Driving Minnie's Piano

by Lesley Choyce

  “Everybody carries guns these days,” Kenny said out loud, too loud, just as the aircraft was circling Newark and getting ready to land. We did that nice little forty-five degree tilt where I got to see the skyline of New York, then the suburbs and oil refineries of my native state in a splendid skewed angle. By the time we landed, I had Kenny ranting about all the deadly hardware that people on the Turnpike packed these days and how, when he stepped out of his cruiser, he expected to confront any form of fire power from a cap gun to a rocket launcher. “You gotta be ready to respond to either one with the appropriate measures.”

  On our way off the plane, Kenny was still talking about guns real loud. I was the only one on board who knew he was a cop, but everybody else just saw a large Black man who looked like he'd been on steroids and they gave us a fairly wide berth as we ambled up to Immigration.

  My brother is waiting for me at the airport and we drive south to Cinnaminson. Once beyond the blight of the industrial wastelands of northern New Jersey, the trees are tall and green with new leaves. A powerful sadness washes over me as the landscape softens. If only we could turn back the clock for New Jersey to somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, I could live happily in such an idyllic natural environment. But that world is gone. You can't bring back the New Jersey that once was.

  In Nova Scotia, the marsh remains brown well into the warmer days. The blessing of green is hard won by the warmth that is kept at bay by the sea and by cold northern nights. My garden sits on the edge of the wide marsh just a few feet above sea level. In May, I roll the ancient rototiller from the dilapidated Acadian shed and she starts on the second tug. One to pull gas into the carburetor and a second to ignite the spark. It's one of those rare miracles of a mechanical contrivance, a rattletrap beast that functions more on sheer spirit than physics.

  Pamela asked me recently about what is alive and what isn't. This query was prompted by the fact that I talk to things that don't appear to be alive - things like rocks and cars and rototillers. And houses. I fumbled with an answer. “Well, I talk to things that aren't necessarily alive but I am sure they have some sort of spirit,” I said.

  “How can a rock have spirit?”

  “I don't know. I just think it does.”

  “And a car?”

  “Yeah, in a certain kind of way. I think a car carries some of the spirit of the people who have driven it.”

  We recently sold the old 1987 Aries station wagon that we'd driven for ten years. Damn, if I didn't feel saddened by losing that old friend. I suppose it was because the beast had served the master well and I felt a sense of betrayal in trading it in on something newer. “This car was used in my first music video,” I told the used car dealer. I could still picture perfectly the great mandala-like swirling image of the front left wheel spinning, creating an optical illusion of going backwards. The whole idea of using one of the world's least sexy cars in a music video had appealed to me.

  “No kidding,” said the large, cigar-smoking salesmen, Jack Boutlier. He thought I was making it up. “Better tell me of anything wrong with 'er, so I can fix things up for the next owner.”

  Suddenly I was relieved. Jack would actually improve the car, sell it to someone who needed it. I was off the hook. “It's a little bouncy,” I said. Our deal was already done. But I couldn't bring myself to tell him that the shocks and struts were totally shot from bouncing up and down over potholes on the road where I live.

  Cars know when you are about to sell them. They sense it and get depressed and then things start to go wrong with them. That's partly how I know they are alive. My rototiller always starts on the second pull even though it's older than me - because it intrinsically knows I will arrive one May morning and expect it to start. It sits in the drafty old wooden shed all winter waiting for the big moment. It will not let me down.

  When I walk through the spruce forest and feel the comfortable thick carpet of moss beneath my feet, when my eyes feast on the healthy green of the seemingly endless repetitive floor of this coastal forest, I talk to it as well. I tell it how great it looks. “Way to go.” “Brilliant.” “Keep it up.” Does it hear me? My kids hear me talking to it. My dog hears me and none of them thinks I'm crazy. On the beach, the lichen covers the rocks and offers up bewitching yellows, oranges, and pale greens or greys and I smile and laugh like I am the audience at a dazzling stage performance. Is lichen alive? Of course, it's alive and it is stunning and perhaps proud of its life.

