The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  I opened the door. We stepped into what might have been someone’s basement rec room. The end of the Quonset was covered in wood panelling. There was a coat rack to our left and above it twelve pairs of skates lined up on a shelf.

  “Oh,” said Jim Richards, who was the first person we met, “that’s where everyone leaves their skates. If you want to go skating, feel free to borrow a pair.”

  There was a small kitchen in the far corner, serving homemade hamburgers and lemon meringue pie; a large table in the other one with a cribbage board; and two rows of twelve chairs overlooking the ice surface. The chairs were salvaged from the Ericson Theatre when it closed.

  We stayed for three hours. We sat in the seats and watched the rocks lumbering along the ice surface from one end of the rink to the other, smashing into one another with prehistoric booms. Curling, a game invented in Scotland’s hinterland, seems to have been made for the granite grip of a Canadian winter.

  “You gotta have some pie,” said twenty-year-old Andrew Richards.

  “Why?” we asked

  “Best pie in the world,” said Andrew.

  We ate pie and burgers. But most importantly, we fell in love with curling.

  When we left, we were of the opinion that curling may just be the perfect Canadian game, and we were berating ourselves for wasting so many of our winters.

  Where should I begin? Maybe where every curler I met always begins. With fellowship.

  Curling is a sport that fosters fellowship. That is easy to say. And lots of people would say it about their sport. The thing is, curlers mean it. Curlers seem a little closer to each other than others. Every game begins and ends with a handshake. It’s tradition. And curlers don’t mess with tradition. The game unfolds slowly. It allows conversation, not only among team members but between teams. You spend a lot of time standing on the ice, leaning on your broom beside the other curler, and eventually you have to say something.

  Bad shots are ignored, good shots are complimented.

  And when the handshakes are over, the fellowship isn’t. There is another tradition. The winning team buys the losing team a drink. In the old days before liquor licences, you went down to the basement, to the “snake pit,” for your drink. These days you go to the bar. And even if you are playing in a big bonspiel and have an early game the next day, even if you are tired and need to go to sleep, you stay and talk. You linger. You get to know the people you play with and against. You replay the good shots and argue about the strategies. Sometimes it is hard to tell where the game begins and ends.

  It is a surprisingly physical game, hard on the knees. You have to be in good shape if you are really sweeping hard. Two curlers who can really sweep can move a stone an extra ten to fifteen feet, so a skip with two good sweeps can throw to them, and they can take the rock home.

  You can, nevertheless, play at any age. We saw an eightyfour-year-old, whose knees can no longer take the strain, using a special cane to push her rocks down the ice.

  “Oh,” said Jim. “You see that a lot these days. No one minds. It helps people play longer.”

  Name me another sport so forgiving to seniors.

  And while we’re on the topic of seniors, I have heard some people say curling is boring. I say you give a team of seniors a bunch of forty-two-pound rocks and tell them to run up and down a sheet of ice, and I think you have an arena full of excitement.

  But it wasn’t just seniors we saw playing in Clanwilliam. We met a seven-year-old who had been curling for two years. He was there with his grandfather, his uncle and his cousin. We saw a mom and dad playing on the same team with their teenage kids. This is a sport that is designed for families and neighbours. All you need is four people for a team.

  And it’s cheap. An annual membership at the Clanwilliam Curling Club costs $20. Unless you’re a student. Then it’s $15. The club provides the rocks. All you need is a broom and a pair of shoes.

  Everything at the Clanwilliam Curling Club is affordable. Pie? A dollar. Pop? A dollar. Coffee? A dollar for as much as you can drink in a night. The whole thing is run on the honour system. Just like the game.

  There are no refs in curling. You call your own penalties. If your broom touches your rock, or burns it, as they say, you’re expected to remove the rock from the game. Nine times out of ten you could get away with the infraction. No one tries.

