The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  Any person who has travelled widely would tell you this world is full of men and women just like you, men and women who are anxious to look after themselves, provide for their families and muddle through to the end as best they can. There are not armies huddled on our borders in the darkness, and if there are, they are the armies of the hungry and the dispossessed. And yes, again, there are bad guys, and yes, it is a tricky business navigating the ship of state, but any political leader who tries to tell you it’s time to circle the wagons is trying to sell you a bill of goods.

  And that’s the truth.

  It is not said enough, so I’ll say it again: the world is a good place, full of good people, and when we act out of that, when we act out of hope, and optimism, and faith in our fellow human, we act out of our best selves, and we are capable of doing great things, and of contributing to the greater good.

  Hope and optimism are not synonymous with naivety. We should be looking to the future with flinty and steely eyes, for sure, but they should be wide open with hope, not squinting in fear.

  Ask, and it shall be given you;

  Seek, and ye shall find;

  Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

  If it is evildoers you seek, you will find them aplenty; if it is enemies you want, they are there too. But if you want the truth, the truth is this: blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.

  9 September 2008

  THE GIRL WITH

  THE GLOBE

  I was on my way home from one of the many farmers’ markets that dot the city in the summertime. My backseat was full of spinach and chard, pears and plums, old cheddar and fresh bread. I was driving slowly, wondering what I was going to eat first, and if the world ever got any better than this, when up ahead of me, it suddenly did. I spotted a young woman with the world literally on the back of her bike. She was pedalling in a random, summery way, without, it seemed to me, a care in the world. There was something fetching about her. Not her exactly. I couldn’t see her, except for the back of her plaid shirt. It was the picture of this young woman, with a globe, one of the old spinning kind that they used to have in the corners of classrooms, stuffed precariously into the basket on her back fender.

  I don’t know why this image pleased me so. But it did. Enough that I rolled down my window when I caught up to her, smiled, and said, “Where did you get that?”

  “Hey,” she said. And she flashed me a smile. “I know who you are.” So we stopped. Both of us. And I got out of my car. And she got off her bike. And we chatted for a while.

  Her name was Madeleine. And she told me she was on her way back from the park, where she had been hanging out with her friend and his dog. And that on her way home she had spotted the globe in a pile of garbage on the side of the street.

  “I always look in the garbage,” she said. “My mom taught me that.” She said that she saw the globe lying beside a broken computer chair, and a box of plates and old magazines, and some ripped plastic bags. And she told me when she saw it, she stopped, looked around and, when she was sure that no one wanted it, picked it up and put it on the back of her bike.

  And ever since she had it back there, all the way home, she had been singing that old song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

  “I was still singing when you pulled up beside me,” she said.

  So we went for a coffee and she told me about herself.

  She told me life has not always been easy for her.

  “I left home when I was fifteen,” she said. “And I have never lived in one place for longer than six months. I am always moving. Until I got to the place where I live now. I have lived there for two years, and I love it. Now I have to leave it because my landlord is renovating, and he is kicking me out. And I have to decide where I am going to go next. I am thinking maybe Brooklyn, or Montreal, or Edmonton, or Kingston. I lived in Mexico for a while and nearly got married there. But that didn’t work out.”

  And then she shrugged.

  “Life is not always clear,” she said.

  And then she pointed at the globe.

  “It is a great sign, though. Having a globe on your bike. Especially if you don’t think life has been fair.

  “You are thinking that, and then you find a globe, and for some reason it makes you feel like life is giving you a sign in a delightful kind of way.

  “So no matter how confusing things are, or how set back you feel, you know, if you have a globe on the back of your bike, it is all good.

  “I think it is the universe talking to me,” she said. “It is telling me to go ahead and expose myself to change, and if I do that, something good will happen.”

  We sat in silence after that. A surprisingly comfortable silence for two people who had just met, and then she smiled and shrugged again and said, “That’s all I can say. I don’t know if this story has an ending.”

  And she got on her bike and pedalled away.

  I watched her leave, and as I did, I felt like there were things I should have said. For instance, I should have said, Everything is going to be all right. Nothing happens without a reason. You will be fine. But I didn’t know that. Sometimes things aren’t fine. And, besides, she didn’t need to hear that from me. Yes, she had some heavy lifting to do, but she had a globe on the back of her bike. And she was singing when we met. And singing too, I bet, as she pedalled away.

  12 July 2009

  NEW YEAR’S EGGS

  We all have our traditions to ring in the New Year. I have mine. One of them is to eat eggs for breakfast on New Year’s morning. It is, I have been told, good luck to eat something round to welcome in the year, which is my good luck, because my little egg ritual began for a different reason all together. It started, abruptly, on a New Year’s morning some thirty years ago and has been my tradition ever since. I remember that morning as clearly as if it happened yesterday.

  I had spent many years not eating eggs. For a while it was a (misguided, I now learn) health thing. It didn’t begin as a health thing, however. It began in the foggy mist of my youth, the way these things often begin with children, for determined yet unexplainable reasons.

