Where virtually every chef that I got to know over the course of my “career” in the food-service industry acted like an un-neutered pitbull in the kitchen – their kitchen, they liked to say – Gio was completely uninterested in that kind of petty territorialism. And where most chefs regarded the staff meal as an opportunity to use up stale produce and nearly-expired meat and seafood, Gio genuinely enjoyed cooking for his colleagues.

Gio in the kitchen

I got to know Gio – that’s how we all knew him – a few years ago, when I spent some time working at Dooney’s Café with him. When I first started, I found him immensely intimidating – a giant of a man, and one who looked like he’d break your legs for a quarter. In reality, as I quickly learned, he was probably the gentlest human being I’ve ever met, the kind who would lend you his last dollar if you needed to borrow it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that there were a few times over the years where he did just that.

There was another side to Gio, though, one that he did his best to conceal. Beneath the jokes and the smiles and the goofy camaraderie was a persistent sorrow, a disappointment with the hand that he’d been dealt. He didn’t enjoy being overweight, and he didn’t like the limitations that it placed on him. Meanwhile, his kindness was a quality that invited abuse, and there were plenty of people in his life who took advantage of it, and of him. He had a habit of giving more to people than he ever received from them in return, and I think that had started to wear on him.

As the Dooney’s Café era drew to a close, it became clear to everyone who worked closely with Gio that something was wrong. He knew that he had to see a doctor, and talked about it often, but I think he understood that the news he would receive from one wasn’t something that he wanted to hear. He sensed, in his heart, that he was dying, and so long as he stayed away from the doctors they wouldn’t be able to confirm his suspicion. In the end, it looks like he was right.

There’s not too much that I miss about those days at Dooney’s Café but I do, and will, miss my friendship with Gio. I’ll miss the banter, the inside jokes and the fact that he made coming to work an enjoyable experience. Most of all, though, I’ll miss the after-work discussions that we’d have almost every night. After the restaurant was locked down for the evening, I’d pour a round of drinks and we’d sit, along with a waiter, another chef, and sometimes even the odd regular customer, in the restaurant’s front window and watch the world go by. At one or two in the morning, with the crowds of wobbling undergraduates weaving their way down Bloor Street, it was a different world than the more genteel one that most people who sat in that spot during the day time were accustomed to, but it was our world, and we knew it better than anybody on the block.

I’m not a religious person, and so I’m not about to pretend that Gio’s in heaven smiling down on us all. That’s a childish fiction, and I doubt it’s one that he would have subscribed to anyways. But if there ever was a person that deserved to find themselves in a better place, a person who had earned his ticket to a better life, it was Gio.

We first met at a book launch, and instantly liked each other. A month or so later he called me up to help a Bosnian-Muslim poet named Admiral Mahic, who’d been brought in as a writer-in-residence at Massey College, and had turned out to be not quite the Koran-reading mystic expected.

Mahic was free spirit with a drinking problem, a man who couldn’t keep his hands off you while he talking to you. None of this had gone over well at Massey, particularly that last quality given that this was at the peak of the body-perimeter hysteria in the universities.  Massey and PEN, who’d rescued Mahic from the various post-Yugoslavia factions who were trying to kill him, were now trying to get rid of him, and this struck Slobodan as peremptory and unfair.  He’d found Mahic a place to stay, but that wasn’t what concerned him. “Nobody,” he said, “has even talked to this guy about translating his poetry. They bring him into a country where he can’t speak the language, and put him in a dormitory with nothing to do, and expect him to sit there.”

Slobodan’s plan was to translate Mahic poetry, which no one at Massey or PEN had seemed interested in getting done, and he’d figured out exactly how to do it: find a Canadian writer with a sense of justice and some intellectual flexibility (me), sit me down with Mahic and a couple of people (himself included) who spoke both Serbo-Croatian and English, and wing it.  It was simple and brilliant, and it worked. For nearly four months, we met at Dooney’s Café on Bloor Street for the afternoon twice a week.

Mahic turned out to be a true poet, once we got him sobered up. He may not have known where he was, or how to deal with the finicky North American students around him, but he always knew where he got his images from, and we got decent translations of his poems. We also jammed on Homer and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the history of Yugoslavia, its writers, the reasons for the country’s disintegration, and anything else that came up. Our sessions were the most literate and intellectually stimulating encounters I’d had since I moved to Toronto—or since—and by the end of it Slobodan and I were close friends and collaborators.

Slobodan was an anarchist, the only true one I’ve ever known. He was a political anarchist, but it went far beyond that. His father had been a Titoist general charged with hunting down and executing the remnants of the Croatian Ustazi and the Serb nationalist Chetniks after World War II, and Slobodan thus grew up inside the communist apparatus of Tito’s Yugoslavia. The experience gave him both a detailed understanding of and an encompassing loathing for Marxist-Leninist Bolshevism, and a lifelong dislike for any kind of authority, no matter where he encountered it. He was temperamentally dissident to everything except non-devotional understanding.

