The Vinyl Café Notebooks
Read The Vinyl Café Notebooks Online
Authors: Stuart Mclean
ALSO BY
STUART M
C
LEAN
FICTION
Stories from the Vinyl Cafe
Home from the Vinyl Cafe
Vinyl Cafe Unplugged
Vinyl Cafe Diaries
Dave Cooks the Turkey
Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe
Extreme Vinyl Cafe
NON-FICTION
The Morningside World of Stuart McLean
Welcome Home: Travels in Small-Town Canada
EDITED BY STUART M
C
LEAN
When We Were Young:
An Anthology of Canadian Stories
VIKING CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
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New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
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Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 2010
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)
Copyright © Stuart McLean, 2010
Illustration of crow copyright © Dan Page, 2010
The Vinyl Cafe is a registered trademark.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available
upon request to the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-670-06473-1
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For CBC Radio,
for giving me a place
to do what I love
All that I hope to say in books,
all that I ever hope to say,
is that I love the world
E.B.WHITE
CONTENTS
A Letter to a Young Friend Heading Back to School
The Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company
The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library
The Imperial Theatre, Saint John, New Brunswick
Roger Woodward and Niagara Falls
The National Umbrella Collective
DRIVING THE 401
My dear friend,
I am on the road again. Just a short trip to Montreal and back. We left home yesterday morning and drove along the 401 in an old tour bus that Blue Rodeo used last week in the Maritimes. Our tour manager, Don, set off from London at eight in the morning and picked me up at ten in a shopping mall parking lot by the highway. We picked up Bill, who is doing the sound at tonight’s show, at a roadside hamburger joint in Port Hope.
Don and Bill are in the back of the bus watching a video as I write. I am alone in the front. I have Steel Rail on the surround sound stereo, cranked up loud. They are on the show today. You would enjoy them, I think. I am listening to them sing about the highway right now. While I listen, I am watching the highway slip by, and writing this note to you.
So many times we have made this trip together. You and I. I remember the time the snow began almost the moment we left. It didn’t look serious at first. It was blowing in fine wisps across the top of the pavement.
I said, “I bet that is the way sand blows across the desert at the start of a windstorm.”
By the time we got to Belleville, the snow was hitting the windshield on the horizontal and I was peering over the wheel. All that was left of the pavement was two black stripes. I wonder if you remember that trip? It was a long time ago. Come to think of it, I’m not sure we had even met. That drive was with someone else. I don’t think you would have liked it, though. There were hundreds of cars in the ditch. Hundreds! Cars were flying off the road all around us. It was as though someone were sweeping them away. I wanted to stop, but the person I was with, the one I thought might have been you, insisted we keep going. It took thirteen hours to cover what will take us five hours to cover today. God willing.
I remember another trip. This one was in the summer. I still had the old Toyota. It didn’t have air conditioning, and the gear box, which was right between the two front seats, used to heat that car up like an oven. I was driving with my boys, who were still young at the time. We stopped every half-hour for Popsicles and pop or I swear we would have passed out.
Everyone says the 401 between Montreal and Toronto is the most boring stretch of highway in the country. I guess they are right, but it holds a lot of memories for me. That is for sure.