The Vinyl Café Notebooks (7 page)

“The bush,” says Glenn, “is slowly recovering.”

What Glenn, and everyone else who is making maple syrup, wants at this time of the year are warm days followed by cold nights. When that happens, the sap starts running up and down the sap wood and can be tapped on the way down.

The magic, the happy alchemy, transpires in Glenn’s sugar shack. In a few short hours, he boils the cold, clear sap down until it turns into golden syrup. The tang of wood smoke from the fire box mixes with the sweet-smelling steam that bellows out of the evaporator. The cheery aroma gets into everything. A sugar shack, writes R.D. Lawrence in his book
Maple Syrup
, “is like a steam bath built inside the heart of a volcano.”

Glenn says that after you’ve stayed up a few nights tending to the evaporator, you can almost imagine the trees breathing in and out as the sugar water runs up and down under the bark.

These days when all the smoke and fire you see on the television news comes from high-altitude bombs, and the sweet talk from generals in uniform and politicians with pointers, it is good to remember that there is a mud time close to home where the pool of decay underfoot is the wonderful smell of the earth waking up and the trees coming to life.

10 March 2002

EARLY APRIL 2009

The ice was off the pond this weekend, the water brackish, brown and windswept. A sign of spring for sure, but a chilly sort of sign. A harbinger, more than a hint of things to come.

On Sunday we went for a walk, and everyone and everything seemed to be softening. There was mud where the sun was hitting the road, and the dog got covered in burrs.

On Monday we got out of bed, cautiously, and peered through the blinds. The sky was blue and the sun bright, but the pond was frozen again. From the upstairs window it looked like the fragile ice that comes overnight on October puddles, as if it would have cracked explosively if we tried to cross it. But our galoshes are not high enough for the pond, and anyway, up close, we found it to be thicker than we expected, and blacker, more January than June, with lots of little brown leaves and other wintery moments caught in its iciness.

We tried to snap a piece of ice from the edge, and it came easily enough, bringing to mind those phony glass panes they break over cowboys’ heads in the movies.

At lunch, on Tuesday, standing in the gravel lane, talking to the roofer who had come to repair the wreck of this
winter, and listening to the crows, we heard the noon bell on the fire hall tower for the first time in months. Not because it hasn’t been ringing, but because we haven’t been out there to hear it.

Early April. One day summer, one day winter. A year of weather packed into a month. The month that shuffles its feet on your stoop, like a young man clutching a bouquet behind his back while the girl stands there thinking,
Get over yourself. Give me the flowers
. But she waits, like little you and me, the burr-covered dog wagging her tail by our sides, while the ice melts and freezes, melts and freezes. All of us waiting for the moment he leans toward her. All of us praying for the kiss.

6 April 2009

WORMS

Bass fishing opens this weekend, and that is good news for Roger Parson of New Hamburg, Ontario. Roger works parttime at the parts counter at Kitchener Tractor. Three days a week, however, Roger hits the road in his 1999 purple Dodge Caravan. He travels around servicing thirty second-hand vending machines that he has bought, modified and placed in gas stations and all-night variety stores from Lake Erie to Lake Simcoe.

“I never dreamed I would get into the vending business,” says Roger, “but my wife got a tumour and can’t work anymore, and we needed extra money, so I had to do something.”

Something
turned out to be the vending business. Of course, these days most of the things you could think of putting in a vending machine, and most of the places you could dream of putting them, have been scooped up by someone else. So Roger had to come up with something special. He chose worms.

He added nightcrawlers and spawn for good measure.

“I put them in used pop cans,” says Roger. “I close them with a plastic lid.”

He has worried that from time to time, in the dead of night, revellers have fed coins into his machines expecting a can of pop and received the shock of their lives when they opened their can of worms.

During fishing season Roger visits each of his vending machines once a week.

“I don’t
have
to go that often,” he says. “The worms will live for four weeks in there.”

He says his best customers are kids.

“I can pretty well tell by sales the day school is out for the summer. My business doubles overnight when school gets out.”