He was also temperamentally courteous and sanguine, the most gentle and casually cheerful man I’ve ever met. He liked people, the more idiosyncratic the better, and he didn’t care where they’d come from. The parties he and his third wife Patrizia Albanese held more or less annually at their Toronto house were typical. There was always enough food to serve 300 people, a mix of Balkan and Italian delicacies broad enough to get anyone, whatever culinary pickinesses they harboured, to overeat. The parties were always crowded, with sociologists (Slobodan taught sociology at Ryerson University the last seven or eight years of his life, as did Patrizia, a sociologist of equal brilliance), scotch-drinking historians, Serbo-Croatian Opera singers, writers, teenagers, small children, bewildered neighbours, elderly but urbane parents. Yet when you arrived, Slobodan would always present you with something specific, (for me it was usually a couple of bottles of the wines he’d discovered I liked), and the way he’d wrap his big arms around you made it clear he was glad you’d come. He did the same for everyone, effortlessly and graciously, and it made everyone glad to be his guest.

I was lucky enough to be his best man when he married Patrizia, and among the many things I said about him at the wedding reception was the following:

First, he is a man without violence, because he understands that enforcement of any idea is alway violent.

Second, and rarer, he is without dourness. He is a walking proof that intellectual merriness is NOT a contradiction in terms.

Third, he is also a man without a jot of righteousness anywhere in his being. He does not think that his portion of the human condition is morally superior to any other, and he does not look down on others—unless of course you happen to be standing next to him, at which point he can’t help it.

Finally, Slobodan is genuinely interested in everything. Not only does he know where Lenin’s heart is partitioned and pickled and what happened when Gilgamesh went to the underworld to rescue his friend, he can tell you where to buy bottled water from Poland, where to get better spinach pies, and where to buy Chinese furniture on the cheap.

True civility requires the precise qualities Slobodan Drakulic embodies on a day-to-day basis:  kindness to those who are smaller (which virtually everyone is); curiosity; merriness; an interest in human knowledge for its own sake; an understanding that education is the most crucial occupation of a democracy; generous wisdom; industriousness and a relentless demand for justice.

All of those things remained true of him to the end of his life. He was a big man in every sense of the word “big.” The biggest part of him, I think, was his heart, and I simply can’t bring myself to change the things I wrote about him when he got married to the past tense. That’s because what I’ll retain of him will remain in my present for a very long time.

September 29, 2010  1119 words

Butch and I were similar in several superficial ways. We were blue-eyed and blondhaired sons from relatively prosperous local families, both of us were chronic underachievers at school who stayed at the edges of the school’s social hierarchies, and, whenever possible, well clear of parents and teachers. But Butch was more thoughtful than I was, a nicer kid who read more and lipped off less compulsively. He seemed to know exactly who he was, and he had a certainty of judgment that was well beyond his years and far beyond mine. There was a sweetness and a gravity to him that made me, and more than a few others, look up to him.

We did most of the things young men do together—and to one another: we teased and tested one another, tried to steal each other’s girlfriends, got drunk, got into fights and into minor scrapes with the cops. We even went canoeing and camping and fishing together. It was in these last activities that we most deviated from our peers. We camped and fished with Ernest Hemingway’s Michigan fishing stories as our manual, and instead of the local custom of drinking whiskey and puking into the campfire, we built our campfires with exquisite care and put sticks in our coffee the way Hemingway wrote about, and we speculated, under the cool and starry northern skies, over what the universe might be about.

I don’t know how Butch died. I don’t know where he died, except that it wasn’t far from where he was born, and I don’t know what it was that killed him. If I were one of those self-involved assholes who thinks the world evolves around whatever they’re doing or thinking, I’d say that Butch died 45 years ago, when his brain went permanently off the main road while he was taking classes at the University of British Columbia. It is true that shortly after that he retreated back to the north, and into some obscure territory within himself which he never again left, as far as I can tell, for more than a few minutes or hours.

The common view was that he experienced what medical people call schizophrenia, which is a stigmatizing catch-all term for deviations from normal perception.  Don White has always found it more accurate to think of what happened to Butch as a kind of mental stubbornness rather than schizophrenia—as if Butch took stances that he was unwilling to let go, and then backed it with an almost-rational decision to let irrationality govern his perception of the world.

Whatever it was, something happened inside his mind in his early 20s that changed him. One night, late in the fall of 1965, while he was at UBC taking creative writing classes, he showed up at an apartment I’d rented on Vancouver’s West 2nd Avenue to show me a play that he’d written. He was in a state of agitation unlike anything I’d seen from him, and when I glanced through the play, I recognize how similar it was to Leroi Jones’ Dutchman, which was about a group of people trapped in a New York subway car. It’s occurred to me over the years that it might have actually been Leroi Jones’ Dutchman he showed me, but really, there’s no way to know what it was. His creative writing instructor hadn’t responded to it well, and Butch seemed completely distraught over it. What I do remember clearly about that night is that everything—not just the play—was seriously out of kilter for Butch, from the complaints that “it” wasn’t good enough, that he wasn’t good enough, to some less coherent complaints about what was real and what wasn’t. I tried to argue that everything was okay, that since we were just starting as writers, of course we weren’t good enough, yet.