  To be truthful, I don’t remember the specifics. I just know that I was a boy who ate eggs, and then, all of a sudden, I was a boy who didn’t. When I was eating eggs, I mostly ate them soft boiled, with little toast soldiers lined up for dipping. In fact, I think we called them “dippy eggs” in my family. And I can remember I liked eggs enough for a while that I would request “dippy eggs” from time to time.

  And then I went off them, for whatever reason that was. And when I went off them, I went off them with a vengeance. I went off avocado too. Or I never started avocado. I think avocado was just becoming common in Canadian stores at the time. And when it arrived at my house, I somehow got avocado mixed up with eggplant. Understandably, because an avocado is the same shape as an egg and the flesh of an avocado looks suspiciously egglike. And that was all it took to put me off avocado. I was having nothing to do with eggs, and that meant I was having nothing to do with something as suspicious as an eggplant, no matter how often I was told that avocados weren’t eggplants, and even if they were, eggplants had nothing to do with eggs. The avocado was doomed, collateral damage, sucked into the slipstream of my suspicion.

  This, as I said, was back in boyhood. But as is the way with these things, behaviour became belief, and eventually I came to believe I hated eggs. And then that eggs were hateful. And avocados too, for that matter. I hated them through my adolescence and into my college years. Just the thought of eggs made me sick.

  The point is that I wasn’t eating eggs. And then one morning I woke up and right out of the blue decided fried eggs would be the most perfect breakfast I could imagine. As I recall, someone I admired had mentioned that fried eggs were their favourite thing in the world, and that was all it took. It happened to be New Year’s morning.

  I fried up some eggs and, surprise, surprise, I liked them. And
now I eat eggs. And avocados. Sometimes two a day. Eggs, that is. And always on New Year’s morning.

  I was wondering about this the other morning as I made my traditional meal. This is the time of year where everyone talks about change: a change in diet, a change in routine, a change in resolution. A change in regime. We all, it seems to me, have the desire to change hardwired into our systems. And maybe our capacity is greater than we think. All it takes is a little courage, a little forgiveness and perhaps some buttery toast. Change often seems overwhelming. But it can happen.

  Of all the things you can think about as we stumble into a new year, that is probably as good as anything.

  13 January 2008

  THE TALL GRASS PRAIRIE

  BREAD COMPANY

  We were going to Manitoba to record a show. Before we left for the airport, my friend and colleague Julie Penner stopped by my desk.

  “When you get to Winnipeg,” she said, “I want you to promise me that you will go to the Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company for breakfast. When you are there, say hi to Tabitha. She is one of the owners. I think you’d like her.”

  And so it was, a few days later, that I found myself sharing my breakfast with Tabitha Langel, who appeared from the back of the bakery covered in flour and sat at my table, drinking coffee while I ate.

  Tabitha is a lapsed Hutterite. She left the Hutterite community where she grew up because she was curious. She moved to Winnipeg, married, settled down and joined an ecumenical church, a church that includes Mennonites, Hutterites, Lutherans, Presbyterians and some Catholics. The bakery was born out of conversations that began at the church.

  The church members were wondering how they could be more of a community. Although most of them lived in the same neighbourhood, they were wondering if they could work together in some way too.

  This was in the late 1980s, a time when grain farmers were getting the lowest grain prices Canada had ever seen—about two cents on a loaf of bread. Farmers were struggling. Farm suicides were at a record high. Another question that arose at church was if there was anything they could do to support farmers. That is when the idea of starting a bread co-op began—an idea they thought could address both concerns.

  Tabitha and her church friends wondered that if they went to one farm, bought their grain directly, then milled the grain and baked the bread themselves, they could afford to pay more than the two-cent average. They would be supporting one farm family, having fun baking together and maybe even getting some decent bread out of the deal.

  So they began. They rented a kitchen at the St. Margaret’s Church and baked bread every Saturday night. Kids delivered the bread around the neighbourhood in little red wagons. And the co-op grew. Neighbourhood people joined. It became a community thing instead of a church thing. Anyone could work in the co-op and get work credits. People who were well off were invited to pay a little more for their bread to carry those who couldn’t. After a few years they were actually supporting a family farm and having fun. Just as they had planned.

  The success provoked more discussion. The discussion was wide-ranging. What, they wondered, is good stewardship of land? And What does that mean to people who live in the city? If you believed, as Tabitha and her friends did, that herbicides and pesticides were not God’s best idea, how should you proceed if you are city folk? How much should those who live in the city pay for grain if they want to behave ethically? What would things look like if instead of having farmers beg city people for pennies, city people beg farmers for grain?

  And What could they do about any of this? Could they support farmers in some larger way?

  They decided to open a bakery. They found one for sale and figured they needed $40,000 to get it going. They went to the bank. They explained they wanted to sell bread at two dollars a loaf, rather than the going rate of fifty cents. The bank said this was absurd. They told the bank manager that if you explained to people that you were charging more so you could pay farmers more, people would be happy to pay the extra. The bank said that wasn’t the way the world worked. They didn’t get any money from the bank.

  They got money from friends instead—some low-interest loans, some no-interest loans. They promised to pay the loans back if, and when, they could.

