Driving Minnie's Piano

by Lesley Choyce

  Somehow, I evolved from being unhappy, “bummed out” as we used to say, and sometimes depressed, into being almost happy.

  Almost, because I never fully trusted being happy. But I was much happier after I had rejected suburban life and moved into that hovel in the wilderness behind Chezzetcook. Good surf was just down the road, free food growing from the berry bushes and nearly free fish from the sea. And there were about a billion square miles of wilderness just beyond the junk pile outside my back door. And all the important stones on the forest floor were covered with moss from there to the Arctic Circle.

  Summer lasted for six months in those days. I had an eight-track cassette player that ran on a big twelve-volt truck battery that stayed charged all summer until one night it finally gave out in the middle of a song by Poco. I also had a wood stove I had bought for fifteen dollars, rolled end over end up a long steep driveway, for proper placement in the kitchen of our house.

  There were gods or angels watching over me. I was good to the world and it was good to me. When things went wrong, however, like getting my van suckered into the bottomless muck of the lower reaches of the driveway, I thought it was the end of the world but it wasn't. Oliver Murphy, an Acadian with a four-wheel-drive truck and an uncanny likeness to Fidel Castro, would come haul it out for a couple of bucks and I'd give him a bottle of Moosehead beer that he would drink in one swallow.

  Although I would return to New Jersey in the fall, I had become unstuck from my unhappiness and saw much light at the end of the tunnel, light that eventually directed a move to Nova Scotia for good.

  I learned back then that I didn't want to spend too much of my life alone. I had been pretty sure I was a character in a bunch of old Neil Young songs up to that point. But I was wrong, as I had been about so many things. (I would also later learn that there are good cops and that some things governments do are worthwhile. I believed exams were evil back then, however, and I still do.)

  Being wrong is where you learn stuff. You almost never learn a damn thing by being right. Fred, the boy in my cartoon project who is either nine or twelve, is famously wrong on some things, which I hope will make him interesting to those kids watching Saturday morning cartoons. He wants to be rich and famous but hates the sacrifices he made to become so. He has five-hundred-dollar running shoes but he doesn't have time to daydream through social studies or roll on the ground with his dog.

  Fred thinks he's smarter than he actually is and so do I. That's why, like Fred, I keep making interesting mistakes. But I still daydream through part of the day and roll on the ground with my dog.

  These days, I don't eat nearly as many edible wild plants as I used to except for cattails, wintergreen, cranberries, blueberries and wild peas. I haven't given up those.

  I am interested in all the ragged loose ends of my life and do a poor job of tying things all together. The tidy ending of things never works well for me, but the loose ends are out there like whipping spruce branches or frayed nerve endings or out-of-control electric wires trying to grab onto something, trying to flag down fragments of real life as time, like a raging north wind in winter, whips it away.

  My daughter driving her car off the road into a ditch in Eastern Passage makes her pensive, reflective and even appreciative for a few days. The seat belt saved her from smacking into the windshield. I can still remember when the seat belt law first came into effect and there was a hue and cry against such common-sense legislation.

  So there: government did this one good thing, right? To hell with the libertarian fools who think you shouldn't enforce something to make people safe. I have a feeling those who protest seat belts are the same ones who oppose gun legislation. Freedom, they cry. Freedom, of, duh, what? And the right to blow the brains out of yourself or maybe your neighbour mistaken for a moose as he hikes through the forest.

  Do you believe how far I've come? I once sat in Students for a Democratic Society meetings with fellow radicals discussing whether we should burn down the ROTC building on our American campus. The next thing you know, I'm spouting platitudes about seatbelts and gun legislation.

  Well, let me and my kids drive ourselves into a steep and muck-filled ditch every once in a while. Yes. Let's do these things and dent up the machine. Then cry, feel bad, and then get up, walk away, go home and get pensive about life, the meaning of danger, of freedom. All those things.

