The Vinyl Café Notebooks (22 page)

But then I am reminded that bad luck
does
happen, as it did to Gerald Keeping, age eight, and Bernard Johnson, age ten,
buried together
, reads their joint inscription.

As they lived so they rest, killed, I read on their shared stone, by auto in the spring of 1931
.

Sometime after that, as I wandered up and down the rows, I came upon Sir William Young’s grave. Sir William was born in Scotland in 1799 and was, I learn, once the chief justice of Nova Scotia,
a brilliant orator, an eminent lawyer and a distinguished statesman, whose gifts and bequeaths to charitable and educational institutions in Halifax mark his high estimate
and
these are the words that catch my eye,
mark his high estimate of the duties and privileges of citizenship
.

The duties and privileges of citizenship are not the duties and privileges we mull often these days. It is good to be reminded of them.

I was in Wales last summer, and one afternoon I went for a walk. Walking through that green land, I felt the closest I ever have felt to being in heaven—there were rolling hills and green fields and sheep grazing in pastures, the hedgerows had little steps so you could step over them, and in the distance there was a village that I imagined had little pubs where you could have a pint if you were thirsty when you got there. Walking in the Camp Hill Cemetery reminded me of my walk in Wales, although it didn’t feel nearly as close to heaven. It was too contained and, strangely, too old, and Robert Stanfield doesn’t have a tombstone. But it was green, and no one bothered me, and the wind was in the trees. Just as I was about to take my leave, the sun came out, through the leaves, and the quality of the light changed. I thought about Stanfield again, and that afternoon in his garden, and how the light through the leaves would have pleased him. And it might not have been heaven, but it was close enough for a Monday afternoon.

8 July 2007

THE IMPERIAL THEATRE,

SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK

One morning as I sat in my hotel room in Saint John, New Brunswick, just back from the Saint John City Market, where I had bought a supply of the oily smoked salmon you can get there, I received a phone call from a man I didn’t know. He wanted to tell me a story and was wondering if we could meet. His friend, who had passed away the week before, had been instrumental in the restoration of the Imperial Theatre—the theatre where I would be performing that evening. The man on the phone was hoping, by way of tribute, that I might mention his friend at my show. I would, after all, be playing on the stage that she had been so involved in saving.

The Imperial, a grand, soft-seater from the vaudeville era, happens to be one of my favourite theatres in Canada. I didn’t, however, know much about it. I had read that it had opened in 1913 and had welcomed some of the biggest theatrical names of that era, including Ethel Barrymore, John Phillip Sousa and Harry Houdini. And I knew it had eventually fallen into disrepair and then had been lovingly restored with gold gilt, a huge chandelier and deep red wallpaper: “the most beautifully restored theatre in Canada,” wrote
The Globe and
Mail
. It was the story of the restoration the man wanted me to hear. I agreed to meet him.

In 1929, Jack MacDougall told me, the grand old Imperial had become a movie theatre. It remained so for almost three decades. And then came television, and the Imperial, like so many other theatres of its kind, closed its doors. It was bought by a church group—the Full Gospel Assembly—who renovated it and used it as a church until Jack’s friend, the schoolteacher Susan Bate, walked into the story. That was in the early 1980s.

“It was the summertime,” said Jack.

“I noticed a small ad in a local paper, that the Full Gospel Assembly was offering, at auction, the theatre organ. I told Susan. It made her crazy. She made me run home and get the paper so she could see the ad for herself.

“When she saw it, she said, ‘We can’t let this happen. We can’t let them sell off New Brunswick’s heritage as if it doesn’t matter.’”

Jack MacDougall was an unemployed taxi driver that summer. And that day, he happened to have his mind on a date. It wasn’t to happen. Susan Bate was so exorcised by the ad that she badgered him into cancelling the date.

“This is your responsibility,” she told him. “You saw the ad.”

The sale was to take place the next morning at nine o’clock.

MacDougall and Bate spent the rest of that night at Reggie’s Restaurant organizing a committee. The next morning MacDougall, who was the only one without a job, was dispatched to the sale. It turned out he was the only one who showed up.

