The Vinyl Café Notebooks (18 page)

Bill agreed to do a bit for
Checkup
and, in the course of our conversation, invited me to attend the premiere of his play
Back to Beulah
, which was opening a few weeks later at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

“You should come,” he said.

Well, of course, I did. Are you kidding? I had an invitation from Bill Mitchell himself, who, I imagined, would welcome me like a ... friend? Colleague? Who knows what I imagined. I bought a ticket and flew to Toronto from Montreal as if I had been summoned to Buckingham Palace by the Queen herself. I didn’t understand that Bill hadn’t expected me to follow up on the invitation and had forgotten it the moment he offered.

Bill was capable of that sort of thing, out of generosity, not malice. Pierre Berton was once invited to dinner at the Mitchells’ and arrived a little late. Pierre met Bob Needham sitting glumly on the Mitchells’ front porch.

“I think the fire is out,” said Needham. The Mitchell kids had set the house on fire. But Merna and Bill were nowhere to be seen.

“Bill is out looking for Merna,” said Bob.

Several hours earlier Bill had driven Merna ... well, that was the problem. He had driven her somewhere, and he had promised to pick her up and return her home so she could cook dinner for Pierre Berton and Bob Needham. The problem was Bill couldn’t remember
where
it was he had dropped her and, thus, where it was he should pick her up. He thought it was possible he had taken her to the doctor. But it could have been the dentist. So while his house was burning cheerfully, Bill was driving around the city, with his head out the car window, bawling his wife’s name, while Merna, who was standing in front of the medical building where she was supposed to be standing, tried to convince the police she wasn’t a hooker. Meanwhile, Berton, who was still waiting on
the front porch, watched while an unfamiliar woman with a suitcase burst out of the house.

“I can’t stay here any longer,” she announced on her way past him. It was Merna’s mother.

I now know these sorts of moments to be the common stuff of Bill’s life, but I didn’t know that the weekend I appeared in Toronto, expecting to attend the opening of his play as his special guest. And I was shaken to get there and learn not only was there no ticket waiting for me at the box office, but the people in the box office had no idea I was coming. The theatre, of course, was sold out.

The box office staff took pity on me and put a bridge chair in an aisle. I saw the play, but I never saw Bill, and I left feeling a little special and a lot stood up.

Almost a decade passed before I met Bill again. The next time our paths crossed, I had moved to Toronto and was working at the old CBC Radio building on Jarvis Street. It was a late autumn afternoon when I came out of the building and saw him standing alone in the parking lot looking lost. Mostly in your life you don’t do what I did next. Mostly you don’t do those things you want to do with people you admire, or are attracted to, or love, which pretty much describes the way I felt about Bill. Mostly you think these things, but you let them go. That afternoon I didn’t. Instead of walking away, and wondering about him, I walked up to W.O. Mitchell and introduced myself.

“We spoke years ago,” I said. And then I heard myself inviting him home for dinner. “I have ball tickets,” I said. “You could come to dinner and after we could go to the ball game.”

I didn’t know he was a big ball fan. I didn’t know I was
making an offer he couldn’t refuse. He lit up. But first we had to go to his hotel room to fetch a jacket and dump his briefcase.

He had a room directly across the street at the old Hampton Court Motel. When I prepared to step out onto Jarvis Street in the middle of the block, Bill shyly pulled me back. He pointed south to the corner of Carlton, where there was a traffic light.

“I promised Merna I would cross at the corner,” he said.

That he would both make, and then keep, that promise speaks of the relationship he and Merna shared.

At dinner he held my young son in his lap. At the ball game he kept saying, “I wish Merna was here. She would like this so much.”

That night was the beginning of our friendship. For the next twenty years we got together whenever our orbits collided.

Once, in Winnipeg, when we were both on a book tour, I was ushered into a radio station for an interview to find him sitting in the lobby, having already done his. He wasn’t actually sitting; he had dropped onto a sofa in exhaustion and had slid so deeply into it he was almost horizontal. I had to step over his legs to get by him. It was another autumn afternoon, this time rainy, and windy, and cold. He was only wearing a thin beige trench coat. There was snuff sprinkled over the coat as if someone had seasoned him with cinnamon.

He is too old and too thinly dressed for this, I thought
.

“Stuart,” he said, opening one eye. “Is that you?”

I smiled.

“They’re passing me around the country like a goddamn baton,” he said. “Do you want to have dinner?”

He was reading that day, at lunchtime, to the Canadian Club. At his invitation, I once again watched him perform, this time from the back of the room. He had attracted a crowd of maybe five hundred enthusiastic fans, and faced with their enthusiasm, he came wonderfully alive. I attracted about fifty to my afternoon signing. At dinner I told him I was jealous.

Another time I took my two boys to a now defunct Toronto bookstore where he was signing copies of
Roses Are Difficult Here
. I wanted them to meet him. I wanted them to understand he was someone I thought was important. We stood in line, and appearing like that out of the blue, I wasn’t sure he would recognize me. He did. He snatched the book out of my hand and explained in a voice everyone in the bookstore could hear that he had fought with his editor, my friend Doug Gibson, over a passage.

“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 books. 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.