  Soon, I'm back to the ice caps of history and the endless mistakes of Arctic explorers. An Irish/English legislator from the nineteenth century named Arthur Dodd, who had never been to the Arctic, believed there were fertile, temperate islands up there and an easy route through the north to China. He professed this despite the fact that he had not the slightest bit of evidence. I applaud his naive optimism, but unfortunately, he kept sending zealous, ill-prepared British explorers north and west to die or at the very least lose fingers and toes to frostbite. Dodd was an enterprising, idea-fixated yapper who had a great following. The politician bribed surviving Arctic sailors to say he was right about the Northwest Passage and the swell living conditions up north.

  But he never went to the Arctic himself and when the great leaders of Great Britain got fed up with Dodd's foolishness and lies, they sent him off to become governor of the American colony of North Carolina, just before George Washington and Thomas Jefferson decided to light fire to a revolution.

  As far as history goes, lies seem to have been more effective than truth in motivating any given population to: a) explore the unknown; b) kill the king; c) go off to war; and d) start a revolution.

  Listen up. This will probably be on the final exam.

  Locust Blossoms

  Athletes sometimes talk about a semi-altered state of consciousness that occurs when they are “in the zone.” Magical, amazing feats are achieved at this point when you become un-self-conscious. In other words, you don't have to think about what you are doing yet your body and mind are totally integrated into the activity, and then zonk. You just are.

  This happens for me when I write. Sometimes. It also happens when I surf. Sometimes. It requires practice and repetition and a unique state of grace. Sometimes, ironically, you can arrive there by being hyper-aware of who you are and being so self-conscious that you break through some invisible barrier and the division between you and your environment evaporates. You can just be part of whatever is going on. I remember, long ago, reading Ray Bradbury's neat little book called Zen and the Art of Writing wherein he suggests that the best way to write is this: don't think.

  Tell that to your grade seven English teacher. But Ray was correct about this, of course. Maybe we can learn all kinds of stuff by stopping our thought process and just doing it.

  A few years ago I was in Beverly Hills visiting with the movie director Dan Petrie. He had an office in a building where other creative types had offices and Dan pointed out to me Ray Bradbury's office. The walls were all cracked from a recent earthquake and I imagined all these creative types - poets, science fiction writers, screenwriters and independent directors - gathering in the hallway there while the walls were cracking, having a grand old dramatic time of it as they scrambled down to street level.

  I've only experienced two small earthquakes. One little ripple that rattled some stones free from the Hollywood Hills and another while I was asleep on a tatami mat in a Tokyo apartment at five a.m. These were polite little earthquakes that did no damage and I enjoyed both immensely. They made me feel sensationally alive. As long as no one gets hurt, I enjoy most of the primal activities of the planet - the elemental things like big waves or heavy winds or thunderstorms, hurricanes, and the like. As a civilization, our own self-consciousness often prevents us from the basic contact we need with the earth. So we need reminders on a regular basis.

  Tim McCarver, the baseball player, suggested that “the mind's a great thing as long as you don't have to use it.” I assume he was referring to his own sport and how much thought can get in the way of playing well. It's one of those great p
aradoxes and gentle ironies of life. We suggest to our kids, think before you act and that makes perfect sense. But when we do this to the extreme and let it rule our lives, we lose the joy of the action in the self-consciousness of the act.

  I'm reminded again of my grandmother, Minnie, back in that cool mid-morning summer basement. I can still hear the snapping sound of beans as she broke them in half for cooking and then freezing. Exactly why she had to break a string bean in half for cooking still eludes me but she took great joy in it. I was just a little kid then, wearing a raccoon cap on my head because I was a fan of Davy Crockett as portrayed by Walt Disney. Minnie had made me the cap by cutting chunks out of a full-length raccoon coat she had worn in the 1920s.

  I don't know why I was elevated by the early morning bean snapping but I was and I think Minnie was transformed too in her own way. She had moved into a special zone then just as she had earlier while out in the dewy morning fields harvesting the beans planted by my grandfather. Moving into that zone, the transcendental one, happens in many ways, but I think part of it may involve preparation, ritual and repetition. This is why breathing becomes a big part of meditation. You wouldn't think someone really needs to teach you to breathe. But sometimes it helps.

