The Crazy Years

by Spider Robinson

  The real reason I took so long to make the step from Landed Immigrant to Citizen, I think, came to me only minutes after I took the oath, as the full implications began to soak in: now that I have the vote, all that mahooha going on in Ottawa and in Victoria is my fault. For years I’ve been able to throw up my hands and say, “Don’t look at me, cobber—nothing I can do about it.” No more.

  Why then did I finally do it? I think it had something to do with the fact that last year I bought a house, the first thing I’ve ever owned more expensive than my guitar. I seem to have put down a root. I actually am landed; it seemed time to start calling myself that.

  Whatever the reasons, I filed my application. In the fullness of time I was invited to come downtown and be tested on my fitness to become a Canadian, and provided with a thick booklet containing the minimum basic facts of history, geography, economy and culture that a citizen ought to know. I took it seriously, memorized the booklet. The test turned out to be a boat race: a multiple choice affair that could probably have been aced by an aardvark with Alzheimer’s. I passed.

  I want to say that my Canadian Citizenship Ceremony was a genuine gasser. They did a proper job: solemn without being oppressive, light without being frivolous, inspirational without being risible. All the officials and helpers present were alert, genuinely friendly and infinitely patient—and nearly all were volunteers. Provision was made for attending family and friends, photo ops were provided and everything went flawlessly.

  Waiting for each of us new citizens at our assigned numbered chair was a small maple-leaf lapel button and a copy of the lyrics of “O Canada” in both English and French. (It’s a close call, but I’d say they’re slightly dippier in French.) There were only a couple of speeches, short and sound; then we stood and each spoke our name aloud in turn—“I, Spider Robinson…”—then collectively we swore or affirmed allegiance to Her Majesty (pretty nice girl; not a lot to say) in English and French, received our Citizenship Certificate and picture-ID Citizenship Card from Judge Sykora, sang “O Canada,” heard one last very short speech and that was basically it. My friends and I went out to Milestones for eggs benny and coffee, and now here I am back home on my island, feeling a sudden strange compulsion to buy a Celine Dion CD. But I will be strong.

  The only downside to the whole thing is that I’ll never show anyone except very insistent border guards my new Canadian Citizen ID Card. The photo was taken shortly after I was maimed in a tragic shaving accident, and my entire nude chin is exposed. Not a pretty sight. It makes my driver’s license photo look good.

  I estimate that, at fifty-three, I was one of the ten oldest people there. Two were under seven. Altogether 103 of us took the oath or made the affirmation, and eight were Caucasian…if you count Russians as Caucasians, which seems only fair since the Caucasus is in Russia. Judge Sykora specifically listed the countries our group came from: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ukraine, South Africa, China, Taiwan, Japan…On and on and on the list went. Nobody but me was from an English-speaking nation, the US or England or Scotland or Ireland or Australia or New Zealand. Nonetheless everyone in the room spoke exceptionally good English…save one old Chinese who spoke not a word, not even “yes” or “no.” Canada has a great and amazing future ahead of it. We put our money where our multicultural mouth is.

  One tiny detail I found interesting: I’ve said that we either swore or affirmed allegiance to Queen Elizabeth. The judge did mention in his speech that we could do whichever we chose, but did not feel it necessary to explain the difference to any who might not already know. I intended to affirm since I’m an agnostic. Then when it came to it, and we were all repeating after the judge, he loudly used the word “…affirm…”—and nearly everyone obediently parroted it. I heard one maverick say “…swear…” Apparently in Canada even the judges don’t push belief in God on others these days. It made me think of the Liverpool City Council, who recently renamed their airport John Lennon Field and put a big sign at the entrance saying, “Above us only sky”—a line which, as all fans of Moondog Johnny know, means, “There is no God.”

  Anyway, I’m Canadian now, eh?