After a long, mutually anguishing wrangle, we walked across the Granville Bridge, and I had to physically grab him to prevent him from jumping. I got the sense, even while I was holding onto him that he wasn’t really intent on jumping into the oily waters of False Creek, but rather, wanted me to know that whatever was happening to him was serious enough to make him consider it. It was an extreme moment for me as well as him, but I believed it would blow over and our careers as writers and thinkers would continue to unfold.  I was wrong.

A couple of weeks later, Butch quit university and went back to the north, where he disappeared for several years. Whenever I was back there, I tried to find him, but never did—or when I did, the Butch I knew refused to engage with me or was simply unable to. And really, I didn’t try as hard as I might have. I’d started university myself, I’d gotten married, and my own life was suddenly in full flight—and the stories I heard from others about Butch weren’t sanguine. Someone—Claus Spiekermann, I think—had spotted him walking the highway between Prince George and Vanderhoof—a distance of almost 100 kilometres—and Butch had been vague and evasive about what he was doing on the road when Claus stopped to offer him a ride.

“I’m restless”, he’d said, not as an explanation, but as a way of refusing the offer of a ride. Getting to Vanderhoof, he was saying, wasn’t going to alleviate his restlessness.

During those years I told myself at least a thousand times that Butch knew what he was doing. But really, I wasn’t sure. I told myself this because in high school and the few years we had after that, he always seemed to know what he was doing, emphatically and authentically so. He knew what to think about, and he knew what to read.  I’d followed cheerfully in his footsteps because I sure as hell didn’t know what to think or what to read. My early education was almost wholly based on appropriations of his recommendations about what to think about and what to read. He gave me a life I couldn’t have constructed on my own, and therein lies an unpayable debt.

He (and thus, “we”) had set out, in those innocent days, to (as Albert Camus wrote, quoting Pindar) exhaust the limits of the possible, or to burn ourselves up in the pursuit. We wanted to live without the comfort of divine design and without the pretense of objective meaning—both, we thought, were unscientific and fatuous. Dostoyevski had taught us that a controlling god was unacceptable even if it did exist, and the Second World War and its atrocities confirmed it. With Camus, we took the absurdity of life as our starting point and set out on the business of judging whether life is or is not worth living. For me this was a judgment already settled by my temperament, which was disposed not to question whether life was worth living. I was attracted to the question’s gravity and drama, but there was, for me, little about it that was precarious. If our studies offered an alternate answer, well, this would be a fine drama, no?

I wasn’t, in other words, serious. This was part of my education, which I sensed (correctly, as it turned out) would go on for a very long time, after which I would settle the philosophical accounts, and if necessary die for what I’d discovered to be the truth. Meanwhile I was romantically tuned to burning up in the pursuit: at 30, I told myself, I would have the most interesting face in the world, and what woman could resist that? And hadn’t Camus himself written that he had never seen anyone die for the ontological argument? I took this to mean that no one could die from it, either. But maybe both Camus and I were wrong about that.

So what was it that Butch Nielsen introduced me to?  First of all, hundreds of books and their writers I might not have otherwise read; with Dostoyevski and Albert Camus at the centre of them. The ideas he brought me I’ve never really tried to put together in any organized fashion, maybe because I was so seamless at appropriating them that it didn’t seem necessary to acknowledge that they were more his than mine.

Beyond the reading lists and our common contempt for authority, whether it was governmental or that of our parents, what he brought was, in its briefest formulation, what Albert Camus called absurdity: the idea that a human life is without objective meaning, that we’re here to roll rocks uphill until our strength fails and the big rocks we’re pushing tumble back to the bottom and we have to choose whether to trudge back down to start rolling them back uphill—or to commit suicide with a 40 hour work-week and fling ourselves into the void by other means.

In Camus, this is sometimes phrased with a seductive counter-theology: “…if there is a sin against life,” he wrote in the essay “Summer in Algiers”, “it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”  But mostly, it was a darker and less romantic expression of the realities Europeans had experienced over the long, cruel past, and particularly since the beginning of the 20th century: that life was cheap and hard; that meaning was both elusive and slippery; that harsh evils ruled the human condition; and that taking one’s own life could be a legitimate way of asserting one’s freedom.

I heard only the lyrical side of this, because that’s all I wanted to hear. I’d caught a glimpse of the darkness while we were travelling in Europe. It had just been the once, at the end of an arduous six week adventure into Yugoslavia, when I felt my mind starting to slip away from me. It scared me enough that I retreated to the relative safety of distant relatives in England. Not long after, I went home, and I stayed away from any kind of travel for years after. Butch, I think, went deeper into all of it, beginning while we were in Europe. He disappeared for about four months at one point, and no one knew where he was. When he returned, he offered no explanation, and he seemed prepared to get on with the same set of half-baked plans we’d had before we left for Europe: read books, go to university, become writers. He was more moody than he’d been, but the moods passed and the playfulness we shared as young men reasserted itself. Until that day when it went away forever.

The clinical definitions of schizophrenia are broad and not entirely coherent. It is usually characterized by “abnormalities in the perception and expression of reality” that can manifest as auditory hallucinations (hearing voices), paranoid or “bizarre” delusions, or simply as disorganization in speech and thought, and the social dysfunction that naturally results from that. I’m not sure Butch heard voices. If he did, he would have been reluctant to admit it. And really, “abnormality in the perception and expression of reality” is the long term goal of art, isn’t it? Certainly that’s what I’ve spent my professional life trying to achieve. But it is clear that for more than four decades years, Butch struggled with a disorganization of his thought that he could only overcome for relatively short periods.

