the assembled families of Shelby, and my sons, screaming, “Whoa, you cocksuckers.”
The bookseller looked uncomfortable. Bill squinted at her and shrugged. Then he winked at my boys and nodded at me. “Ah, shit,” he said. “They live with him. They’ve heard worse than that. Haven’t you, boys.”
It wasn’t a question.
I began to visit him whenever I found myself in Calgary. In the late autumn of 1995, I was in Calgary on another book tour, scheduled for an evening reading at the Memorial Park Library.
The organizers had done me the courtesy of booking a small room so the few people who had come were spilling into the aisles, making it appear as if there was almost a crowd. As I stood behind the lectern and surveyed my audience, there were Bill and Merna Mitchell sitting in the front row. I stepped around the podium and leaned over Bill, and he hugged me and gave me a kiss.
“I wouldn’t do this for just anybody,” he said. He meant come out for the reading.
I didn’t know how sick he was. I went back to his house afterwards and found him in a wheelchair, wearing a bib, which he had managed to cover with snuff.
I began to phone every few weeks. Sometimes he didn’t feel well enough for the phone, and I talked to Merna. Sometimes I phoned Doug Gibson for an update.
They both died within a few months of each other. I understand how Merna would have found it hard to go on without him. I miss him, and I think of him often—of the things he wrote, the things he taught me about writing, and the permission he gave me, by his own example, to enjoy reading in public. But mostly it is him I miss. He made me laugh, and knowing he was there, and how seriously he took his business, made me feel it was all right to be serious about this business myself.
6 November 1999
THE ISLAND OF
NO ADULTS
Teaching a child how to read is an enterprise that is fraught with danger and something that should only be undertaken after careful thought.
Oh, you can start with flashcards and exercise books, but you won’t stay there. Reading invariably leads to books, and reading books inevitably leads to knowledge, and there is no telling where knowledge is going to lead anyone.
Take my friend Leah, for instance. The spring Leah was eight years old she took a book out of her school library. The book, written by Carol Ryrie Brink, was called Baby Island. It is, says Leah, a child’s adventure in the Enid Blyton tradition, one of those books in which a group of kids go off and have an adventure without any beastly grown-ups getting in the way. In Carol Brink’s book, as Leah remembers it, a group of young girls end up on an island looking after a bunch of babies.
“There were goats on the island,” said Leah by way of explaining how they might do that. “They milked the goats.”
Sounds innocent enough. Well, by the time the end of June rolled around, the police were involved, and there was talk at Leah’s school of pulling Baby Island from the library.
That’s because it was Baby Island that gave eight-year-old Leah the notion that she and her best friend, Amy, should set off and seek their fortune.
“We’ll walk to Brighton,” Leah told Amy. “We’ll get jobs.”
Leah lived in Cobourg. Brighton was the next town over.
Amy’s father raised rabbits. All that spring Leah and Amy held secret planning meetings in the rabbit hutch in Amy’s backyard. They decided they should wait until the weather was warm enough to sleep outside before they ran away from home.
So they waited until June, and on a Friday in June they agreed to meet at the schoolyard, at the top of the slide, at the stroke of midnight. Leah’s father had gone out that night and left her with a babysitter. While the babysitter was in the basement playing video-games, eight-year-old Leah loaded a garbage bag with food. Then she took her dad’s hockey bag and filled it with clothes and stuffed animals and tapes and her stereo, and books, of course, which were what gave her the idea in the first place. Then she took the garbage bag and the hockey bag up to her bedroom and heaved them out her bedroom window. She was planning on following them herself until she saw what happened to the yogourt containers when they hit the ground, so she slipped out the front door instead. She dragged the two bags down the street to the schoolyard, and there was Amy, wearing a tiny knapsack on her back, waiting at the top of the slide just like they had agreed.
There was a park near Amy’s house. There were some woods behind the park. They decided they would sleep in the park and follow the shore of Lake Ontario to Brighton the next morning. When they got to Brighton, they would get jobs as waitresses.
Leah had packed a sleeping bag. They set up camp in the woods. As they lay there, Amy got scared. And at some point in the middle of the night, when they heard Amy’s dad calling her name, Amy started to cry.
Amy said, “I’m going home.”
“I’m going to Brighton to become a waitress,” said Leah.
Leah said, “You can go home, but you have to promise not to tell anyone where I am.”
She swore Amy to secrecy.