  Okay, there are umpires at the big bonspiels, but they are kept behind glass. And they don’t interfere unless they’re asked. It is a gentleman’s game. I don’t know how you say that inclusively. And I don’t want to insult all the women who play just as ... gentlemanly, on teams with other women and, I should point out, on teams with men. But I don’t think I have to fuss about that: curlers don’t take offence easily.

  I have a friend back home, a young mother who plays at the provincial level. I phoned after my visit to Clanwilliam.

  “What do you like about the game?” I asked.

  Like every curler I spoke with, she talked about fellowship.

  “But besides that,” I said.

  “Well, you get to yell,” she said.

  “Yell?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Who doesn’t like to yell? Especially curling talk. HURRY HARD,” she yelled down the phone line. “Hurry hard. Now how great is it to yell that in public?”

  So, yes, I’m loving this sport, though I may be getting ahead of myself. I haven’t actually played. But maybe that is the best place to keep your favourite sport, at arm’s length, in the realm where anything is possible. I still have a lot to learn, for instance, how to read the scoreboard. As far as I can figure, some drunk in a kilt developed the system years ago and people have been trying to make sense of it ever since.

  “It’s just the way we do it,” is the best explanation I got.

  Mostly, I think, I have fallen for curling because, more than any other sport I know, it is about community. And, I would put forward, sport is at its best the closer it can get to that. Take hockey, for instance. Professional hockey was at its best when it reflected the community it came from. Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane have written about this eloquently. In the 1950s, Rocket Richard and the Montreal Canadiens more than personified Montreal. They were Montreal. The team might have underpaid Richard, but they never would have traded him. The community would not have accepted that. Today, professional athletes are only seldom connected to the communities where they play. They are literally free agents. They pop up wherever it suits them.

  The best of hockey was never the professional game. The best was when the old senior leagues from coast to coast competed each year for the Allen Cup and the right to represent Canada in the World Championship. In those days any community could dream of sending their team overseas.

  That is why, when I grew up in Montreal, I grew up wondering about towns like Trail, British Columbia, and Whitby, Ontario—homes to the Trail Smokeaters and the Whitby Dunlops. And why, when I was a man, and I found myself in Trail, the first thing I did was visit the hockey arena.

  Well, curling still works like that. The Briars (for men) and Scotties Tournament of Hearts (for women) are the top rungs for Canadian curlers.

  And when the curling season begins each year, every curler in the country begins the season in the knowledge that they could make it to either tournament. Anyone in any town, in any province, has the same shot.

  And this is not just in theory. This is the way it works. Club playoffs, in every club in the country, are played to choose the teams that will go to the zone playoffs; which are played to determine which teams go to provincial playoffs; which are played to determine the twelve provincial and territorial champions that go to the Briars and the Tournament of Hearts.

  You have to love a sport where any schmo can aspire to playing at a national level. It is, ultimately, a sport of the people.

  2 February 2009

  ROBERT STANFIELD’S GRAVE

  I have an affection for graveyards. And when I found myself
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with time on my hands, I decided to go for a walk in one. I considered the Old Burying Ground, on the corner of Barrington and Spring Garden. The Old Burying Ground is Halifax’s first graveyard, established in 1749, and it looks like something Charles Dickens might have imagined. I might also have chosen Mount Olivet, Baron de Hirsch or Fairview and paid my respects to the one hundred and fifty victims from the sinking of the Titanic who are buried there. I almost did that, as I seem to remember having read that Titanic director James Cameron took the name for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from an actual Halifax tomb, and that there were always fresh flowers on that grave, and many visitors. I thought that might be a worthwhile distraction, but, while I was trying to verify that, I learned Robert Stanfield was buried in Camp Hill, across the street from the Halifax Public Gardens, which more or less means in the centre of town, and I decided to pay my respects to him instead.