  (And still an American citizen. These days you can be both, as long as you’re willing to eat both back and front bacon. Something to do with free trade…)

  Thanks for All the Fish

  FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 2002

  MY SISTER-IN-LAW persuaded an operator to crash my Internet connection to tell me my wife’s maternal grandfather had died in New Bedford. It’s a day later and I feel like my system is still crashed. I expected, and to some extent have accepted, the death of the century, the millennium, even George Harrison—but Vovo? It’s nothing less than the end of an era, of a way of life older than the concept of cities. He was one of the very last men to leave home in wooden ships and pull up fish from the sea with his hands.

  God must have loved Frank Parsons. He died in his sleep, at home, at age 100.5. He’d outlived two wives, lived to hear great-great-grandchildren giggle uncontrollably at the faces their Vovo made. He was once a major force in the Massachusetts fishing industry; his descendants still own the best pier in New Bedford, plus a superb seafood market there and another in Florida, both called Captain Frank’s. Until his final year, he danced ’em into the ground every week at the senior center. I heard him invent and tell a joke—a good one—at his centennial last summer.

  He was born, like his father, in Fuseta, Portugal. The family name was Paixao, then, which means “passion,” but became Parsons at Ellis Island. Henrique Paixao was a doryman: a lunatic who deliberately leaves a perfectly good ship in a two-man cockleshell and rows into the fog in search of enough fish to founder him. Happily, the second time Henrique and his mate tried getting lost in the fog on the Grand Banks, it worked: instead of being caught and sent home to Fuseta, or drowning, this time they reached Newfoundland, and eventually made their way down to Cape Cod without troubling anybody at the border.

  Henrique lived happily, some say a bit more happily than he had a right to, in Provincetown for a year or two. Then one afternoon a knock on the door turned out, most unexpectedly, to be his wife. With the kids. Not unreasonably, she wondered why Captain Passion hadn’t sent for her…or at least sent word he was alive, and maybe a few escudos. He explained how busy things had been, and how you couldn’t seem to get escudos here, and they say he was so slick he might have pulled it off…if a soprano voice from the kitchen had not picked that moment to call out the Portuguese for “Dinner’s ready, sweetcakes!” There was trouble, then.

  Senhora Paixao’s ire is understandable: things had not gone well at Ellis Island. Somehow, she’d bullied an Immigration official into letting her enter the US to join an illegal alien whose address she did not know—whose name she did not know—and who wasn’t expecting her. Persuasive woman. The problem was, her babe in arms had pink-eye. Very common: smokestack cinders often blew into steerage. But this official decided it might portend disease, wrote “DEPORT” on the baby’s forehead with grease pencil and told its mother she could certainly enter America…as soon as she shipped her infant back to Portugal.

  Weeping with frustration, her Herculean effort wasted, she stumbled away into the milling crowd, became aware that on top of everything else the baby was wet—

  —stopped short. Glanced around. Put her hand into the diaper. Used the urine to wipe away the mark on her son’s forehead. And walked boldly through the gate into America, carrying the baby who would from that day on be called Frank Parsons, and who would live a hundred years.

  He owned his own boat by eighteen, competing with his father and eventually eclipsing him. He made the shift from sail to powered vessels more smoothly than most, wisely got into the processing end of the business early, moved to New Bedford and bought a key pier, owned pieces of plants as far away as New Brunswick and Labrador and put fish on tables from Bangor to Miami.

  On his ninety-fifth birthday, Vovo drew me a detailed map to the secret spot no oth
er captain knew, where the finest cod could always be found in quantity. Later, I showed it to one of his great-grandsons, the last fishing captain in the family. He sighed. “I know the spot. There’s no goddam cod there now—or anywhere else on the Grand Banks. Vovo’s living in the past.” A year later he quit fishing, sold the boat and is now a whale-watch skipper.

  The fish are gone. Next summer, for the first time in living memory, there’ll be no Blessing of the Fleet held in Provincetown. Once a hundred boats and more sailed out every July to hear a bishop beseech God’s mercy on the brave fisherman. Someone did, at the last minute, manage a final, fiftieth annual Blessing, a whopping four boats…by bringing in three ringers from Gloucester. There’s no fleet left to bless in P-town. Captain Frank lived to see every Blessing there ever was or will be. The cod may come back one day, they say—though they don’t say when—but even if they do, it won’t be men stalking them any more, just software and machines. Oh, there’ll be men aboard to service the machines, and since they’ll be afloat I suppose it’s proper to call them sailors. But they won’t be fishermen. Not like Frank Parsons.