  In surfing, you paddle each stroke, you watch and you listen and you ultimately feel the power of the wave under you. Once you are moving, things happen quickly. There is no time to think or you get whacked in the head here in Nova Scotia by a mightily cold North Atlantic fist of sea. But in order to do it right, whatever it happens to be, you must love the act of doing it. And you have to love the wave, love the words or love the beans. If there ain't love in it, it's not gonna snap.

  In New Jersey this spring, the black locust trees at my parents' house where I grew up were splendid with white flowers, big clumps of them, and when the wind rose, they showered down like fluffy popcorn. Three weeks earlier I had been showered by cherry blossoms in Tokyo and I felt blessed by all the flowers falling on my head that year. My parents were growing great curtains of bamboo along the roads to try and shield out the raucous noises of progress that surrounded them. “You can watch the shoots grow inches by the hour,” my father told me and he wasn't lying. I felt that link again with Japan where the bamboo trees flourish and it seemed unlikely but significant that New Jersey and the neighbourhoods of Tokyo had so much in common. No bombs had ever fallen on this part of Jersey, though.

  My old backyard is a beautiful grove where the shade of the tall, crooked but somewhat elegant black locust trees makes a haven in the midst of the near-urban chaos. Every trip back here robs me of my adult identity and I am twelve years old again, freezing my tongue to the icy iron of the back step railing before tearing it off and screaming from the pain of severed taste buds.

  That and many other mistakes made up my youth, but it was mostly a happy one, punctuated by bouts of self-doubt, loneliness and a kind of anxiety-driven terror that dulled with time until I realized I was more or less just like everyone else.

  The land on which my parents house sits is a triangle, a place where two roads converge. Once they were rural cart paths, then gravel roads, then county connector roads; now they are highways. The locusts and the bamboo continue to offer some wilderness protection from traffic but it is never enough. In the mornings now when I wake up there, the house shakes and windows rattle just like my first morning in Tokyo, only it is traffic, not the quaking of the earth that makes the house tremble. Trucks slamming into manhole covers at 5:30 a.m. instead of tectonic plates shifting beneath the earth. Amazingly, the feeling is much the same.

  Back in Nova Scotia, the wind and the sea rule the day, although I've known days where the combined efforts of both create a sound precisely like that of highway traffic in the distance. If I am in bed and not yet fully awake, I am fooled into believing I am still twelve years old, still living in New Jersey. Before my current self can overtake the boy I once was, I have at least a brief shuddering theory flick through my brain that Nova Scotia and all the rest, the surfing included, is something I conjured up, dreamed into being. But by the time I've planted my two good feet on the floor, I've wrestled myself back into the present and my identity is confirmed by the fact that my clothes seem to fit my current body.

  Alive

  Summer arrives grudgingly slow here in Nova Scotia. April and May breed hostilities against the sluggishness. Rebellions break out and we want to know why we live in such a climate. Then the sky cracks into blue, the winds abate and I discover again this can be a quiet, beautiful land. I walk the shoreline of the Atlantic and rediscover the serenity and power of this deep sea at our doorstep.

  It has been a productive, successful and even adventurous year for me and also one that has stirred the deeper, darker fears. I am not without clues but I am probably not much closer to finding the great truths.

  Satisfied that the great truths are yet far off, I occupy myself with trying to formulate a few good questions. Some are old and stale. Why am I here? What am I doing? Am I making the best use of my time? How can I be happier? How can I be of more value to the world? Or simply, what should I do next?

  Why is it that the satisfaction I get from earning money, writing books, receiving awards and congratulatory handshakes for all my professional deeds is not nearly as fulfilling as simply walking along the sand at the very edge of the sea on a calm, even cloudy morning? The simple answer is that so much involving accomplishments pulls me away from anything that is essential. Follow your intuition and settle for simple things, seems to be the clue, but not the answer.