Ten minutes later Amy was back with her dad.
“I was pretty determined,” Leah told me years later. “I think her dad had to pick me up and throw me over his shoulder. I was convinced I didn’t need any adults. I was also convinced that when I got home I would be in deep trouble, because I had taken so much food out of the fridge and now it was ruined.”
There is no better landscape than the landscapes of our fantasies. And no one nourishes it more assiduously than our children’s authors. And that is why, if I was asked, I would cast my vote for Enid Blyton’s dreamy bike trips, where the adults fade quickly into the background, over S.E. Hinton’s gritty tales. I cast my vote for the island where there are no adults; and for sleeping in the woods, and walking the shoreline to Brighton, and for all the eight-year-old waitresses, wherever they are.
1 May 2005
FREE BOOKS
I was walking through my neighbourhood when I came across a cardboard box full of books. The box was half on the sidewalk and half on the front lawn of whomever they belonged to. It was clear whoever that was was finished with the books and had put them out so that people who came along and felt like going through them were welcome both to do that and to take away whatever books struck their fancy.
It is a conspicuous and uncomfortable business going through someone else’s garbage but not as uncomfortable a business as walking by a box full of free b
ooks. I looked around, and when I saw no one was watching, I knelt down and tried to flip through the box as fast I could. I was hoping that I could get the job done before the owner walked out of his house and spotted me. I know I was doing what he intended me to do, but I found the possibility of him watching me embarrassing.
So, there I was, on my knees, going through the box, when it became apparent that I had stumbled upon a treasure trove. Not that these books had any great value, just that whoever it was who had chucked them out had been living my life.
What was there? Well, to start with, there was Gateway to Latin, 101 pages of pain that I carried with me, or, more to the point, didn’t carry with me, all the way through grade ten. There was Man and His World, a reader that begins with the eloquent address delivered by William Faulkner in 1950 when he received the Nobel Prize for literature, and there was Contemporary English One.
There was popular literature as well. Love Story by Eric Segal, for example, which I reread standing there on the pavement: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart, and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”
I stuffed Love Story into my pocket for old time’s sake, and it was just after I did that I found the real treasure. A book that I’m sure you’ve never heard of, but a book that swept me away when I read it in 1969: The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary by James Simon Kunen.
I hadn’t seen The Strawberry Statement since I was gliding up and down the escalators of Sir George Williams University in my beige corduroy jacket.
I was so transported to have the book in my hands again that I didn’t notice the kid come out of the house until he was halfway down the walk. He looked at me the way you might look at someone going through your garbage.
I was beyond caring.
“These your dad’s?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said the kid. “We’re cleaning out the attic.”
“Your dad,” I said, hefting Kunen’s book, “he’s about fiftytwo years old, right?”
“Exactly,” said the kid, slowing down and looking at me for the first time. “How’d you know that?”
“Just a hunch,” I said.
He left for school, I guess. I finished pawing through the box. I pocketed The Strawberry Statement and, like I already said, Love Story, and the two readers, and the Latin text.
Five old books, but they were once part of my life, and it felt good running into them like that, unexpectedly, on a cloudy morning in November. Like running into a group of old friends. I brought them to my office. They are there today, on my desk. Sometimes you can get as much pleasure looking at a book as you can from reading it. So they are going to stay where I can see them, until I get tired of them. Then, who knows, maybe I’ll put them into a box of my own on my lawn and see who I reel in.
19 November 2000
THE CREATION
OF SAM MCGEE
There have been, over the years, many attempts to get down on paper the essence of a Canadian winter. I think of the opening paragraphs of Hugh MacLennan’s quintessential Canadian novel Two Solitudes and his poetic description of Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street on a snowy winter night. I think of William Kurelek’s sunny prairie paintings, of David Blackwood’s dark etchings of the great Newfoundland sealing disaster of 1914.
They all get part of it; they all come close to it in their own way, but none of them get closer to the heart of the matter, closer to the bone-numbing chill of a January wind, than Robert W. Service, the bard of the Yukon, gets in that most famous of his poems, “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”
You know how it goes:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Now that is what I call poetry—an epic chiller about the night Sam McGee froze to death on the Klondike Trail and then sprung back to life, for a moment, on his funeral pyre.
It begins thus:
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee
Where the cotton blooms and blows ...
Well, guess what? That’s not even close to being true. Not at all. Sam McGee was actually from Peterborough, Ontario. Well, Lindsay, to be precise.