  It was a noble occupation. Probably as old as hunting—now also extinct—and certainly older than farming, which is circling the drain. Hemingway based a pretty good book on a fisherman, Cuban rather than Portuguese, who coincidentally also died this week with three figures on his odometer. Jesus apparently recruited a lot of his posse down at the pier, and served only fish sandwiches and red wine at parties. Captain Frank would have approved that menu.

  He weighed anchor and set sail at the traditional hour: with the tide, sometime between four and six in the morning. I’m violently allergic to fish, myself—but he was a tough, smart, funny old man, and I’ll miss him. If we have the wit, we all will.

  All things must pass, George Harrison sang. All things must pass away. Isn’t it a pity.

  Phone-y Manners

  FIRST PRINTED FEBRUARY 1997

  IN ROBERT A. HEINLEIN’S science fiction novel Friday, an encyclopedic synthesist with eidetic memory (read: a genius among geniuses) is assigned to analyze all of human history and prepare a report on how, specifically, to spot a dying culture. She identifies several telltale indicators—inflation, violent crime, dominance of one gender over another, ratio of productive versus nonproductive citizens, of enforceable versus unenforceable laws—but only one surefire sign:

  “Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot. This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health, but as proof of his/her strength.”

  As I type this, they’re re-running the pilot for Due South. The script (like the splendid TV series it foreshadows) makes, remakes and then underlines the point that the single identifiable characteristic Americans associate with Canadians is our almost eerie politeness.

  But I find myself wondering if it isn’t a slightly pathetic thing for us to pride ourselves on: compared to Americans, we seem polite. Sort of praising with faint damns, isn’t it?

  Addressing a topic as vast as Canadian manners here would be silly: allow me a paradigm. I suggest that an excellent clue to overall manners is how Canadians behave when they believe themselves anonymous, when they see little chance of being held responsible for rude behavior. How polite are we “in the dark,” as it were? Road manners and cyberspace manners suggest themselves in this connection, but let me pick an approach for which I have hard data I’ve collected and verified personally: telephone manners.

  My phone machine, constantly in circuit, explains that my wife and I concentrate for a living, and invites all callers to leave a message. If it’s someone we recognize or want to talk to, we interrupt our work and take the call. For reasons too silly and complex to explain, we’re stuck with a phone number that looks institutional. About half the calls we get are wrong numbers. In the last decade, exactly one caller who reached us in error—out of roughly 10,000—took the trouble to say, “Excuse me, wrong number,” before hanging up. The other 9,900-odd barged into our home by mistake, seized our attention with an imperious alarm bell and then exited without apology, slamming the door behind them. Before we got our new digital answering machine, we then had a (squeak!) beeeeeeeep (squeak!) to fast-forward through on playback, wasting even more time. (Not counting the occasional nit who cursed us for being the wrong number.)

  God bless Call Identify. I customarily write until dawn, and am often in the mood for some diversion at around four A.M. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I now say, as politely as I can, “but I just got your hang-up message, and had to be sure whether you were my aged aunt having a stroke in a phone booth or simply a lout.” About one in five apologizes; all, I think, learn something.

  In the fullness of time, as more people do this sort of thing, phone manners will improve somewhat. But we’ll deserve little credit. As suggested above, they’re only manners if you still have them when you’re masked. Phone manners will improve only for the reason LA drivers now signal their lane-changes more often than Vancouver drivers: because someone’s liable to shoot at them if they don’t. Not good enough.