  Stanfield, sadly, might need an introduction these days, and the best one I can give is that after he served four terms as the premier of Nova Scotia, he was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. This was back in the 1960s, when the word progressive meant something. His nickname, which he came by honestly, was Honest Bob. There are plenty of people still standing who would tell you Bob Stanfield was the best prime minister Canada never had.

  I once spent an afternoon with Bob Stanfield. It was during his retirement, and we sat and talked in his backyard garden. What I remember most fondly about our time together was the moment I asked him to show me his favourite part of the garden.

  “That would depend,” he replied, “on the time of day.”

  He went on to explain how his appreciation of the garden shifted with the sun. Bob Stanfield was a modest man who understood the beauty of light through leaves. I liked him, and I can’t for the life of me remember if I voted for him. Once, I think.

  So as I set off, I felt I was visiting an old friend of sorts.

  The sign on the cemetery’s iron gate read, Open at Dawn, closed at Dusk, which struck me as all the precision anyone would want on a graveyard sign. Like at many cemeteries, there is a ring road at Camp Hill and then two roads that bisect the graveyard into four quadrants. In the exact centre, where the roads meet, I found an abandoned white chapel. There was a phone number posted for information.

  I called the number and told the man who answered that I wanted to see Stanfield’s grave.

  There was a slight pause, and he explained that while he was happy to give me directions to Stanfield’ s grave, and he did do that, he didn’t think I would find it.

  “There is no stone,” he said. “It was removed. His third wife is fighting about it with his children.”

  I didn’t ask what they were fighting about and considered for a moment calling his children to find out, but I decided the twice-widowed Stanfield deserved the privacy and respect in death that he would have granted others in life. The family would settle things soon enough, and he would get his stone back.

  Undoubtedly both sides were acting out of their own sense of love and loyalty. And sadness, of course.

  I sat on one of the benches for a while with a sense of something that felt like sadness myself, which is not at all what I had come there for, and then I decided that there would be another stone that would have something to say to me if I gave it a chance, so I set off to see if I could find it.

  A graveyard can be many things: a park, a garden, a museum, a history lesson, a conversation with the past. The nice thing about walking in one is that people are usually on their best behaviour. They don’t tend to litter, or panhandle, or do anything too offensive in graveyards, and if you should come upon someone on one of the footpaths, they usually give you wide berth or, at most, a solemn nod, in case, I suppose, you are there on some sad mission.

  Even the dead, on the whole, are at their best. All in all, the monuments are modest. There is not a lot of bad taste in a graveyard.

  Camp Hill is indeed tasteful, if agreeably cockeyed. Stones tipping higgledy-piggledy like crooked teeth. There is a semblance of order, with orchardlike rows to walk down, but it is the order of an old orchard, slightly messy and, you sense, verging on out of control.

  Like all graveyards, or most anyway, it is overwhelmingly green: all leaves, and grass, and on the oldest tombs emeraldcoloured moss, made all the more lovely by the white and grey stone.

  The nice thing about Camp Hill is that no one seems in a hurry to fix things. The stones have been left as they fall or lean, which might be upsetting if it’s your grandmother’s stone that has fallen, but all together it gives you the feeling of wandering through an ancient forest; the deadfalls are part of the beauty.

  There is a sign at the gate, which I missed on the way in but will catch on the way out, that says, Warning. Gravestones and monuments may fall over and cause injury. Which, I suppose, is technically true, but I imagine you would have to be pretty lucky to be there when a stone falls and exceptionally unlucky to be under it when it happens.

  But then I am reminded that bad luck does happen, as it did to Gerald Keeping, age eight, and Bernard Johnson, age ten, buried together, reads their joint inscription.

  As they lived so they rest, killed, I read on their shared stone, by auto in the spring of 1931.

  Sometime after that, as I wandered up and down the rows, I came upon Sir William Young’s grave. Sir William was born in Scotland in 1799 and was, I learn, once the chief justice of Nova Scotia, a brilliant orator, an eminent lawyer and a distinguished statesman, whose gifts and bequeaths to charitable and educational institutions in Halifax mark his high estimate and these are the words that catch my eye, mark his high estimate of the duties and privileges of citizenship.