  The lichen also grows on my roof and must have some kind of acid that eats away at asphalt shingles. While this is an annoying truth when it comes to home repair, it is a comforting thought that the lichen is a slow but persistent harbinger of natural cycles. I've seen bright yellow lichen on ancient fishermen's sheds reducing shingle and wood back to a powdery dust that floats away at high tides into fine sediments drifting east towards the Grand Banks.

  I don't know about the lifespan of the various lichens or about their individuality but I know that they have a kind of peacock aura for me, strutting their stuff on roof or rock. And what can I say, but “Hello, how is it going? Keep it up.” And, of course, I cling to the comfort of knowing that I can eat lichen if I am ever lost in the wilderness and starving. Canada is full of lichen. If Farley Mowat is right, and he damned well better be, then all I have to do is munch away like a kid with a bag of potato chips. Bring on the tundra, the great northern forests, the rugged, craggy coasts. The sumptuous feast is waiting.

  I have tried it on occasion and found it wanting. But I think it needs to be soaked in water, salt water preferably, to soften it up and make it more palatable.

  Recently on a trip to Tokyo, I attended an extremely formal lunch with the mayor of one of the city boroughs of Tokyo, Itabashi. In the lacquered box before me was an assortment of what Sunyata would have called Klingon food - seaweed, tentacled things, mushrooms of extremely odd colours and a black fungal-looking delicacy that turned out to be pickled, well, tree fungus. Where I come from, people only pickle fish parts or garden crops. The black fungus, however, was delicious and I devoured it with chop sticks like I'd been hanging out in Japanese noodle parlours all my life. If my Japanese had been better, I would have told the mayor about lichen. Instead, we talked at length about singing Enya songs Karaoke style.

  One of the “assignments” I had given to myself for my trip to Japan was to have several satori experiences. Awareness. Discovery, eye-openers for the mind and soul. There was no genuine satori at the lacquered box lunch where I had to bring “official greetings from my people.” I had not expected that. The mayor had done a formal greeting to me and I was expected to return the favour. I was a little taken aback. Who were my people? Lawrencetowners, Nova Scotians, Maritimers? Canadians? I had no time to consider who my people were so I said, “I bring you the warmest greetings from my people to everyone here in Itabashi and I know that we have so much in common.” My translator must have elaborated on this because her translation was a long eloquent event that pleased the mayor immensely.

  The slightly off-kilter, counterpoint conversation that followed through my harried interpreter moved on to a discussion of Karaoke and food, especially seaweed. I boasted of the fact that I could collect seaweed from the waters where I surfed. I could eat it fresh from the sea while surfing or take it home and dry in the sun. “Most of my countrymen,” I said, because I kept reminding myself that I should speak for my people, not just me, “scoff at seaweed but I myself am a huge fan of dulse, Irish moss, certain chewy forms of kelp and rockweed.”

  I think my long-winded remark lost something in the translation, for the mayor looked puzzled and consulted with his several deputy mayors sitting on his side of the table. I tried to restore the comradery with the innocuous remark, “The sea is such a wonderful provider,” and a quick translation brought smiles all around. I decided to become less loquacious and nibbled heartily at my fungus, making satisfactory noises that needed no translation.

  A Zen mas
ter once said, “Enlightenment is an accident but some activities make you accident prone.” Like celebrating simple life forms such as lichen. So whenever I hike across the beautiful rubble of boulders near the east end of Lawrencetown Beach and the lichen is out in full plumage on the grey stones, I celebrate the possibilities. If I was far, far away from home and starving, I'd have plenty of hope. Because I celebrate, I have made psychic contact with lichen friends and I may be crazy but I am happy. Lichen makes me happy, I admit it. In a world where you have the choice between being happy, feeling disgruntled or having no feeling at all, I prefer to be happy. Lichen happy. What do I have to lose? If you find joy in a thing, it probably has a spirit (a life, if you prefer) or else, perhaps, your joy in it has given it a spirit.

