The Vinyl Café Notebooks (31 page)

What I would like to put forward is that perhaps the time has arrived to add the umbrella to the social safety net.

If we lose our health, we have medicare. If we lose our job, there is employment insurance. When we lose our youth, there is the old age pension. Why shouldn’t there be help when we lose our umbrellas? Which just like health, wealth and youthfulness we all know we are bound to lose one day, no matter how mindful we are.

I would like to propose The National Umbrella Collective.

Because even in the unlikely event you are one of those someones who find more umbrellas than you lose, it can’t be easy on you, it can’t be all sunshine and roses, because I have, as I said, found the odd umbrella and I know what happens.

There is an initial swell of good feeling, as if finally life’s balance has begun to tip your way, and if it keeps tipping maybe even stock trades and real estate investments might work out, or at least break even.

But then the wave of doubt hits. What happens, you wonder, if it starts to rain? What happens if you put your new umbrella up and the original owner sloshes by, shoulders hunched, and recognizes it? What happens then?

Thus, my proposal.

Tomorrow morning, whatever the weather, take your umbrella with you when you leave your house. When you get where you are going, leave your umbrella behind—leave it on the backseat of the taxi, or propped on the seat of the subway, or up against a newspaper box on the street outside your office. You don’t want to tote it around all day, and let’s face
it, if you did, you’d eventually leave it somewhere anyway, so leave it somewhere obvious, where it will wait for the next rainy day guy who forgets his—a guy who might even be you.

If we all did this, if we all agreed to agree on the matter of public umbrellas, we could all be a little bit happier on rainy days.

23 October 2005

BOB DYLAN’S

PHONE NUMBER

I have a notebook with Bob Dylan’s home phone number in it. I know it’s authentic because I got the number from Pete Seeger. Pete didn’t actually
give
me the number. He enabled me. He left me alone with his phone book, which was open at the
Ds
at the time (I don’t remember, but that would be the
charitable
explanation). It is possible that the phone book was closed when I picked it up.

This was long ago and far away, although I don’t mean to imply I wouldn’t, if placed in the same situation today, flip through Pete’s phone book. The point of this, or part of the point, is that I have had Bob Dylan’s home number for a long time. More than twenty-five years.

Here’s how I got it. I was working on a profile of Pete Seeger for the CBC Radio show
Sunday Morning
. Pete had invited me down to his house on the Hudson River, where, at eightyseven, he lives today, in case you were wondering. I had flown down to New York City, rented a car and driven up the Hudson to the town of Beacon. As I recall, I slept on a couch on Pete’s sun porch.

Although he had graciously invited me into his home, Pete and I were having trouble with each other. Ever modest, he
was doing his best to avoid talking about himself. Every time I suggested bringing out my tape recorder, Pete would suggest something else.

“Let’s go down to see the boat,” he said. Pete was and still is involved with the sailing sloop
Clearwater
and a project to draw attention to the fragile health of the Hudson River.

“Let’s go visit a school,” he said another morning. And off we went to a local elementary school, where Pete had been asked to drop by and sing a few songs.

When I finally sat him down and turned on my tape recorder, all Pete would talk about was Woody Guthrie.

When he finished that, he sent me back to New York City to talk to Woody’s wife, Marjorie, and his manager, Harold Levanthol.

After a couple of days of this toing and froing, I was beginning to panic. Finally, in desperation, I told Pete we
had
to do the interview.

“Okay,” said Pete, “You go into the bedroom, and I will be there in a second.”

That is how I came to be sitting on Pete Seeger’s bed staring at his phone book, which was lying there on the bed in front of me, either open at the
D
s or not.

In any case, pretty soon it was, and I remember, as if it were yesterday, staring at the handwritten notation that read,
Bob Dylan (Home) Malibu
.

I knew this piece of information wasn’t meant for me, and I could have closed the book. I did, but I wrote the number down first, and soon after I did, Pete came in the bedroom. We did the interview, I wrote and edited the piece, it went on
the radio, and when it was all over, well, I had Bob Dylan’s home phone number.

Now, once you possess something like that you have more than the number, you have a problem. What are you going to do with it? I considered a number of possibilities. I could call Bob Dylan, and when he answered, I could hang up. Or I could ask for “Larry.” Or, better, “Pete,” which would be sort of clever.

If I did any of those things Bob Dylan would have to engage me in conversation. He would have to tell me I had the wrong number, and I could say thanks and hang up, but I would have had a conversation with Bob Dylan. Of course I could also try to do that—have a
real
conversation with him, I mean.

I knew that if I did
any
of these things, especially the latter, Bob would probably have his phone number changed and then, well, then I would have caused problems for him, something I didn’t really want to do, but more importantly I wouldn’t have his phone number anymore, would I?

I decided that
having
his phone number, and therefore possessing something no one else I know possesses—that is, the
possibility
of phoning Bob Dylan—was far better than any version of a real call that I could imagine.

So I never called.

I have the phone number in front of me right now, and even though a lot of water has gone under the bridge, for Bob and me, even though it is pretty clear neither of us are going to be
forever young
, and even though he may have changed the number many times since that afternoon, maybe he hasn’t.

And because I haven’t called, and because I never will, that possibility still exists today, and will tomorrow too—the
possibility that one lonely night I could call him, and we could talk, and if we did, who knows? The possibility exists that we might even have something to say to each other.

Just having it keeps that little dream alive and provides me, whenever I think about it, with a sense of quiet satisfaction.

I have Bob Dylan’s phone number, and because I do, my little world shines brighter.