  Attention is energy. Who seizes my attention by clumsiness, stumbling like a drunk into my living room, owes me an apology. Our society is a huge underdesigned machine composed of over 30 million cranky, creaky gears meshing together. Moving parts in contact require lubrication. The only social lubrication we have is good manners. A good deal of that meshing now takes place under conditions of relative anonymity: behind the wheel of a car; on the phone; in cyberspace. If we fail to keep the machine oiled, even where it doesn’t show, even where no mechanic can be found liable for failing to do so, it will seize up…and we will all die. Badly.

  ————————

  My number contains several repeated digits adjacent to each other on the keypad. An infant, allowed to use a phone as a toy, is almost guaranteed to reach me. I then get to listen to boop beep boop until the machine switches off—two full minutes, unless I get up and quell it. I used to think it was one kid, until I got Call Identify. Then I learned to my surprise that it was hundreds of kids. But that’s not the weird part.

  I’ve called back about eighty of them by now. Every single time, the adult who answers is, unmistakably, recently arrived from the Indian subcontinent. (I can’t nail it down any finer than that: I am not qualified to distinguish an Indian from a Pakistani from a Bangladeshi by accent or displayed name.) I have absolutely no explanation for this and do not claim it says anything comprehensible about that notoriously polite racial subgroup—but I feel obliged to report it, in hopes that some wiser mind may be able to explain it.

  For what it’s worth, nine out of ten apologize—and none repeat.

  Night of the Impolite Canadian

  FIRST PRINTED FEBRUARY 2001

  I’M GUESSING IT WAS 1968. In those days there briefly existed on this planet a phenomenon I despair of explaining to the modern consumer called “folk music.” Before it all blew over, it offered sporadic employment to people like Tom Rush, Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Fred Neil, Judy Collins, John Koerner, James Taylor and Bob Dylan, some of whom went on to become legitimate musicians.

  One of the best songwriters in folk was Tim Hardin, an American. His biggest commercial success was a song called “If I Were a Carpenter,” a hit for Bobby Darin. He wrote the folk classic “Reason to Believe” and a haunting jazz ballad called “Misty Roses.” He was one of the best performers of his songs, with a smoky, fragile voice and guitar-playing as crisp as bread-sticks. He seemed poised to become one of those rare folksingers to earn a living. Then someone gave him some heroin.

  By the time of which I speak, Mr. Hardin had already flamed out at least once—he’d actually fallen asleep onstage at the Royal Albert Hall. Now, chastened and fresh out of rehab, he was r
eady to try a career-reviving comeback. A tour was booked. A humble, low-key folkie tour: no smoke-bombs and lasers, just Mr. Hardin and an unknown for a warmup act, another solo singer-guitarist-songwriter like him.

  Why his management booked this acoustic double-bill into my university’s main stage, I’ll never understand. It was a large state university, with a concert venue—a quadruple gymnasium—so humungous that a more typical bill was The Who. I didn’t care. I may as well confess this like a man: I was a folksinger myself, in those days. I’ve been completely rehabilitated through a twelve-step program—swear to God—but back then, I was one of the first in line for Tim Hardin tickets.

  Then, in the few months before the concert actually happened, everything changed…

  Not for Mr. Hardin, but for his warm-up act. Lightning struck, and set her ablaze. A shy folkie with the obligatory long blonde hair, hailing from some place so nowhere it wasn’t even in America, she unexpectedly became a pop star, overnight. So when Tim Hardin’s big evening finally arrived, the house was packed…but nearly everyone had come to hear this Joni Mitchell chick.

  She was wonderful of course, held the huge crowd spellbound in the palm of her hand, and when she was through, the standing ovation seemed to go on forever. Then Tim Hardin came out on stage, and Ms. Mitchell left…

  …and so did a good quarter of the audience.

  The doors of this dark gymnasium, enormous ones, were located on either side of the stage, and the lobby outside was brightly lit. So the policy was to keep those doors shut while someone was actually performing onstage. Otherwise you were shining a big light into the audience’s face, wrecking the ambience. Those wishing to enter or leave were required by ushers to wait until the song-in-progress was over. This is good policy when only a few people want to go through the doors. When many people try to leave at once, however, the result is large milling crowds on either side of the stage…