  And what about rocks then? Are they alive? For the sake of argument, I'll say yes. Most rocks have good spirits - if you want them to. I'll tell you first about one bad rock, though. I was twelve, a pubescent mineralogist, a collector and namer of rocks. I had a great rock collection all my own with glued numbers on every specimen and a notebook with a list of corresponding numbers and names - milky quartz, slate, amethyst, the fickle shiny flaked mica, granite (rockhounds repeat the age-old pun about this one whenever possible. “I'm not a hundred percent sure what it is but we'll take it for granite.”), on and on into the more exciting geodes and the ignominious slag. My father wasn't sure if slag was something you could consider a rock. “Slag is what's left over after you burn coal.” There was a lot of slag in New Jersey in those days. I liked slag, however, because of its asteroid-like quality. It was like something that would be left lying around after a nuclear blast destroyed the world and, at twelve, I thought war, any kind of war, was cool.

  One day, fellow rock fan Bobby Yeager and I, while hiking through the sandy South Jersey fields, came across a hard white rock that looked like a golf ball. It wasn't in our identification book so we called it a moon rock because we deduced through no logic whatsoever that it had come from the moon. It was perfectly round, white, heavy and hard. Bobby wanted to throw it at something. A wall or a window. He wasn't a real rockhound like me but preferred to find rocks and throw them at things, usually in hopes of breaking something. Vandalism was in his nature and unlike the Zen master, happy to simply sit and be with a rock, or me who wanted to catalogue it and keep it in an egg carton like a prize, Bobby wanted to destroy something with it. Bobby was a really nice guy, older than me, who had taught me to smoke cigarettes and look at topless women through a miniature picture device on his father's key chain. All I had to offer back in friendship for these gifts was knowledge about rocks and minerals and, of course, slag.

  The moon rock fit nicely in the palm of the hand and I held onto it tightly, realizing that Bobby could probably not hold back from throwing it at a passing car or a bird or the glass insulator on the power lines. After some more hiking around in the early afternoon sweltering heat of a southern New Jersey summer day, I discovered I had a headache. “I think I better go home,” I said.

  “It's the rock, man,” Bobby said. “It's an evil rock. It gave you the headache. Let me see it.”

  I reluctantly handed it over. Within minutes Bobby had a headache too. The moon rock was doing something weird and evil to our brains. I had never encountered this problem with all the other benign rocks I had collected in my youthful days. Perhaps there was an alien life form inside the rock or some Russian mind control device. I was twelve; anything was possible and even likely.

  “We have to break it so it won't destroy our minds,” Bobby said. Smacking things or breaking them was his solution to most problems. Breakage was his favourite form of creative communication next to throwing things.

  “I don't know,” I said. “What if breaking it open unleashes some awful force upon the world?” My headache had suddenly intensified as if the rock knew what Bobby was suggesting. I could tell from the grimace on Bobby's face that he was hurting as well.

  “Yeah, but what if we don't break it open and the headaches get worse?”

  “Why don't we just leave it? Or just throw it in the pond?” I suggested, pointing toward the lily pads and muddy water of Steele's Pond.

  “We can't take that chance,” Bobby said with great certainty. I didn't know what chance he meant. “Let's go to your house and get a hammer.”

  “Okay,” I said. Bobby was older than I was. I often naively assumed he must know what he was doing. And anyway, my head hurt and I was tired of thinking.

  In the cool basement of my house, we failed at cracking the moon rock open with a normal claw hammer and I rooted around my father's tool bench until I came across a really serious looking ball-peen hammer. I still had an inkling that if we actually cracked open the rock it might just destroy the world, but that in itself didn't seem like a big thing any more. Bobby was certain that our headaches would go away if we busted open the rock. Besides, we had to see what was inside. It was an experiment. Maybe no one had ever cracked open a moon rock before. Or found one. We were in uncharted mineralogical territory here.