25 March 2007

THE GIRL IN THE

GREEN DRESS

I went to an all boys’ school. I was painfully shy and selfconscious, especially around girls. So I never had a girlfriend. Not even close. When everyone else was falling in love and kissing each other, I wasn’t kissing anyone.

In grade ten there was a school dance. It was held on a Friday evening in October. I was, maybe, fifteen years old. I wanted to go to the dance. I bought a ticket. And then I came face to face with the
next
step. I needed a date. When you go to an all boys’ school, you can’t show up at a dance without a date. If everyone did that, there would be no one to dance with. Only a loser would go alone. Probably no one ever had gone alone in the history of the school. I wasn’t about to be the first.

I had to find a girl to go with. And I didn’t have a hope of doing that.

I could have asked my friend Marilyn. She was sort of the girl next door—a pal who had a cottage up at the lake. But I didn’t ask her. I don’t mean disrespect, but I didn’t want to go with a pal. I wanted romance. Instead of doing something about that, I waited for something to happen. Of course, nothing did.

Maybe in some spoony moment I phoned a girl, intending to ask her to come with me. I seem to remember doing that, but probably her mother answered and I hung up. I used to do that from time to time, mostly from phone booths so no one in my family could be party to my ineptitude. Or, perhaps, my desire. Phoning a girl was the scariest thing in the world. Rejection, the likely outcome, seemed so certain and so horrible that just dialing the numbers took hours of preparation.

So on the Friday night of the dance when my dad told me he would drive me, and I said that would be okay, I had to come up with a story that would explain my missing date. I told him I had arranged to meet her at the dance.

He dropped me at the front door of my school. I hung around outside, waiting for him to leave. When he was out of sight, I took off. I had a plan.

There was that same night a teen dance at a nearby community centre that I had read about in a local paper. My plan was to go to that dance, find a girl there and ask her to come to the school dance with me.

I was desperate. I couldn’t go alone.

I got to the community centre and scoped the room. All of the girls were wearing jeans. That was a deal breaker. I couldn’t take a girl in jeans to my school dance. It was a semiformal. There was one girl wearing a dress, however. I waited for a slow song and asked the girl in the dress to dance with me. She agreed. While we danced I told her about the dance at my school.
Want to go with me?
I asked. As I write this I am thinking it could sound kind of cool. I go to one dance, pick up a girl and take her to another. I want you to understand that I was frantic. Cool was nowhere on the radar.

Surprisingly, the girl agreed. I remember her dress, the one that made me choose her. It was green. But that’s
all
I remember. I certainly don’t remember her name. But if this sounds vaguely familiar, if you are the girl in the green dress, I would love to talk to you again. I would love to say thanks.

But that is not why I still think of that night. What I think about is this: as we walked from that community dance to the dance at my school, I made the girl in the green dress promise she wouldn’t tell anyone at the dance where we had met.

“I’m going to tell everyone that I know you from my cottage,” I said.

I can’t remember how I explained this to her. I’m sure I didn’t tell her the truth. The truth was I didn’t want anyone to know I was a desperate loser who had to find his date at a local community centre at the last minute.

So we went to my school dance, and the only other thing I remember from the rest of that night is that I walked the girl in the green dress home. I had never kissed a girl before, and I remember as we came upon her house, I began to wonder if this was going to be the night I was finally going to get kissed. It wasn’t.

And here is why I am telling you all this. Here is what I want to know. Why all those lies? If I had told my buddy Mike that I didn’t have a date the week before the dance, I know he would have fixed me up. He might even have offered anyway. I seem to have a vague memory of that happening. But I didn’t let him.

And why didn’t I tell my dad? What a great father-and-son talk that could have been.
Hey, Dad, can I tell you something?

And while I was walking that girl in the green dress home, why didn’t I tell her I had never kissed a girl before, and that I really wanted to kiss her goodnight. Why didn’t I tell her I was nervous, and would do it if I knew how, but I didn’t know how. Why didn’t I tell her I was afraid? How adorable would that have been? Who could have resisted that? The simple truth would have got me my heart’s desire.

I have wondered about that over the years. It has taken me an awful long time to learn that simple lesson. I am getting better at it these days. Speaking from my heart and saying what I really and deeply feel. I try to do it especially when I am feeling afraid and vulnerable because I have learned that the only thing that ever really serves you is the truth, especially when it’s hard and difficult.

I try to remember that if I had spoken my heart, that girl in the green dress probably would have kissed me that October night, the wind blowing the leaves, the moonlight suddenly so much softer.

1 October 2008

THE DESK LAMP

I bought a lamp at a craft show. It is a small table lamp, less than a foot high. It has an antique brass stand and a shade made of milky glass. It is too low to the ground, or, to be more precise, to the desk where I work, to shed any light and too reticent about the light-shedding business in any case—it tends to “glow” rather than illuminate, the light too soft to be of any help other than to the mood.

Yet in the mood-setting business, my little lamp is a prince among lamps. A day doesn’t pass without it brightening my mood.

I turn it on every morning when I sit down to set about my work (which given the abundance of light in my office in the morning is akin to lighting a campfire on a summer afternoon). And maybe it’s this essentially unessential quality, above its graceful milky-ness and its warm yellowness, that makes my little lamp so appealing.

As I sit at my desk, day in and day out, answering my phone, paying my bills and scribbling away in between, I know that my lamp and I share this fundamental fact: neither of us is really necessary in this big wide world of light. But bidden, or unbidden, we are here nevertheless. Here by the
grace of some big unknown thing. And while we are here, we will shine when we are called to, and do our best to shine as brightly as we can, shining away until the dark morning when someone will forget to turn us on.

6 February 2005