I know this. I have been to his grave. I have spoken to a number of his descendants. I have met his granddaughter.
William Sam McGee. Born in 1867 of Irish parents, he was a prospector—a sourdough. He had a bank account at the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Dawson City where young Robert Service worked as a teller.
Many of Service’s readers assume that the poet was a hardboiled, long-gone Klondike prospector himself. He was a bank teller. And he lived until 1958. He saw McGee’s name on the bank ledger and pilfered it for his poem. Without permission, it seems.
Sam McGee might have moiled for gold, but he didn’t expire in a snowstorm on the edge of Lake Lebarge. He died of a stroke, I believe it was, on his daughter’s farm not far from Calgary. I thought it was high time someone set the record straight.
If you would permit me then: “The Creation of Sam McGee, the sequel.” The poem Service would surely have written had he made it to Sequelsville. I include it here with a nod to this long winter, and deep apologies to all concerned.
There are strange things done ‘neath the midnight sun
By bank tellers who work in the cold.
The arctic banks have their secret ranks
Of writers and poets I’m told.
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was the night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I created Sam McGee.
Now Sam McGee weren’t from Tennessee; that was just a writer’s trick.
And when I think today of what he had to say, of my poem it makes me sick.
I took his name, if it’s all the same, from a list on my desk at the bank.
It’s what writers do, when they’re brewing a stew, to stop it from getting too rank.
He came in one day, and I said, “Hey, I hope you don’t mind what I wrote.”
And he turned to me and, “Bob,” says he as he reached out and grabbed at my throat.
“It’s been thirty long years, and we have some arrears, to settle between us two.
So listen up well, ’cause my life has been hell, and I’m feeling mighty blue.
“I’m from Lindsay, you see, not from Tennessee, and I’m still living, I guess you could say.
I lit out from home when I was barely a gnome, fifteen years if I was a day.
I’ve been travelling around, but I’ve come back to town, ‘cause I’m feeling so poorly and lame.
And I see by the door at the old general store they’re selling my last remains.”
He plunked a jug down and I stared with a frown as the ashes spilled out on my desk.
And he let my throat go and said, “I want you to know I’ve come to you with my dying request.”
He seemed so low that I couldn’t say no, then he began with a moaning sound
and said, “When I’m gone and it’s time to move on, I want to be put in the ground.”
Well, a man’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail.
He said, “It’s the fear of the fire drawing near that is making my skin so pale.”
I said, “It’s just a poem that I wrote coming home from a party a long time ago.”
And he said through the tears of thirty long years, “You doomed me to burn when I go.”
He crouched by my desk and raved for the rest of the night of his fear of the fire.
I said, “Those ashes you bought, it’s a tourist shop, don’t make a s
mall thing so dire.
You ain’t yet dead,” I said, shaking my head, but he laughed and he started to glow.
“It’s the fevers,” he said. “Get me a bed. I want clean sheets when I go.”
For a day and a night he kept up the fight as he sweated his life away.
A fever so hot that, believe it or not, he singed the sheets the next day.
And at dawn on the third, I give you my word, all that was left to see
Was a small pile of dust, and I knew it was just, what remained of Sam McGee.
There are strange things done ‘neath the midnight sun
By bank tellers who work in the cold.
The arctic banks have their secret ranks
Of writers and poets I’m told.
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was the night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I created Sam McGee.
18 January 2009
QUENTIN REYNOLDS
A bookshelf is a highly personal thing, and often the books on it bristle with emotional connections that no one would ever guess. There are the old friends that you put on the shelf and return to often, acquaintances that sit there for years, untouched; there are the ones that slip away and are forgotten, and those that seem to wander off on their own accord, yet remain, ghostlike, to haunt the library, like an old lover, with feelings of regret, or sorrow, or confusion. These are the books you think of from time to time and wonder what became of them, and if you would have anything to say to one another if you were in touch again.
I have such a book. It was written by the American war journalist Quentin Reynolds. It was called By Quentin Reynolds. I owned it in a pocketbook, and it made a big impression. Reynolds, as I recall, seemed to be on a first-name basis with Winston Churchill and just about anyone else who you would want to be on first-name basis with in the 1940s.
Probably that book had something to do with me doing what I do, and have done, on the radio these past twenty-five odd years.
The Vinyl Café Notebooks Page 14