  The duties and privileges of citizenship are not the duties and privileges we mull often these days. It is good to be reminded of them.

  I was in Wales last summer, and one afternoon I went for a walk. Walking through that green land, I felt the closest I ever have felt to being in heaven—there were rolling hills and green fields and sheep grazing in pastures, the hedgerows had little steps so you could step over them, and in the distance there was a village that I imagined had little pubs where you could have a pint if you were thirsty when you got there. Walking in the Camp Hill Cemetery reminded me of my walk in Wales, although it didn’t feel nearly as close to heaven. It was too contained and, strangely, too old, and Robert Stanfield doesn’t have a tombstone. But it was green, and no one bothered me, and the wind was in the trees. Just as I was about to take my leave, the sun came out, through the leaves, and the quality of the light changed. I thought about Stanfield again, and that afternoon in his garden, and how the light through the leaves would have pleased him. And it might not have been heaven, but it was close enough for a Monday afternoon.

  8 July 2007

  THE IMPERIAL THEATRE,

  SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK

  One morning as I sat in my hotel room in Saint John, New Brunswick, just back from the Saint John City Market, where I had bought a supply of the oily smoked salmon you can get there, I received a phone call from a man I didn’t know. He wanted to tell me a story and was wondering if we could meet. His friend, who had passed away the week before, had been instrumental in the restoration of the Imperial Theatre—the theatre where I would be performing that evening. The man on the phone was hoping, by way of tribute, that I might mention his friend at my show. I would, after all, be playing on the stage that she had been so involved in saving.

  The Imperial, a grand, soft-seater from the vaudeville era, happens to be one of my favourite theatres in Canada. I didn’t, however, know much about it. I had read that it had opened in 1913 and had welcomed some of the biggest theatrical names of that era, including Ethel Barrymore, John Phillip Sousa and Harry Houdini. And I knew it had eventually fallen into disrepair and then had been lovingly restored with gold gilt, a huge chandelier and deep red wallpaper: “the most beautifully restored theatre in
Canada,” wrote The Globe and Mail. It was the story of the restoration the man wanted me to hear. I agreed to meet him.

  In 1929, Jack MacDougall told me, the grand old Imperial had become a movie theatre. It remained so for almost three decades. And then came television, and the Imperial, like so many other theatres of its kind, closed its doors. It was bought by a church group—the Full Gospel Assembly—who renovated it and used it as a church until Jack’s friend, the schoolteacher Susan Bate, walked into the story. That was in the early 1980s.

  “It was the summertime,” said Jack.

  “I noticed a small ad in a local paper, that the Full Gospel Assembly was offering, at auction, the theatre organ. I told Susan. It made her crazy. She made me run home and get the paper so she could see the ad for herself.

  “When she saw it, she said, ‘We can’t let this happen. We can’t let them sell off New Brunswick’s heritage as if it doesn’t matter.’”

  Jack MacDougall was an unemployed taxi driver that summer. And that day, he happened to have his mind on a date. It wasn’t to happen. Susan Bate was so exorcised by the ad that she badgered him into cancelling the date.

  “This is your responsibility,” she told him. “You saw the ad.”

  The sale was to take place the next morning at nine o’clock.

  MacDougall and Bate spent the rest of that night at Reggie’s Restaurant organizing a committee. The next morning MacDougall, who was the only one without a job, was dispatched to the sale. It turned out he was the only one who showed up.

  The lady from the church said, “Wait here,” and she began turning on the church lights one by one.

  “I’ll never forget it,” said Jack. “It was a vision of beauty. The church was a theatre. A theatre I didn’t know existed.”

  The organ, a Wurlitzer, was in a thousand pieces. MacDougall was more interested in the building. He was enthralled by it.