When Don and I had a conversation with Butch in Prince George during the autumn of 1996, I noticed that when he came out of his shell and started to talk, the conversation quickly trailed back to the ideas and books that had interested us in 1962-1964. It was as if he’d simply stopped in that nexus of experience, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t move beyond it. The idea that he was actively refusing to move beyond it makes a certain sense, but it’s also possible that he was trapped there, inside a kind of mental fugue where there was a problem—an intellectual problem—that he couldn’t solve, and that at best, he was choosing to stay inside. Maybe that’s what schizophrenia was, for him.

That 1996 conversation went on for about twenty minutes before Butch’s attentions began to wander: he had things to do—laundry, I think he said—but his eyes told us he wanted us to go away, and we did. It was the last time I saw him. I tried to find him several other times when I was in the city, but no one seemed to know where he was, although nearly everyone conceded that he was there—somewhere. Often, they’d seen him walking along a street or highway, lost in those restless thoughts that were his chosen companions—or  tormentors.  After his sister Peggy died, I had no more easily approachable family contacts, although in retrospect it’s apparent from the obituary that his family was there for him, and that they took care of him as far as he’d let them.

The uncomfortable truth here is that I simply don’t know what became of Butch Nielsen, except that he “got lost”, and I didn’t try very hard to find him. I now know, sort of, that  life doesn’t have any objective meaning, and that we don’t have a right to purposeful existence or happiness, and that the goodness and sweetness of life is often wasted or lost. Butch seems to be the proof of that. Even there, I have no sense of what is true and what is a lie. All I can testify to is that the small darkness of Butch Nielsen’s absence has been with me for 45 years now, and that now, it can never go away.

.

2351 words  April 28, 2010

The first time I met him was the day I moved into the house we’d bought two doors south of his on Euclid Avenue. I was in the back yard hacking down the half-dozen three metre cedars some idiot had planted in the back yard, trees that are toxic to every other living plant, and the bane of every vegetable gardener—which of course every downtown Toronto Italian is.

He leaned over the fence with a small glass of espresso in his hand, and asked me if I believed in predestination. I accepted the espresso, and said, no, wondering what I was getting myself into.

“Neither do I,” he answered. “But let me tell you a story.”

During the next hour or two—I took down two more of the cedars—Francesco (or Ciccio—pronounced “Cheech”) told me his life story. He’d been a paratrooper in the Italian army, joining in late 1940 as a 18 year old, and made his first jump into Tunisia, I think, in 1942. He and his unit landed in the middle of a firefight, bullets flying everywhere, and his best friend was quickly wounded. Ciccio was helping him to cover, and at one point, with his arm around his friend’s waist, stopped and turned his head to look in the opposite direction. As he did, a bullet whizzed by his face, grazing his cheek, and killed his friend.

“It wasn’t my time,” he said, simply.

Of course, it wasn’t simple at all, nor were the several other close calls he related, each of which he explained with the same phrase. He told me that he’d been captured by the British, transferred to a POW camp in England, where he learned a little English, developed a permanent liking for the British to counter his dislike of Mussolini and the Nazis (and the French, as it turned out).  When Mussolini was deposed in 1943, Ciccio was asked if he wanted to join an Allied paratroop unit. He said, yes, and eventually made another paratroop jump, this time behind the German lines in Normandy on D-Day. He survived that, too, offering the same explanation: it wasn’t his time.

I listened to these stories, entertained but not quite believing any of them. But they were very good stories, and Ciccio was even better company. I liked his way of making conversation, which had a leisurely sort of pace to it. Ciccio had learned to take his time with things, partly a learned response to having a bad heart, and partly his nature. He was following my excavation of the cedar roots with interest, clearly understanding why I was going to the trouble of digging out their poisonous roots, and encouraging me to be thorough about it without being supervisory. He was also taking in the spring breezes and the early April sunlight, telling me about the neighbourhood and talking about who my new neighbours were, and generally, welcoming me to his world.

It was Ciccio’s world, as it turned out. He was the semi-official Don of the neighbourhood. Not that he was a member of the Mafia or anything, just that he was the guy people automatically came to for advice or to settle small disputes—the kind of job competent and decent men acquire in  any functioning culture, which is to say, the kind that most Anglo-Canadians do not have.

Ciccio, along with his wife Mimma and the neighbour between us, Vittoria, a tiny, sweet-faced widow who was the neighbourhood’s co-alpha female with Mimma, quickly adopted me, my wife, and my daughter (who was born a few months after we moved in) .

This adoption was no small matter. My daughter had full access to—and the protection of—three connected households while she was a toddler, and when either of the Italian households had a special event, we were included. We gardened together, sometimes ate together, made tomato sauce and barbecued peppers together in the back alley in the Autumn, and Ciccio and I made wine together each October until his doctors put a stop to his wine drinking. This sort of interfamily cooperation was familiar to me. I’d grown up with something similar in Northern B.C. in the 1950s, where cooperation with your neighbours wasn’t optional. But this went deeper, and it was, well, sweeter.