  The road back to Nova Scotia and sanity, for me, often begins with the trip away to somewhere else. Banff, Paris or Tokyo and then New Jersey. After my father's radiation treatment for prostate cancer, I flew down there to check up on how he was doing. Any return visit to the house where I grew up is fraught with emotional peril but also blessed with sweet visions from my past. Somewhere in my thirties, I think I finally outgrew my nostalgia for my youth but I expect it will creep back into my consciousness within a decade or so.

  On the two-hour hop from Halifax to Newark, I sat beside a New Jersey State Trooper. A six-foot-two, 280-pound Black man with an infectious laugh, Kenny Wilkins confessed that he travelled to meet women, lots of them, and that he found himself attracted to women who were not American. “American women want too much,” he said. “They're too demanding.” So he had a girlfriend in Vancouver, one in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, one in Norway, one in Morocco and he was hoping to enlist one in Spain. He was flying home to his Turnpike job, however, from Newfoundland, where he had struck out. Or as he put it, “I wasn't there long enough to get my bearings.”

  Truth is, Kenny was not a sexist creep. In fact, he was a very nice guy, reluctant to the extreme to admit that he was a Jersey trooper. Most kids growing up in New Jersey had a distinct hatred for state troopers who would bust you for everything from hitchhiking to smoking pot to going five miles over the speed limit. So here I was sitting next to what should have been a loathsome individual and I found myself liking him immensely.

  I told him I was a writer and nearly begged for Turnpike stories, for surely this guy who had logged over a hundred thousand miles of driving on the Pike had stories to tell. “I seen it all,” was the best I could get out of him. No colourful details. And then we talked about growing up in New Jersey, about high school even and about parents. Kenny was very proud of the fact that he had just bought a “small” house. “It only has four bedrooms.” It was small and old (twenty years) by the standard of his friends, he said, who were all buying new and monstrous houses with extensive mortgages that no one ever expected to actually pay off.

  For some reason, I told Kenny about my ancient history days of hitchhiking and doing other illegal things on the Jersey Turnpike. Now that I was older and respectable (well, sort of) and even ten years older than this guy, I felt like I could flaunt it in his face. Which is really pretty dumb of me but there it is.

  “Anyth
ing bad ever happen to you?”

  “Not on the Turnpike,” I admitted. Suddenly I realized nothing bad ever did happen to me all those times thumbing up and down the Pike from Exit 4 to Exit 8 as I attended Livingston College. No trooper ever hassled me because I only caught rides outside the tollbooth. I was a rebel but I wasn't stupid. I also told him about the Marine with the case of Budweiser, just back from the horrors of Vietnam, who gave me a very scary ride; the other drunk on a highway in North Carolina; and the time I was stuck at an Interstate in Alabama - a northerner with hair down to my armpits in a sea of rednecks. I gave it up when Kenny's eyes began to glaze over.

  Kenny asked me about writing. He asked if I had any of my books with me. I didn't. At that point, I don't think he believed that I actually wrote books. Not that it's a big deal. It's just that unless you can show the goods, sometimes people think you're just trying to impress them by being a writer. All I had was other people's writing: a Kevin Major novel, a manuscript about riding a bicycle around Cameroon by Neil Peart (the drummer from Rush), a book by Leo Buscagila (wonderfully corny and profound) that I'd been meaning to read and a magazine put out by the Buddhists called the Shambhala Sun. On the cover of this issue was the provocative question: “What Happens After You Die?”

  I actually broached that very subject with Kenny. But he didn't want to talk about death. I think he'd seen too much of it in the cruelest forms. I was thinking about my father and the cancer and admitted I was flying down to see if my father was telling me the truth - that the radiation treatment had gone quite fine and that he was doing well.

  So I sidelined the discussion onto gun control and asked my state trooper friend how come Americans were so screwed up that they couldn't get any decent gun control going. It's about this time in any of my Canadian-American conversations that I foolishly start boasting about Canada and how far ahead of the U.S. we are in areas such as gun control and socialized medicine, all the while realizing that some of our advances are just holding on by a thin, frayed thread of tradition and hope.