Roger says sometimes, if a kid comes up to buy when he is servicing a machine, he will give them a free can of worms.

“Like the other day,” he says, “I was at a variety store in Alcona Beach and a little girl came up on her bike. She was maybe twelve years old, and she had her little brother with her, who was maybe eight. She told me she was taking him down to the dock to fish for perch. She seemed to know what she was doing. She said she hoped the water was warm enough for the fish to bite. I don’t do it all the time, but I gave
her
a can.”

It made me happy to learn that there were still kids getting on their bikes and taking their fishing rods down to the lake to fish for perch. I was under the impression that kids’ lives were too organized these days for that sort of thing.

“Yeah,” says Roger, “when we were younger we lived outdoors more than kids do today. And we were allowed to make more choices. Kids spend too much time indoors these days.”

“With parents watching too closely,” I added.

I asked him what it was about the girl on the bike that made him decide to give her the free worms.

“It was her friendliness,” said Roger. “The way she smiled. And then when I gave her the worms, she said thank you and told me she would be back next week.”

Then he shrugged. “Kids are my future,” he said. “As long as kids keep fishing, I am going to be in business.”

27 June 2004

SUMMER JOBS

T.S. Eliot opens his most renowned poem, “The Waste Land,” with a line that has the enduring ring of truth. Eliot famously claims, “April is the cruellest month.” I don’t pretend to know what Eliot was thinking when he wrote that, but those words stuck in my college-aged brain when many other things I was exposed to back then didn’t. April
is
the cruellest month when you are a university student. April brings a shower of tests and term papers, a gale of all-nighters and the desperation of cram sessions. It’s the season of panic, and regret, and eye strain, and too much coffee. But April is done like dinner, and with God’s good grace, the kingdom of summer will soon settle upon us. Goodbye Duo-Tangs, goodbye highlighters, goodbye backpacks full of binders and loose-leaf paper. All of them should be stuffed under the bed, into corners and cupboards, to languish until autumn, the real season of renewal, stirs the leaves and we have another chance at getting it right. Another chance, perhaps, at figuring out “The Waste Land.”

Summer is coming. Before you know it, all there
will
be time for is the smell of the sun on your skin. Someone’s cottage. Summer love. And, of course, a summer job.

I miss summer jobs. I like the idea of a lifetime that lasts three or four months. June. July. August. Beginning. Middle. End. A perfect span for a decent career—long enough to get good at the thing, even long enough to get tired of it, but not
sick
and tired of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that summer jobs are easy, or satisfying, or even rewarding. Sometimes, a summer job is three months of struggle, another lesson from the long list of things you aren’t cut out to do. Summer jobs can be exhausting, tedious and thankless.

But whether the work is satisfying or not, summer jobs open your eyes to the world around you. Summer jobs allow you to appreciate the hard work
others
do all year. Summer jobs give you an idea of what you want to do for the rest of your life. A few months to try on a new hat, a different existence, a fresh outlook. A summer job can be a leap into another world, and that has to foster understanding if nothing else.

And I have been wondering if the world might be a better place if we all hung up our backpacks in May or June, got up from our desks, walked away from the assembly lines of our lives and got ourselves a summer job.

I have, in summers past, been a construction worker, and a camp counsellor, and a busboy, but I have never been a waiter. I think I could be good at that, especially at one of those resorts that are only open for the summer and have staff quarters, and staff snacks, and, I am willing to bet, staff parties.

I think things might lighten up to everyone’s benefit if all the lawyers and lecturers had to spend their summer flipping
burgers while the mechanics got to try their hands at the law. Let the waiters play in the symphonies and the lady from the laundromat do ... whatever she wants. And let’s all head to the lake on the weekends while there is still enough water to go around.

29 April 2007

SEPTEMBER

September is upon us. We knew it was coming. It happens every year around this time. We love September, yet every August we find ourselves hoping that the winds of summer will linger.