  Wham! The ball-peen hammer came down hard on the moon rock, caught it square on its round head, and made it shoot off across the basement like the golf ball that it appeared to be. It took several minutes of searching through the hanging steel vines of my father's winter tire chains in the darkest corner of the basement to find it again.

  “It's a good thing it didn't break a window,” Bobby said but I know he didn't mean it.

  “Maybe it's too hard to crack with any normal tools,” I offered, in hopes that Bobby would give up. “It might take something stronger, like a nuclear blast to do the job.” I watched a lot of 1950s science fiction movies in those days and whenever something wasn't working out with alien invasions, nuclear weapons were discussed as a solution.

  “We can't give up,” Bobby said. “Do you still have a headache?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  Wham! The hammer came down harder this time and the rock fractured with a deafening sound. The moon rock had been breached. I waited for the unleashing of a horrendous evil force and the end of the world. Everybody expected the world to end any day during those times, from one cause or another.

  “Wow, my headache's gone,” Bobby said. “We've freed ourselves from the moon rock's power.”

  “Yeah,” I said, although, in truth, I think my headache was worse after the godawful noise of smashing the rock. My ears were ringing. “Look, it's like glass inside.”

  The inside of the moon rock was a dark opaque brownish reddish colour and not at all like the white skin. It had cracked into three pieces. Now that it was no longer perfectly spherical, however, it seemed less exotic, less potent and less interesting. “You keep one piece and I'll keep one piece. That way it can't have any power over us any more.”

  I agreed. But there were three pieces. “I'll throw the third piece in the pond,” Bobby said. “That way, the rock can never get its power back because no one will be able to put it back together.” We were still acting through a classic SF plot that was perfectly familiar to us. Bobby was certain we had saved the world but we were both somewhat disappointed now that the rock had “lost its powers.” I labelled my piece of the moon rock as number 89 and in my notebook wrote, “moon rock.” A few days later I learned that Bobby had tossed the third piece in the pond as promised but then later got distracted and lost track of his fragment of the stone. He was probably lying because he was congenitally incapable of carrying anything in his hand for any length of time without throwing it at something.

  My moon rock chunk became dull and uninteresting but later that week I heard on the news that President Kennedy got mad at the Russians for shipping missiles into Cuba. Adults got all fired up over this and it sounded like we were ready to go to war: nuclear war, of course. At school, I asked Bobby Yeager if he was scared. He said he wasn't, that things were pretty boring and at least a war “would be different.” I tried really hard to get worried about a nuclear war but I
couldn't see what the big deal was. The Russians already had missiles they could launch from far away to blow us up and we had missiles to blow them up. President Kennedy had issued some kind of ultimatum and we Americans thought that was pretty cool. In retrospect, of course, it was pretty dumb, with the stakes being what they were. But fortunately for us all, the Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who we all thought was really evil, decided he wasn't willing to sacrifice the world for the sake of a few missiles in Cuba, so we all didn't die that year. Which was fine by me because I was only a kid and hadn't grown up yet.

  I stopped hanging out with Bobby Yeager when I realized that his ambitions for getting into trouble were much larger than mine. He eventually moved to Idaho and then Alaska and then Hawaii and back to Idaho and I wonder if he remembers the moon rock at all. I moved to Nova Scotia where the shoreline is like one endless ribbon of rocks of all shapes and sizes. On cold but still spring mornings I keep my eyes down as I walk the shoreline and look for interesting rocks. Some of my current favourites are sculpted smooth sandstone pieces that have delicate markings like Japanese artwork naturally tattooed into their surface - veins of other minerals, actually, that create amazing, graceful images that have been shifting as the rock erodes over thousands of years. I offer the rocks special compliments as I pick them up and ask if they mind going home with me. At my farmhouse some rest on windowsills in the sunlight.