Part of my side of the cooperation came during the winter, when I shoveled the sidewalks for all three households. Since the total frontage was less than 20 metres, this wasn’t hard work, and if there was a serious snowfall, it always netted us two free dinners. On the first night, something delicious would come from Vittoria, and on the second, a huge dish of Mimma’s excellent pizza would arrive.

Over the years, Ciccio’s health slowly declined, and he slowed down, gradually and reluctantly.  But he never really declined in the way that some elderly men do because he so much liked being alive. He continued to talk in the relaxed way he had, and he continued to patrol the neighbourhood, although from time to time over the last few years he’d outwalk his stamina, and we’d find him grey-faced with exhaustion on College Street, and either walk or drive him home.

Ciccio and I spent a fair amount of time sitting on his back porch drinking those small glasses of espresso, talking about making wine or growing tomatoes, or, sometimes, what it was like being alive. He had a physical gesture he used when words failed him: he’d smile, cock his head slightly, and wiggle his hand and arm toward the sky, as if to say, ah, here’s the sunlight, here’s the breeze, here’s the loss of my driver’s licence, here’s the difficulty of simply getting a breath, here’s my life, such as it is: more than enough.

During our porch conversations I came to realize that the war stories he told me that first day were all true, and that Ciccio had embellished very few of the facts, and then, only to make his point. He almost always had an interesting point to make, and some of them could be sharp.

One chilly fall day as I was walking our crippled Golden Retriever up the street, I heard Ciccio’s voice calling me from his porch. He was taking in the air, bundled up against the cold, and he had something he wanted to impart.

He motioned me to sit in the chair next to him. I sat down, settled the dog, and waited.

“You know,” he said carefully, “You’re an educated man.”

I shrugged, not sure what was coming, but pretty sure it was going to be a good one. He let the pause grow before he continued.

“So what,” he asked, “are you doing walking around behind a dog, picking up its shit?”

He said this without contempt or even judgment. It was simply a question that puzzled him. Since I had no good answer,  I admitted that I didn’t know, and that I’d think about it.

Ciccio, of course, knew why I was walking the dog: because I’d accepted responsibility for it. Most of us accept such responsibilities. He’d accepted more than his share, and cheerfully. But he had the sort of curiosity that swiftly generalizes, and in the right way: why do we do the things we do? I’d shovel his walks until eternity for just the privilege of keeping those sorts of existential interrogations. (And no, I still don’t have a good answer for that question he asked, not the existential answer.)

One time, just as he was about to enter hospital for one of his many heart procedures, he called me on the phone and asked me to come over. “I have something for you,” he said.

I rushed over, sensing that whatever it was, it was important. He sat me down at the kitchen table, and handed over an intact 1970s bottle of Old Vienna beer. “I want you to have this,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the hospital, and someone needs to take care of it.”

I stared at the bottle of beer. The contents were murky, and the cap was beginning to rust. It certainly wasn’t drinkable, so something else was going on. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll take good care of it while you’re gone.”

“Okay,” he said, and struggled to his feet. That was all he was going to tell me, but he really didn’t have to say anything more. He was telling me that I was in charge, that I was, temporarily, the Don: in charge of protecting our three families while he was out of commission—and just maybe, if I was interested or capable, more than that.

Ciccio survived the procedure—it wasn’t his time. He survived it and a dozen other crises for the same reason. But he didn’t ask for the beer bottle when he came back from the hospital, and we never discussed it again. It is now the Sacred Beer Bottle, carefully kept in my house, and it will be passed onto one of my sons someday, along with the story and its charge: be a good man, and enjoy every moment you can, until it’s your time.

RIP Francesco DeCaria, 28 October, 1923-January 29, 2010

A man named Harlan Clark died early last week out in Port Perry, which is a small agricultural community east of Toronto near Lake Ontario. He was a small, wiry, bright-eyed man with a soft voice, and a heart attack took him at the age of 87.  I knew Mr. Clark, sort of. Each Saturday for the past several years, I’ve had the same short conversation with either him or his wife Norine, who’s two years younger and like Mr. Clark, small, wiry, bright-eyed and soft-voiced.

“I’d like two dozen of the Friday Jumbos,” I say, the “Friday” meaning that the eggs were laid yesterday and I was willing to pay another ten cents a dozen for them. He or Norine, depending on which of them I’m talking to, replies, “That’s $7.20″, and I hand over the exact amount. After that, we smile at one another, and each of us thanks the other. Sometimes I say “thank you” first, sometimes they say it. But it always gets said both ways, and we’ve meant it every time. It’s one of those civil transactions that makes me realize that I live in a good and civil society, and part of the reason I’ve always thanked the Clarks is because they remind me that I’m grateful that I live in Toronto, which has many people like them.

