ALSO BY
STUART MCLEAN
FICTION
Stories from the Vinyl Cafe
Home from the Vinyl Cafe
Vinyl Cafe Unplugged
Vinyl Cafe Diaries
Dave Cooks the Turkey
Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe
Extreme Vinyl Cafe
NON-FICTION
The Morningside World of Stuart McLean
Welcome Home: Travels in Small-Town Canada
EDITED BY STUART MCLEAN
When We Were Young:
An Anthology of Canadian Stories
VIKING CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 2010
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)
Copyright © Stuart McLean, 2010
Illustration of crow copyright © Dan Page, 2010
The Vinyl Cafe is a registered trademark.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
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upon request to the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-670-06473-1
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For CBC Radio,
for giving me a place
to do what I love
All that I hope to say in books,
all that I ever hope to say,
is that I love the world
E.B.WHITE
CONTENTS
NOTES FROM HOME
Driving the 401
The Piano
My Palm Tree
Losing Paul
Watchfulness
My “To Do” List
Ants
Keepsakes
The Sentimentality of Suits
The Morning Paper
Radio
Peter Gzowski
The People You Love
CALENDAR NOTES
Signs of Spring
Maple Syrup Time
Early April 2009
Worms
Summer Jobs
September
A Letter to a Young Friend Heading Back to School
Autumn
Piano Tuners
Approaching Winter
Hibernation
Salt of the Earth
February
Snowman
NOTES FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
Boy, Bike, Chair
Toronto
The Parking Spot
Garbage
Haircuts by Children
The World Cup
The Front Lawn
Kissing Contest
Small Decisions
Silence
George Learns to Swim
The Key
Safe Places
The Girl with the Globe
TASTING NOTES
New Year’s Eggs
The Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company
Apple Peeling
Watermelon
Ode to the Potato
The Bay Leaf
Cherry Season 2006
READER’S NOTES
Book Buying
The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library
W.O. Mitchell
The Island of No Adults
Free Books
The Creation of Sam McGee
Quentin Reynolds
Leacock Country
NOTES FROM THE ROAD
The Way Which Is Not the Way
In Praise of Curling
Robert Stanfield's Grave
The Imperial Theatre, Saint John, New Brunswick
Biking Across Canada
Bridge Walking
Getting to Swift Current
Prairie Wind
Parliament Hill
Maynard Helmer
Motels
Meeting Famous People
Maxine Montgomery
Gander International Airport
My Favourite Photograph
Roger Woodward and Niagara Falls
NOTES TO SELF
My Hello Problem
Summer Jobs Redux
Rug versus Chair
Spelling
I Am Deeply Sorry
The Joy of Socks
On Beauty
The Wall Clock
Parking Lot Blues
The National Umbrella Collective
Bob Dylan’s Phone Number
The Girl in the Green Dress
The Desk Lamp
DRIVING THE 401
My dear friend,
I am on the road again. Just a short trip to Montreal and back. We left home yesterday morning and drove along the 401 in an old tour bus that Blue Rodeo used last week in the Maritimes. Our tour manager, Don, set off from London at eight in the morning and picked me up at ten in a shopping mall parking lot by the highway. We picked up Bill, who is doing the sound at tonight’s show, at a roadside hamburger joint in Port Hope.
Don and Bill are in the back of the bus watching a video as I write. I am alone in the front. I have Steel Rail on the surround sound stereo, cranked up loud. They are on the show today. You would enjoy them, I think. I am listening to them sing about the highway right now. While I listen, I am watching the highway slip by, and writing this note to you.
So many times we have made this trip together. You and I. I remember the time the snow began almost the moment we left. It didn’t look serious at first. It was blowing in fine wisps across the top of the pavement.
I said, “I bet that is the way sand blows across the desert at the start of a windstorm.”
By the time we got to Belleville, the snow was hitting the windshield on the horizontal and I was peering over the wheel. All that was left of the pavement was two black stripes. I wonder if you remember that trip? It was a long time ago. Come to think of it, I’m not sure we had even met. That drive was with someone else. I don’t think you would have liked it, though. There were hundreds of cars in the ditch. Hundreds! Cars were flying off the road all around us. It was as though someone were sweeping them away. I wanted to stop, but the person I was with, the one I thought might have been you, insisted we keep going. It took t
hirteen hours to cover what will take us five hours to cover today. God willing.
