The Vinyl Café Notebooks (19 page)

So, there I was, on my knees, going through the box, when it became apparent that I had stumbled upon a treasure trove. Not that these books had any great value, just that whoever it was who had chucked them out had been living my life.

What was there? Well, to start with, there was
Gateway to Latin
, 101 pages of pain that I carried with me, or, more to the point, didn’t carry with me, all the way through grade ten. There was
Man and His World
, a reader that begins with the eloquent address delivered by William Faulkner in 1950 when he received the Nobel Prize for literature, and there was
Contemporary English One
.

There was popular literature as well.
Love Story
by Eric Segal, for example, which I reread standing there on the pavement: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart, and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”

I stuffed
Love Story
into my pocket for old time’s sake, and it was just after I did that I found the real treasure. A book that I’m sure you’ve never heard of, but a book that swept me away when I read it in 1969:
The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary
by James Simon Kunen.

I hadn’t seen
The Strawberry Statement
since I was gliding up and down the escalators of Sir George Williams University in my beige corduroy jacket.

I was so transported to have the book in my hands again that I didn’t notice the kid come out of the house until he was halfway down the walk. He looked at me the way you might look at someone going through your garbage.

I was beyond caring.

“These your dad’s?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said the kid. “We’re cleaning out the attic.”

“Your dad,” I said, hefting Kunen’s book, “he’s about fiftytwo years old, right?”

“Exactly,” said the kid, slowing down and looking at me for the first time. “How’d you know that?”

“Just a hunch,” I said.

He left for school, I guess. I finished pawing through the box. I pocketed
The Strawberry Statement
and, like I already said,
Love Story
, and the two readers, and the Latin text.

Five old books, but they were once part of my life, and it felt good running into them like that, unexpectedly, on a cloudy morning in November. Like running into a group of old friends. I brought them to my office. They are there today, on my desk. Sometimes you can get as much pleasure looking at a book as you can from reading it. So they are going to stay where I can see them, until I get tired of them. Then, who knows, maybe I’ll put them into a box of my own on my lawn and see who I reel in.

19 November 2000

THE CREATION

OF SAM M
C
GEE

There have been, over the years, many attempts to get down on paper the essence of a Canadian winter. I think of the opening paragraphs of Hugh MacLennan’s quintessential Canadian novel
Two Solitudes
and his poetic description of Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street on a snowy winter night. I think of William Kurelek’s sunny prairie paintings, of David Blackwood’s dark etchings of the great Newfoundland sealing disaster of 1914.

They all get part of it; they all come close to it in their own way, but none of them get closer to the heart of the matter, closer to the bone-numbing chill of a January wind, than Robert W. Service, the bard of the Yukon, gets in that most famous of his poems, “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

You know how it goes:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee.

Now that is what I call poetry—an epic
chiller
about the night Sam McGee froze to death on the Klondike Trail and then sprung back to life, for a moment, on his funeral pyre.

It begins thus:

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee

Where the cotton blooms and blows ...

Well, guess what? That’s not even close to being true. Not at all. Sam McGee was actually from Peterborough, Ontario. Well, Lindsay, to be precise.

I know this. I have been to his grave. I have spoken to a number of his descendants. I have met his granddaughter.

William
Sam McGee. Born in 1867 of Irish parents, he was a prospector—a sourdough. He had a bank account at the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Dawson City where young Robert Service worked as a teller.

Many of Service’s readers assume that the poet was a hardboiled, long-gone Klondike prospector himself. He was a bank teller. And he lived until 1958. He saw McGee’s name on the bank ledger and pilfered it for his poem. Without permission, it seems.

Sam McGee might have moiled for gold, but he didn’t expire in a snowstorm on the edge of Lake Lebarge. He died of a stroke, I believe it was, on his daughter’s farm not far from Calgary. I thought it was high time someone set the record straight.

If you would permit me then: “The Creation of Sam McGee,
the sequel.” The poem Service would surely have written had he made it to
Sequelsville
. I include it here with a nod to this long winter, and deep apologies to all concerned.

There are strange things done ‘neath the midnight sun

By bank tellers who work in the cold.

The arctic banks have their secret ranks

Of writers and poets I’m told.

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was the night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I created Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee weren’t from Tennessee; that was just a writer’s trick.

And when I think today of what he had to say, of my poem it makes me sick.

I took his name, if it’s all the same, from a list on my desk at the bank.

It’s what writers do, when they’re brewing a stew, to stop it from getting too rank.

He came in one day, and I said, “Hey, I hope you don’t mind what I wrote.”

And he turned to me and, “Bob,” says he as he reached out and grabbed at my throat.

“It’s been thirty long years, and we have some arrears, to settle between us two.

So listen up well, ’cause my life has been hell, and I’m feeling mighty blue.

“I’m from Lindsay, you see, not from Tennessee, and I’m still living, I guess you could say.

I lit out from home when I was barely a gnome, fifteen years if I was a day.

I’ve been travelling around, but I’ve come back to town, ‘cause I’m feeling so poorly and lame.

And I see by the door at the old general store they’re selling my last remains.”

He plunked a jug down and I stared with a frown as the ashes spilled out on my desk.

And he let my throat go and said, “I want you to know I’ve come to you with my dying request.”

He seemed so low that I couldn’t say no, then he began with a moaning sound

and said, “When I’m gone and it’s time to move on, I want to be put in the ground.”

Well, a man’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail.

He said, “It’s the fear of the fire drawing near that is making my skin so pale.”