Harlan Clark and his wife ran the egg stall at the St. Lawrence Farmers Market, and the reason I always gave them the exact change was because I’d come to understand that  they’d both reached the age where making change accurately had become terribly difficult. Any number of times over the past several years I’ve observed people handing them a $20 bill for a dozen eggs, then getting $7.00 in coins and their twenty back. More than a few of them did a double take, pocketed the $20, and walked off with their booty. Most gave the $20 bill back, pointed out that it should have only be a $10 bill, and were thanked for their honesty. I’ve also seen a few people hand over a $20 for a dozen or two dozen eggs, get $3 and some smaller coins back, shrug it off, and walk away smiling: a fair deal, in their eyes. The Clark’s egg stall has been, during that time, an illuminating window on the human condition.

What I didn’t know about Harlan and Norine Clark is that they’ve been running their Saturday egg stall since 1947, which if you haven’t done the math, is 62 years. During that time they never missed a single market. Not one. I also didn’t know that in order to pack up their eggs and get to the market before it opens, they’ve had to get up at 2 AM each Saturday morning for 62 years, and that the rest of their week was spent tending the chickens, grading the eggs, and putting the eggs in pressed cardboard cartoons with the name “Harlan Clark, Port Perry, Ontario” stamped in small letters on the top.

Until twenty five years ago they also sold roasting chickens, but Mr. Clark’s first heart attack in 1984 ended that, and the work load, in recent years, had begun to overwhelm them enough that they’d hired a helper to give them a hand on market day. But they hung in there, and they got to the market every Saturday with their eggs because, well, that was their life, and people were relying on them to be there.  They did take a holiday once, a four-day trip to Los Angeles to celebrate their 40^th Anniversary. They scheduled it so they wouldn’t miss the Saturday market.

Their stall was open this morning, but with only half the usual volume of eggs to sell. The other half was taken up by a series of cards people were signing as condolences to Norine-and maybe to themselves, because next week, Harlan Clark’s eggs won’t be there to buy, and they won’t be available the week after that, or ever again.

I signed one of the cards, writing something that I knew instantly was both inane and inadequate. Then I got out of there, because I was teary, and I didn’t think anyone really needed to see a grown man weeping over what might seem like nothing more than the diminished supply of fresh eggs.

But after a few minutes of wandering around the market on the edge of bursting into tears, what I should have written on the card came to me: “We didn’t know how lucky we were.”

I suppose that within a month or two, a new egg-seller will replace Harlan Clark’s modest operation. The eggs will probably be similarly fresh and organic-something that the Clarks never really made a big deal of-and they’ll likely be more expensive and less fresh. But they should hang a memorial over the stall-suspend it from the roof so the new operators will understand the burden the Clarks carried with such elegant modesty.

It should read something like this:

Harlan and Norine Clark: 1947-2009

“We Don’t Know How Lucky We Are.”

891 words November 15, 2009

Patwant Singh was the only man I’ve ever encountered that I would describe as truly wise. This came to me more or less instantly, and as a surprise. After listening to him talk for just three hours, I asked him what the meaning of life is. He looked into my eyes, saw that it was a straight question, and gave me a straight answer: live without fear or rancour, and come from a good family.

The first two may be very hard to practice, but they are self-explanatory. I have found no evidence that Patwant did not live that way, and voluminous testimony that he did. He was a man who attacked intolerant governments and venal people in a country where violence is often the first response to criticism. He never did so lightly, and always without the sort of gleeful “gotcha”s that typify most politics. He loathed the inequities and rigidities of the Hindu religion’s caste system, but did not see it through simplifications. He did not enjoy fundamentalists of any sort. To him one kind was as evil as the next, yet each in its own distinctive way, and to be understood coldly. Fundamentalists were his enemies, wherever he found them. They diminished his family, which was much larger than the mostly wealthy and educated Sikh kinship group he was born into. Every man and woman of good will was a member of his family, provided that they were capable of the merriness that was his life-fuel. I have tried my best to earn the kinship he offered me.

At a Toronto dinner party about eight years ago, I watched Margaret Atwood, who clearly recognized both his unblinkng cosmopolitan intelligence and his fabulous charm, spend the evening sending ball after ball into the air for Patwant to spike: ideas, complex paradigms, issues of international political and cultural moment. He put away every set up she tossed him. At the end of the evening I wasn’t sure whether I was more impressed by Patwant’s intellectual range and dexterity or by the cheerful willingness of my country’s most skilled cultural celebrity to play second fiddle to a man few Canadians knew existed.

They should know about Patwant. He published at least 20 books, but two of the essential ones, Of Dreams and Demons (1995) and The Sikhs, (2000) are obtainable in North America, if not easily.

With Patwant’s death, the world has become a little smaller, more stupid, and less merry. I am better for knowing him, and I will not forget what I learned from him.

.

Toronto, Aug. 25, 2009, 400 words.

Robin Blaser

The poet Robin Blaser died of a brain tumour on May 7, 2009, in Vancouver, at age 83.

One of the first poems of Blaser’s to which I paid attention, published in editor Don Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-60 (1960), was an untitled sonnet-like work that begins, “And when I pay death’s duty / a few men will come to mind.”

I was fascinated by the triple-pun-like meaning of the second line. In Blaser’s imagining of his own death, written at age 30 or so, in 1956, he says that as he pays Charon the boatman the standard one-obol fee (that’s one meaning of “death’s duty”) to ferry him across the River Styx to the Underworld, a few of those he knew in his life will appear before his mind. “Death’s duty” also means, more obviously, that we have a duty to pay to death, namely, our lives.