We are just about ready to start our vacations now, not end them. It wouldn’t have to be a long one; things are more or less shipshape; just, say, a couple of weeks with nothing to do. We have long believed that what we need, more than a holiday in February, is an extra month slipped in between August and September. Maybe a three-week month, where all that is necessary is—nothing at all. Not exactly vacation, but not exactly work either—the secular equivalent of purgatory, where we are required only to hang around, to wait, and in the waiting achieve the holiness necessary to enter this month that is upon us now and that, like all holy things, will not wait for us.

6 September 2009

A LETTER TO A YOUNG FRIEND

HEADING BACK TO SCHOOL

Dear Sam,

September is here again, and with it, all the familiar September sounds: the shuffle of feet on stairs, the rattle of lockers opening and closing, the annual autumn bells. Echoes we all hear when September rolls in, of the schoolyards and the school days, both past and present, that are both present and not present.

I have been thinking about you amid these ringing bells and wondering what I could possibly give you to mark the moment—wondering if there was some small token I could wrap, some little thing that would ring bells for you, as you head off once again with your brave little bag of books.

I have been racking my brain for some perfect thing that would tell you I understand the complexity of this week. That I know that although the first day of school is a grand day, the grandest day of all in many ways, that even in its grandeur, in the grandeur of new shoes and shirts, new friends and old ones, new teachers and new classes, that it is a grand bag of tricks too, that it comes with exams, and papers, and other things that can go all too wrong.

People like to say that this is the week that marks the real new
year. And why not? What could be more full of possibility than the first day of school? As full of potential as a toboggan at the top of a snowy hill, as a pencil hovering over a blank page, as the smile of that girl with the golden hair sitting in the front row.

But sometimes the snow melts and you’re standing there with your toboggan, feeling a fool, the only one who didn’t hear the weather forecast.

It is a complicated thing, this business of school. And it is in the complexity that the sorrow and sadness comes. The heavy burden of books that pile up, and the numbers that don’t; the metaphors that lie on their backs with their little feet wiggling in the air.

Timetable and exams, projects and essays, all that stuff can build up and cause problems, and I was hoping this thing I would give you could acknowledge that stuff too.

My first idea was a dictionary. A blue, cloth-covered
Canadian Oxford
, with the title stamped in gold letters. If I gave you a dictionary, you would have all the words in the world. You could look them up and write them down in any way you wanted, and the wind would blow, and the bells would ring, and the lockers would slam, and teachers would be bewitched by your way with words, and that girl with the golden hair too.

I thought maybe a dictionary with gold letters on the cover would be just the thing.

Then I thought, maybe a new pair of shoes.

A brand new pair of sneakers, sneakers as heady as dandelion wine, a pair of Ray Bradbury’s “Royal Crown Cream Sponge Para Litefoot tennis shoes,” and when you put them on, you bounce like a kangaroo, and when you run, you run like a gazelle. Is it a pair of sneakers you need as you run to school?

Or what about lunch? What about lunch every day for a year? If I packed you a lunch of carrot sticks and raisins, and peanut butter sandwiches on soft white bread, with lots of jelly, the way you like it, the bread so fresh you dent it with your fingers just in the unwrapping. I thought if I wrapped your sandwich in wax paper and wrote little notes on the paper with a black felt pen, and slipped in some chocolate from time to time, that might do the trick.

I thought. And I thought. And I thought I could be your wordsmith, your shoemaker, or your chef.

But none of them seemed right. The shoes didn’t fit. You forgot the lunch bag on the bus. And who needs more words anyway? There are words enough to go around.

And that is when I decided to give you this eraser. It is an original Pink Pearl—a little plug of pink rubber, with a point at both the ends, and a broad side too, the perfect size for mistakes, big or small. It will fit in your hand, whatever size your hands are, whether you are four or forty, five or fifty, and is something that will work today, and work tomorrow.

Best of all, it has, deep in its rubbery little heart, memories of a rubber tree in some thick forest. A gash in the bark. The
drip, drip
of sap. But more than that: the worried frown of a chemist too.