  They believed there was a great hunger for connection. They believed that farmers wanted to meet the city people who used their crops and that city people wanted to know where their food came from.

  They had no idea if they were right. Everyone told them they weren’t. Everyone told them they would fail. They decided not to do anything in a grandiose way. For opening day they baked thirty loaves of bread, two dozen muffins and twelve cinnamon buns. When they opened their doors at ten in the morning, there were two hundred people lined up at the door.

  They had planned to have a bread blessing, but after ten minutes there was no bread left to bless. Someone gave their loaf back and they blessed it, broke it and ate it.

  They kept growing.

  And growing.

  They had made all these careful plans for failure. They had worked out how they might exist selling twelve loaves of bread a day. They hadn’t given any thought to what happened if they were wildly successful.

  It was a nightmare. They were working so hard. Tabitha remembers the day the timer on the oven went off and she picked up the phone and couldn’t figure out why no one was saying hello.

  Today, some fifteen years later, they have opened a second branch of their bakery. They still have the little hole in the wall in Wolseley, where it all began, and now they have added one at the Forks. They support five farm families and employ about fifty people. And they have learned that you can’t get rich when you pay fair wages to both farmers and staff, but you can make a decent living.

  “We buy our wild rice from a local native co-op,” said Tabitha. “We could get it way cheaper elsewhere, but we like what these folks are doing. They have a store in the poorest part of the city and they won’t sell cigarettes. They are part of changing their community. We want to support them.”

  She picked up her coffee and looked around her bakery and smiled. “If something is too cheap, that means someone is paying the cost somewhere. Maybe it is the environment, or maybe it is someone else down the line.

  “The average food item in the average grocery store travels two thousand miles,” she said. “Here, in the bakery, the average is two hundred miles.

  “The farmers come here and deliver their grain. And they see the bread. They see where their grain is going. And our customers see where it is coming from. They can have coffee together.”

  Tabitha says she has learned that if you’re mindful of what you’re doing, you can make a difference to the local economy.

  “The questions that we continue to ask,” she said, “are how we can be more local, more just, more environmentally conscious than we were yesterday.

  “It has been an unbelievable journey,” she continued. “I am honoured to be part of it. I am a tad tired. But show me a baker who isn’t.”

  The Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company started in 1990 with two people on staff. They baked thirty loaves of bread on opening day. The Saturday I visited, they baked about seven hundred loaves of bread, all organic, and many handshaped. Tabitha didn’t know how many cinnamon buns and croissants.

  I am a lucky man. I get to travel all across this country and talk to people from coast to coast. Mostly I get to tell my stories, but often I get to hear others. This is one of my favourites.

  11 June 2006

  APPLE PEELING

  I own, at last count, twelve kitchen appliances. To wit: a microwave, a toaster, a food processor, a Mixmaster, a coffee maker and, God help me, a George Foreman Grill—which came, like a Cracker Jack premium, packed inside the microwave, $34.50 for the two of them. I thought the microwave was a deal at $34.50. And six others.

  Twelve appliances that I kept lined up on my kitchen counter, as if I was running a showroom, until the derision heaped upon me
by my so-called friends, all of them women, passed a tipping point. Now I have packed up my counter of wonders, and my appliances are stored in various cupboards.

  I kept them out on the assumption that I would never use them if I didn’t see them. I finally accepted the fact that I didn’t use them anyway, and I have to admit that I’m not unhappy with the new state of affairs. The clean counter space is more relaxing. And there is less chatter in my kitchen about the things that I’m not doing, like chopping or mixing, brewing or juicing. If the chatter is still ongoing, it is, at least, going on behind closed doors. As I do the things I do best in a kitchen, like throwing away food that has gone by, especially pears and bananas, it is at least unwitnessed by the juicer, which was silent, but you could tell what it was thinking. Or I could.

  I did leave one appliance out. When the moment of truth arrived, I was unable to put away my candy-apple, green flecked, apple-peeling machine. The only appliance out of the twelve that doesn’t plug in.

  I bought it when I was in university—a suction-based model, which you can use on any flat surface, as opposed to the screw-clamp model that requires a lip.

  The apple-peeling machine is made out of cast iron and only has twenty-three parts, including the peeling blade, the thumb screw, the three-prong fork, the peeling arm and the wood handle grip, to name five of them. It does only one thing—peels and slices apples, automatically and perfectly. Actually, it does potatoes too, but although I have, in the years I have owned it, peeled hundreds, maybe even thousands of apples, I have never done a potato. I did try a pear once, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

  I don’t know why the peeler pleases me so much. Maybe because I have owned it for nearly thirty years, and you can tell, just by looking at it, that it is good for another thirty. Or maybe I like it because all you have to do is stick an apple on the three-prong fork, turn the wooden handle and the apple skin peels off it in a perfect long and continuous ribbon. Then, as I learned when I was a boy, before you eat the apple, you can take the peel, throw it over your shoulder and it will fly through the air and land on the kitchen floor, forming the initial of your one true love. I always do that when I am finished peeling my apple. Over and over again for thirty years now.