I remember another trip. This one was in the summer. I still had the old Toyota. It didn’t have air conditioning, and the gear box, which was right between the two front seats, used to heat that car up like an oven. I was driving with my boys, who were still young at the time. We stopped every half-hour for Popsicles and pop or I swear we would have passed out.
Everyone says the 401 between Montreal and Toronto is the most boring stretch of highway in the country. I guess they are right, but it holds a lot of memories for me. That is for sure.
I have driven it more times than I care to remember. I have stopped at the Big Apple for pie, and at Iroquois to watch the ships slip through the lock. I have driven in the morning, and I have driven at night, in search of love, and away from love, and back to love. I was born in Montreal, but these days I live in Toronto. That means no matter which way I am going, whether I am driving from east to west, or west to east, I am both leaving home and coming home.
I used to believe the getting there was the important thing. Now it’s good enough just to keep moving.
Anyway. It has been forever since we have spoken. That is my fault. And I apologize. And I hope you understand. I am doing the best I can. I will try to do better when I get home.
The sign we passed says we are almost in Napanee. That means we are almost halfway home. No matter which way we are heading.
3 March 2002
THE PIANO
I was seven years old the afternoon I had my first piano lesson. My teacher was a young man from Scotland. His name was Mr. McLachlan. He wore tweed sports jackets and carried a soft leather briefcase, and, like the doctor and the bread man and the milkman back in those unhurried days of the mid-1950s, he came to the house.
Mr. McLachlan came once a week: Wednesday afternoons after school. He and I would go down to the basement, past the furnace and into the playroom my father had finished with blue-stained plywood and tiles. There was a blackboard on one wall, and a pretty good train set, and in the corner, an old upright piano.
The piano wasn’t there for the early lessons. At the beginning Mr. McLachlan taught, and I practised, on a fold-out cardboard keyboard. Eventually the upright piano arrived, and that, as you might imagine, was a big deal. Especially after the cardboard keyboard.
The piano in the basement was where Mr. McLachlan and I did our work. Or, more to the point, didn’t. Even back then, when I was still in the single digits, I was capable of disappointing and well aware of the disappointment I was causing Mr. McLachlan. Despite my mother’s encouragement, I never brought discipline or attention to my practising. The two things that were, really, the only requirements for forward motion.
Oh, I progressed. I wasn’t hopeless. My right hand conquered the treble clef in a boyish way, but my left hand lumbered around the bass notes without any confidence, like a dim cousin trying to find his way along a crowded street, always stopping to stare at the street signs myopically and falling behind everyone else.
How Mr. McLachlan kept coming week after week, year after year, is beyond me. He must have had a pupil somewhere who made it worthwhile. Whoever it was, probably some studious girl, it certainly wasn’t me.
And so it was that my piano lessons eventually, and thankfully, ended. Mr. McLachlan and I were put out of our pain.
My brother took lessons too. And probably my sister; I don’t remember about her, but we all stopped. The years slipped by, and somehow I ended up with the piano— probably because I took guitar lessons at university, probably because I became the writer. I was the artsy one. I was also closest to the piano. My brother and sister lived on the other side of the country.
The first place it went was in the living room of my first apartment. I remember how, reunited, I took renewed interest in it; sadly, my self-discipline and perseverance, not to mention my talent, hadn’t developed over the years. Not surprisingly, neither had my playing.
When I married, the piano came with me into my new home, and when I had children of my own, they took piano lessons too. I used to sit with them while they practised, and sometimes we soared over it, and sometimes we fought over it, and when all was said and done, they had more success than I, for sure, but not much more success. Not meaningfully more. They grew up, and left home, and sadly I did too, and the piano came with me again.
We have been through a lot together, this piano and I. A lot of years if nothing else, close to half a century.
And a year ago I bought a new house. It is a modest place, and there is no room for a piano in my new house, unless I wanted to have a living room without a sofa. Or an office without a desk. And I decided I didn’t.
My problem, as moving day approached, was what to do about the piano. Selling it, the reasonable thing to do, seemed out of the question. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I decided I would lend it to someone. They could have it until, well, until I needed it back. Where and when and why that might be I had no idea, but when I did find someone who thought they might be interested, I assured them it wouldn’t be anytime soon.