At the same time, “a few men will come to mind” has two more meanings that are to be found in the double sense of the verb “to mind,” as meaning both “to attend” and “to object.” When the poet pays death’s duty, a few of the men and women he knew will come to attend his death. They will be his “minders” at the ceremonies of death, as they were in his life and during the process of his dying. Finally, a few of those he knew will “mind” that he died, that is, they will object to, be troubled by, and will mourn his death.

When he pays death’s duty, “the big question” for Blaser “is what it will feel like with eyes wide open. / It won’t be complete darkness because there / isn’t any…” Until I read the poem (I was 19 then), I hadn’t known there isn’t any “complete darkness.” However, “One thing will stop and that’s this / overweening pride in the peacock flesh.” Having discovered “disgust” “in the wrinkling flesh” of aging, the poet recognizes that death will, if nothing else, put an end to our vanity, our “overweening pride in the peacock flesh.”

At the end of the poem, Blaser says, “And when I pay death’s duty / the love I never conquered / when young will end as such.” I found those last lines puzzling and was never quite sure what they meant. They meant, of course, that just as our vanity ends with death, so will our never-conquered, unrequited love. I only later realized that one of the reasons that I was uncertain of the meaning of those lines is that I made a crucial mis-reading of them: I replaced the word “end” with the word “remain,” so that it read “the love I never conquered / when young will remain as such,” and I imagined those who had been loved remaining, untouched by time and aging, “as such.” Those who had been loved are the immortals of our mortality.

I’m afraid that my mis-reading says more about me than about the poem, but since I’m one of those who have “come to mind,” mis-reading joins the reading of the poem. What’s more, it was a mis-reading that Blaser was inclined to accept on the occasions we talked about it.

In any case, “when I pay death’s duty” is a poem that I not only attended to, but that stayed in mind through the almost 50 years that I knew Blaser as a friend, intimate companion, and master. That last word, “master,” also has multiple meanings: Blaser uses it in his poetry as a submissive address to the powers in language greater than ours: “O, master.” But it also means master of the art or craft of poetry, which Blaser was and, in a more conventional sense, it simply identifies Blaser as one of our teachers, as he was to the large number of people who were his students.

A few years ago, I brought Blaser a poem I’d written, titled “Friend,” that begins, “The law of friendship is / one of us must die // before the other / Mourning begins // before death…” It was a poem I wrote upon reading Jacques Derrida’s book, The Work of Mourning, and after Blaser performed the prescribed task of the master or peer of confirming (or not confirming) that it was a poem, we sat in his kitchen, drinking coffee (as we’d done countless times before), and talked about the recently dead philosopher, Derrida, who had inspired the poem, and provided lines for it.

Then I read it aloud again (another custom of the poetry trade), and Blaser looked up afterwards, and slyly asked, “Is that for me?” I was taken aback, startled that he was asking something more than a conventional question about whether the poem was dedicated to him, as in “for Robin.” I hadn’t thought about it before he asked. Am I the “one” who “must die // before the other” in our friendship? Is this the beginning of your mourning for me? “Who else?” I replied, without thinking, then added, “or for whichever of us,” since I too, though it was less likely, could be the one.

Three months before Blaser’s death, on the day before I was leaving Vancouver for Berlin, in early February 2009, I visited Blaser at Vancouver General Hospital once more to say goodbye. We went downstairs so that he could smoke a cigarette, to a parking lot outside one of the hospital’s back entrances. He was in a wheelchair, looking reasonably elegant with his shock of white hair, and wearing a thick dark bathrobe. The tumour had progressed so that present memory dissolved every thirty seconds or so, and he frequently repeated questions he’d asked only a minute before, but his recognition of others and past memory remained.

The moment of departure arrived in the chill February sunshine, while the hospital behind us and the traffic on the street across from the parking lot both continued to hum in their daily rhythm, as if a permanent break between us wasn’t about to happen.

“Well, I guess this is goodbye,” I said.

He suddenly focused. “This really is goodbye,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I said, once more (as on countless occasions) startled by his sudden coherence.

“Don’t forget me,” he said.

“I won’t forget you, Robin,” I said, almost as if I’d been accused of forgetting.

Then, with some effort, he visibly pulled himself together, looking up at me from his wheelchair, and in a voice both tearful and ferocious, said, “I won’t let you forget me!”

So, let the muses weep; they, after all, have more time on their hands than we do. As for us, the temporarily living, we won’t be allowed to forget Robin Blaser.

.

Berlin, May 8, 2009. A more extensive appreciation of Blaser’s poetry is available on Dooney’s. Go to related article below, click on “About Robin Blaser,” and you’ll be taken to the earlier essay.

Val Ross died this past week of brain cancer. She was only 57. Val, who was a highly successful freelance writer before taking up editorial posts at Maclean’s, Saturday Night, and finally The Globe and Mail, will be remembered by her many friends and colleagues for her integrity, her passion, and her no-nonsense approach to the frequently nonsensical trade of journalism.