The lady from the church said, “Wait here,” and she began turning on the church lights one by one.

“I’ll never forget it,” said Jack. “It was a vision of beauty. The church was a theatre. A theatre I didn’t know existed.”

The organ, a Wurlitzer, was in a thousand pieces. MacDougall was more interested in the building. He was enthralled by it.

He arranged to meet the board of the church. They thought he was coming to talk to them about the organ.

“I wasn’t sure why I asked to see them,” he said. “I was in a bit of a fog. And then halfway through the meeting I just blurted it out. I asked them if they would be interested in selling me the theatre.”

They laughed.

“We wouldn’t sell this theatre for a million dollars.”

And that was when MacDougall said, “A million dollars seems like a fair price to me.”

He offered them a dollar as a down payment. They threw him out.

But as luck would have it, the board had a constitutional obligation to take any offer of sale to the congregation. The following week the pastor announced that an unemployed taxi driver had offered to buy their church for a million dollars.

The congregation erupted. No one wanted the building sold. It was, after all, the place where many of them had been baptised and married, and where they had said goodbye to their beloved deceased.

More to get the meeting under the control than anything, the pastor suggested they seek a sign from God. They would
pass the following Saturday in fast and prayer and seek God’s direction.

That Friday, Jack MacDougall went to the pastor and asked what a sign from God looked like. The pastor said he wasn’t sure, but he would know one if he saw one.

“Do you think,” asked MacDougall, “I can raise a million dollars in a year?”

“That,” said the pastor, “would be a bloody miracle.”

“Then,” said MacDougall, “take my dollar and give me a year. If I can raise the million, that will be your sign.”

“Who do you represent?” asked the pastor.

MacDougall, who didn’t represent anyone, and would have been on a date if Susan Bate hadn’t leaned on him, said he represented certain business interests.

He gathered up a collection of his friends, got them to put on their best suits, which in many cases meant their only suit, and had them show up at the next meeting. The deal was done. The congregation agreed to place the matter in God’s hands.

One of the people on MacDougall’s committee was a single mother. A woman on welfare. When they hatched a fundraising scheme to sell brass plaques for $1000 each, she said more than anything she would love to have a plaque with her daughter’s name on it. Sadly, she said, she didn’t have $1000.

“You don’t have to have a thousand dollars,” said Jack MacDougall. “You can raise it.”

And she did. In three weeks. She sold buttons for $5 each at the market. And somewhere on the back of a seat in the Imperial Theatre you can find a plaque that reads,
To my daughter, Christa, love Mom
. It was the first plaque sold. Within a year, they had sold four hundred more.

“It was that first plaque that got things going,” said MacDougall. “We figured if a single mom on welfare could raise a thousand dollars, the rest of us could raise a million.”

And that is more or less the way it went. One day a professor from the university, Joe Pocks, wandered into their committee room saying he would like to raise $100,000.

“I am going to run a raffle,” he said. “I’ll get a thousand prizes and sell a hundred thousand tickets for a dollar each.”

They told him it couldn’t be done. They only had a year. He would have to get three prizes donated every day for a year to get a thousand prizes. It was impossible.

Professor Pocks came back three months later with 350 prizes. He had women in old people’s homes all over town knitting sweaters. Within the year he sold seventy thousand tickets for a dollar a piece.

When their year was up, the committee had raised
more than
$1 million. They bought the theatre from the church. It took another decade and more than $10 million to complete the renovation.

“All sorts of people moved in and out of the project over that decade,” said MacDougall. “It was like a relay race. Lots of people carried the baton over the years.”

They made it to the finish line, and like I said, the Imperial is now one great theatre.

And I will never stand on its stage again without thinking of Susan Bate and Jack MacDougall, and what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it.