You would think there would be lots of takers. There was only one, and they had it for about a year. Then one day they phoned me and said, “We made a mistake, we want to give you your piano back. There’s no room here either.”
And so I did the only thing I could think of doing. I arranged to have my piano placed in storage.
And that is where it is today. Although, as I say that, I realize I have no idea whatsoever exactly where that is. I haven’t visited the piano, or even asked about it. It is just away, somewhere. It costs $50 a month to keep it there.
I am assuming that because the people who are looking after it are in the business of doing this, storing pianos, that they have given it a good home, and my fifty bucks is buying decent accommodations. I am assuming that it isn’t sitting in someone’s backyard under a tarp. But that’s an assumption; I don’t know that.
I imagine it to be in an old warehouse. An old brick-walled factory dating back to the 1920s, where they once manufactured electric fans, or corn brooms, and today is just a room where someone works on pianos. My piano, and a few others like mine, are lined up against the brick wall. I like to think that at night, when the piano tuners have gone home, and the lone security guard has fallen asleep at his post, people appear to play these pianos. Men and women living in cramped apartment buildings, who long to play but haven’t the space or resources for a piano. Or maybe the spirits of all the players from the past who find the temptation of one last concert too much to pass up. And they sit and play the music I never could while the moonlight streaks through the warehouse windows. But that’s just fantasy. I know my piano is just sitting there, under its storage blanket, and that every month I pay to keep it there is another month that it is unplayed.
So this is what I want to know. Why am I holding on to it? Why can’t I say goodbye?
Am I honouring memories here? My father? Who is ninety years old now and built that room in the basement and got the piano down there. Not negligible things. Mr. McLachlan? My boyhood? All those years—can I sell them? Can I give them away for nothing? Am I holding on to a road to the past? There are, I’ve noticed, fewer and fewer.
Or is it a road to the future? Do I think that one day, one of my sons is going to show up, like I did, and say, “Where is that piano, anyway?” Do I think I have to hold on to the past so I can pass it on to the future? So what, if when they asked, I said, “I sold that piano.” Would that really matter?
Or are we talking about dreams here? Do I, in my disorganized and busy little imagination, believe that one day I will call up the people at the warehouse and say, “I want my piano back, bring it home”? Am I, stuck in my fifties, still dreaming that one day I will do away with the desk, or the sofa, roll up my sleeves and sit down the way my mother and Mr. McLachlan always wanted me to, and apply myself to the mathematical mysteries of the key of
C?
Is this what happens to dreams? Do they all end up in brick warehouses? And you pay people $50 a month and they look after them for you? It costs $50 a month to keep them free from rain, or sleet, or snow, until the day you phone and say, “I’m ready now; bring me my dream.” And they put it in a truck, and they bring it to your house, and as they carry it down the stairs to the room that you have made for it especially—your little dream—you think to yourself, This time I am going to practise every day. This time, it is going to work out.
15 April 2007
MY PALM TREE
I was living in a modest home at the time. Not, frankly, the kind of home where you would expect to find a palm tree. Then one Sunday afternoon, unexpectedly, I bought myself another. House, that is. The new house came first. The palm tree came later. But the two events are all part and parcel. The palm wouldn’t exist without the house. Or not in my life, anyway.
This is what happened.
A real estate agent, a friend of mine, phoned and said she had seen a house that she thought I would like.
“I am not in the market for a new house,” I said.
“I think you should come and see it,” she repeated. “I think you would like it.”
So I went. The moment I saw it, I knew I was doomed. It was the house I had wanted all my life. I had to own it, and there was no time to dither. If I was going to get this house, I had to make an offer then and there. So that is what I did, and it was accepted, and there I was at bedtime faced with the terrifying prospect of owning two homes. I had to sell the one I was living in, the one that had been, up until that Sunday afternoon, perfectly acceptable but now no longer was. And I had to sell it fast.
The real estate agent who had lured me into this predicament agreed, reluctantly, to handle the sale.
“We are going to have to fix this place up if we are going to have any hope of selling it,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste.
By “we” she meant “me.”
She put me in touch with a man whose job it is to make disreputable houses irresistible. One of the things the man did was stand in my living room and point at the window where my desk was.