But I’ll remember her in slightly different terms. She was, after all, my first.
Val Ross published my first piece of freelance journalism, all the way back in 2005, on the subject of mandatory retirement. She gave me the rest of the day to do it, and if I could finish it in time she’d consider running it. I did, and she did, and that set the tone for the relationship that we had, a writer and his first editor. I would ask Val for advice, on who to approach with a particular piece or how to approach them, and she’d respond quickly, honestly, and often tersely, the last feature a byproduct both of her responsibilities at the Globe and the fact that she had no time for formal niceties and false politeness. Once, I toyed with the idea of working at the Globe as a copy-editor, and Val, being Val, simply left her copy of the Globe’s style manual at the front desk for me and told me to figure out the rest.

Val was one of those rare writers who didn’t believe that she was playing in a zero-sum game where any success that’s shared with another writer, be it through collaboration, editing, or professional guidance, reduces the amount that’s available to them. She opened doors – hell, she kicked them down – as a force of habit, not as a favour, and I doubt that she never expected anything in
return.

She promised that she’d come by one day for a drink, although I now understand why she didn’t. But I can picture what she’d look like if she had, sitting at the bar, glass of wine in hand, with those eyes that seemed to send light out rather than take it in.

Her eyes are what I’ll remember most about Val, in fact, because they symbolized the giving spirit and vitality that defined her too-brief presence in my life.

Toronto, February 27^th 2008 – 575 w.

I first caught Brown live back in 1964 with cape – three drummers and two bass players. I was playing a prom at the Coliseum in Louisville, Kentucky in a side room while Brown inhabited center stage in the sports arena. What a spectacle. The place burned with female shrieks and thundering rhythm. I’d never heard a band play with such precision outside the Basie band.

That summer we followed Brown into Club Cherry in Lebanon , Kentucky with The Shadows, which was a cover band playing mostly rhythm and blues classics of the day. Club Cherry was a black music venue that sat next to a long stretch of railroad tracks. The decor was all things dim and walls sticky with tobacco stains and evaporating body sweat. When you entered, one of the first things you saw was two large glass canisters next to the cashier. One had three or four left-behind pickled pigs feet submerged in what appeared to be pond water and the other showcased a preserved pig snout. Posters of Arthur Prysock, Count Basie, Lowell Fulsom, Cab Calloway graced the walls. Bands shared dressing quarters with the owner who on this occasion had failed to sweep away a recently spent condom. Soiled clothing and the smell of fresh pomade challenged the nasal passages.

The stage where Brown worked his magic was not at all the grand dimensions you’d expect, leaving one to believe floor space down front served that purpose. On this night two fights broke out, both swift and memorable. One guy took a shot from a kitchen chair across the backside followed by a kick to the head: Justice served, I guess. I remember thinking how unruly and bizarre the whole week must have been with Brown in attendance. The local white clubs were jammed with beer swilling teenagers more intent on getting a liver rupture than a shot of music. Club Cherry was all about sex and music. In which order they arrived depended on how magnificent the doo shaped up and how smooth your delivery. Over at Club 69 the white boys were like vultures, hovering over the potential carrion until the last chick fell unconscious after drinking a vat of near-beer.

Fast-forward to the mid nineties when Brown was booked into the Masonic Temple in Toronto . Gino Empry was Brown’s PR man for this occasion. My wife Kristine and I jumped all over the offer to attend the press conference with cameras in hand. The place was dominated by television crews so we decided to split up and shoot from opposing sides. Brown eventually held court. I snapped a few shots when suddenly Brown singles me out. ” Who says you can be taking pictures of me …did I ask you?”

At first I was startled by the remark, but then I realized I could ignore him. ” He then turns to Kristine and says,.” Pretty thing you can shoot as many pictures as you want.”

Needless to say, that was my invitation to cop as many indiscreet shots as I could.

Still, nothing matched the concert images. The room was a suffocating hundred degrees and a hundred per cent humidity. Both Kristine and I shot from down front but the cramped surroundings had me close to panicking for air. We relocated upstairs and caught some wonderful concert frames and enjoyed one of the best concerts ever. The building foundations shook.

In the ensuing years I have found myself buying early Brown sides to reacquaint myself with the complex rhythm patterns – the inside horn lines—that rest at the core of his sound. Brown camped on the offbeats, which is a most unusual place to inject a clever twist of a phrase.

I’ve played many of the Live at the Apollo tracks in various bands but no one really ever played his arrangements note-for-note.

Prince is the grandest and most serious disciple of Brown. He uses the same measured techniques to build from the bottom up.

It’s funny how we say “We will truly miss the man.” But in reality James Brown will never be gone. Like Ray Charles the music will linger for an eternity. Brown was crazy as hell and did some wild ass things but it’s still the music not the personal silliness that was his strong suit.

I met several players around Los Angeles in the 60′s and 70′s who worked as sideman for Brown. As jobs go, this was no picnic. The gig was demanding and paid a paltry sum. Brown carved out minuscule stage real estate for each band member. If one ventured beyond that, they could expect a fine and tongue lashing – the same for wrong notes, miscues and stage wear. The man ruled a tight kingdom and kept his bands in prime shape. I never saw less than perfection.

JB dance in peace!

847 w. January 12, 2006