I said, “It’s just a poem that I wrote coming home from a party a long time ago.”

And he said through the tears of thirty long years, “You doomed me to burn when I go.”

He crouched by my desk and raved for the rest of the night of his fear of the fire.

I said, “Those ashes you bought, it’s a tourist shop, don’t make a small thing so dire.

You ain’t yet dead,” I said, shaking my head, but he laughed and he started to glow.

“It’s the fevers,” he said. “Get me a bed. I want clean sheets when I go.”

For a day and a night he kept up the fight as he sweated his life away.

A fever so hot that, believe it or not, he singed the sheets the next day.

And at dawn on the third, I give you my word, all that was left to see

Was a small pile of dust, and I knew it was just, what remained of Sam McGee.

There are strange things done ‘neath the midnight sun

By bank tellers who work in the cold.

The arctic banks have their secret ranks

Of writers and poets I’m told.

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was the night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I created Sam McGee.

18 January 2009

QUENTIN REYNOLDS

A bookshelf is a highly personal thing, and often the books on it bristle with emotional connections that no one would ever guess. There are the old friends that you put on the shelf and return to often, acquaintances that sit there for years, untouched; there are the ones that slip away and are forgotten, and those that seem to wander off on their own accord, yet remain, ghostlike, to haunt the library, like an old lover, with feelings of regret, or sorrow, or confusion. These are the books you think of from time to time and wonder what became of them, and if you would have anything to say to one another if you were in touch again.

I have such a book. It was written by the American war journalist Quentin Reynolds. It was called
By Quentin Reynolds
. I owned it in a pocketbook, and it made a big impression. Reynolds, as I recall, seemed to be on a first-name basis with Winston Churchill and just about anyone else who you would want to be on first-name basis with in the 1940s.

Probably that book had something to do with me doing what I do, and have done, on the radio these past twenty-five odd years.

I don’t remember how it came into my possession;
probably I stumbled on it in the drugstore, which is where I used to buy my books. In any case, it made an impression— it was one of those books you read when you are a kid that expands your understanding of the world, mainly because it is full of stuff you had no idea existed.

So it was a deal for me, and like a fool, one day, I sold it. I did this on a spring afternoon when I was supposed to be studying for exams. I wanted to go to a movie, and I didn’t have any money, so I boxed up my entire book collection and took the box to a second-hand bookstore and sold everything— including that formative Quentin Reynolds autobiography.

I spent the next four or five years regretting that, until the day I found myself, by chance, walking past the second-hand bookstore where I had done the deed. I wandered in and began looking through the stacks of books while a sort of melancholy settled over me, when low and behold, I came across the book I had sold, the very copy. I plucked it out of the pile and saw my name written in the inside.

I bought it back of course, for three times the price I had sold it for; storage fees, I guess. I held on to it for a long time, and then, somewhere over the years, I lost track of it again.

I have no idea what brought it back to mind, or what I would make of it if I got my hands on a copy today. I am not at all sure how Quentin Reynolds would strike me now that he and I have walked down the same road a little ways. One never knows with old friends. Sometimes reunions can be deep and joyful things. Other times there are nothing but awkward silences and promises to call that are never kept.

20 November 2005

LEACOCK COUNTRY

The little village of Sutton, Ontario, recently swallowed by the town of Georgina, sticks to the south shore of Lake Simcoe like an old photo in a family album.

Walking along the Hedge Road in Sutton, an evocatively narrow and twisty road that runs right along the edge of the lake, it is easy to pretend, as I often do when I walk along it, that you are strolling through the British countryside. That is how I was preoccupying myself the other day when I happened upon Canadian broadcaster Peter Gzowski’s old cottage, where I spent so many happy New Year’s Eves, and which, I feel compelled to report, has been painted an arresting shade of mauve since Peter sold it. Someone has also cut down Gzowski’s favourite (and don’t think the old tobacco bum wouldn’t appreciate the irony) Smoke Tree.

I wasn’t in Sutton, however, to inspect or pass judgment on Gzowski’s old cottage; time marches wearily on, and so did I, along the Hedge Road, past The Briars, past Gzowski’s and over the one-lane-only, historically designated 1912 iron bridge that spans the Black River.

I was heading to Peter Sibbald Brown’s house and studio, to visit the man who famously plucked a burning log off the
living-room floor one smoky afternoon long ago, and whose wit and charm had saved the day for Gzowksi so many other times over the years.

I was going to see PSB, as Gzowski affectionately dubbed him, partly because there are few people in this world who can make me laugh quite as joyfully as he does, and mostly because I had, over lunch that day, learned that Peter Sibbald Brown, who is a collector and an award-winning and elegant designer of books, happened to be working with six or seven handwritten original pages of Stephen Leacock’s manuscript from
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
.

Leacock, as you no doubt know, is Canada’s answer to Mark Twain. He was the most famous humorist
in the world
in the early days of the twentieth century. In fact, it has been famously said that in his prime, more people had heard of Leacock than had heard of Canada.

Sunshine Sketches
is Leacock’s enduring Canadian masterpiece. It was published in 1912, almost one hundred years ago and still sells several thousand copies a year in the New Canadian Library edition.

So I made my way over the bridge and past the little church where Leacock is buried, for this is Leacock country. He grew up and summered on the shores of Lake Simcoe. He knew all the little towns around and about.

When I finally got to PSB’s house, I found the manuscript on his work table—an unlined piece of brown paper that I reached out to touch in awe. As far as Canadian letters are concerned, the piece of paper that was lying in front of me is just about the fountainhead.