4 May 2003

BIKING

ACROSS CANADA

In 1997, Cal Lane, who was living on a boat and working as a welder in Victoria, British Columbia, was accepted into the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design. This meant Cal had to cross the country somehow, and she thought that bicycle would be as good a way as any, and a lot cheaper than most. Seven flat tires and 6078 kilometres in seventy-seven days didn’t change her mind.

“I’d do it again,” she said. “In fact, I’ve been thinking about it.”

And then she smiled and said, “So many memories.”

I made tea.

“Tell me some of them,” I said.

“Saskatchewan was the hardest,” said Cal.

This might surprise some, Saskatchewan being the heart of the prairies and largely flat. I wasn’t surprised. I haven’t biked in Saskatchewan myself, but I have biked in Holland, so I guessed what she was talking about. Fighting a stiff wind across flat land can grind you down in a way that, well, in a way that I imagine even the Rocky Mountains wouldn’t.

“That’s right,” said Cal. “Going up those mountains wasn’t nearly as hard as I anticipated. Coming down them was
harder than you’d think. You have to keep squeezing the brakes for hours on end. That can get tiring.”

Cal said she biked eighty to one hundred and forty-five kilometres a day. At night, she said she and her friend Mike, who biked with her, slept wherever they were.

“We slept beside the train tracks, and once in a churchyard, and another time in a ball field behind a bar.”

Cal said they got good at hiding their tent. If they felt unsure about where they were, they would set it up in a hedge where no one could see them.

“By the end,” said Cal, “we were like little animals.”

Sometimes, she said, she could hear deer around the tent at night. Hear them breathing and snorting. It scared her at first.

“Because I didn’t know what it was,” said Cal.

One night she saw fireflies for the first time.

“I was lying in the tent without the fly,” she said, smiling. She thought they were stars until they started moving around. She couldn’t believe her eyes.

She said the train engineers used to wave.

“They’d blow the horn and wave.”

The people they met were generous.

“They gave us water and food,” she said. “Even restaurants.”

There was a chip wagon in Ontario where they wouldn’t let Cal and Mike pay. “And it wasn’t the only restaurant like that,” she said.

Although Cal and Mike were travelling together, she told me they hardly talked all day. Sometimes Mike would call out and ask if she was okay, and she would squeak her dinosaur horn to say she was fine.

“Mostly,” said Cal, “we just pedalled.”

It was like meditation. They pedalled and pedalled. Every day that’s all it was, the pedals going around and around. The pedals and the repetition of the road and the trees.

“We had no worries,” said Cal. “We didn’t have anything to focus on except
keep pedalling.”

She picked up her teacup and then put it down without drinking any. She stared at the cup for the longest time. Then she smiled and said, “It was so amazing to see the country like that. To see how the landscape changes. It was as if I had run my hand across the entire country like you would on a piano. I feel as if I touched it from one side to the other.”

She said when she and Mike finally arrived in Halifax, they just looked at each other.

“We didn’t know what to do,” she said.

All they knew was how to bike. They had pedalled everywhere. They had pedalled to the store and then to their campsite.

The only injury she got on the whole trip was the day after she finished.

“I got shin splints,” she said. “Because I wasn’t used to walking.”

When I asked her what she remembered most about her trip, Cal didn’t hesitate. “The birds,” she said.

“Every day you heard the same song. Over and over. It was very calming.”

“It wouldn’t change for weeks and weeks,” she said, “and you would memorize the song. And then one day you would notice a new melody joining in and slowly, as the species
changed, the new tune would take over and you would forget the old one. It was lovely.”

Cal isn’t the first person I know who has biked across the country and come back talking about birds. When my friend Noel told me about his bike trip across Canada, the first story he wanted to tell me was his eagle story.

Like Cal, Noel was biking from west to east. One day, around the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, he met a man who was
walking
in the opposite direction.

Noel pulled over to the side of the road, which, of course, you never would do if you were in a car and you saw someone walking along the highway but is the only thing you
can
do if you are on a bike.

The hiker, who happened to be an Aboriginal, told Noel he had left his home in Ontario and was walking to Alberta to visit his brother. He said he had been walking for two months. He said he had lost forty pounds.