by Arthur Black
Now, decades later, I am trying to appreciate the fact that Somebody Up There has a divine sense of irony, if not humour.
I finally have my coveted moustache—it’s no Lanny McDonald but it’s respectable.
Meanwhile, the top of my head is as bare as a Sylvania 60-watt bulb.
Good one, God.
Take Back the Night
Once upon another lifetime it was my honour to address the graduating students of a private school. When I’d exhausted my repertoire of pieties and platitudes the headmaster asked me if there was one piece of advice I could offer that would guarantee success in whatever they chose to do.
“Sure,” I said. “I can tell you how a simple, easy, healthy, dirt-cheap alteration in your daily life will guarantee success. I can also guarantee that 99 percent of you will scoff and reject it the moment you hear it. Still game?”
They were.
So I gave it to them in three words: Get. Up. Early.
How early? Crack of dawn early, I told them. Get up early and work on your dream. Read, paint, sing, sketch, write, knit—whatever. Do just an hour or so early every day. They groaned and recoiled as if they’d been clubbed with baseball bats.
For once, I knew what I was talking about. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a husband, a new father and a holder of a full-time job it occurred to me that if I ever wanted to be anything more than the above, I needed to find some extra hours in my day.
It was summer, and I lived in a part of the country where the sun was already up and blazing at five in the morning. And so, after a few coughing, spluttering mornings, was I.
It’s a grand time to get things done, the early morning. There is nothing on TV, no colleagues to drop by and chat. The rest of the family is asleep, the phone isn’t likely to ring and it’s way too early for Jehovah’s Witnesses to be knocking at the door. Best of all the mind is fresh, rested and—after a jolt of java—frisky, even.
So I got up and wrote. Not absolutely every day (I took Sundays off and there was the odd morning compromised by flu or travel or a hangover that made it too painful). But almost every day—and I got more writing done in those precious one or two hours than I did in the rest of the week.
Productive? Well, fifteen books, five seasons’ worth of TV scripts, uncountable TV and radio commentaries and a raft of speeches—all written in the early hours of the day. Oh, yes—and thirty-five years’ worth of weekly newspaper columns. I’m not boasting about this, because it’s no big deal. I didn’t erect a cathedral or compose a symphony—all I did was get up early most mornings and sit down in front of a keyboard. It’s like building a home or walking a hundred miles: it doesn’t get done overnight, it gets done a brick or a step at a time.
Ah, but what about the hard part? What about rolling out of the sack at an hour when most folks are in deep sleep (and some are just rolling in from a night on the town)?
Yeah, there are compromises involved. An early riser doesn’t get to close the bars or watch the Late Late Show. People who get up at dawn tend to go to bed earlier than most, which means your social life takes a bit of a hit. But there’s nothing on television that you can’t tape and watch at your convenience. And having one or two fewer beers with the gang won’t do you any harm. Au contraire.
Best of all, you get to have some time to yourself to Get Something Done. Read your favourite author, complete a correspondence course, paint a watercolour, write those letters you’ve been putting off. Move your life along so that you’re not merely putting in time.
There are other rewards, often unexpected. Some years after I gave my talk at the private school I got a phone call from someone whose name I didn’t recognize. She was a film producer, working in Edmonton. She had also been a member of the student body in the school where I gave my talk.
“I just want to tell you,” she said, “that I took your advice—about getting up early. It made all the difference in my career.”
Yes!
Sung Any Good Songs Lately?
When you’re thirty-five, something always happens to the music.
—Gene Lees
I first read that quote back when I was a teenager—which is way more tree rings than I care to count up. I remember thinking at the time: yeah, the man is right.
It explained why my old man couldn’t get Elvis or Buddy Holly. When the strains of “Heartbreak Hotel” or “That’ll Be the Day” would crackle out of our old Philco stand-up radio, my old man would throw down his newspaper and grouse, “What the hell is that? You call that singing? Can’t even understand the words!”
Now, all these decades later whenever I hear a current top ten tune I find myself channelling my old man.
Are mushrooms growing in my ears or did the music change—as in, get stupider? At the risk of offending thousands I have to say that I find most modern popular music stupendously boring and appallingly mediocre. The vocalists sound like they’re singing through keyholes; the instrumentalists sound like they’re playing with boxing gloves on. Haven’t these nimrods ever heard Ella or Aretha? A guitar solo by Chet Atkins or a trumpet riff by Wynton Marsalis?
Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—recorded live at Woodstock?
Aren’t they embarrassed to pretend they’re even in the same business?
How did popular music tumble from the dizzying glory of the Everly Brothers and the Temptations to the atonal squeaks and flatulent squawks that dominate the charts today?
Beats me. Beats Beck too.
That would be Bek David Campbell, a forty-something American singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who prefers to be known as Beck. He’s been around and on the charts for a good twenty years. Last year, Beck put out an album with a difference. Beck doesn’t sing on this production, or play an instrument.
Nobody does.
Song Reader is not a CD or an LP or an iTunes download. Song Reader is a book of sheet music containing twenty original compositions along with a hundred pages of art. Beck’s idea is to take listeners back in time, back to when people sang songs with and to each other.
“You watch an old film and see how people would dance together in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s,” Beck told an Associated Press reporter. “It was something that was part of what brought people together. Playing music in the home is another aspect of that that’s been lost.”
Beck points out that nearly eight decades ago—in 1937—Bing Crosby recorded a song called “Sweet Leilani.” Fifty-four million copies of the sheet music were sold. That means almost half the US population was trying to learn how to play and sing the song for themselves.
Well . . . yeah. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a car or a TV but we had a piano in the parlour—as did most of the families I knew. And in our piano bench was a pair of castanets, a tambourine and a couple of dusty old harmonicas.
Mom and my older sister sang harmony, my other sister sang and played tambourine, while the old man chorded on the piano.
Me? I still play a fairly mean “Freight Train Blues” on the harmonica.
I know, I know . . . corny as hell.
On the other hand, I watched a family of four waiting for their dinner in a restaurant last night. They didn’t talk. They didn’t even look at each other. They were all texting, off in their separate corners of cyberspace.
I’ll take corny.
A-Mushing We Shall Go—Not
I’m a double-edged, multi-tasking (some would call it obsessive-compulsive) kind of guy. I love doing two things at once because I hate wasting time. If I’m going to be stuck in a lineup at the bank, I take along a yo-yo. If I get caught in traffic jam I rat-a-tat the drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on the steering wheel with my thumbs. Even for short ferry rides I carry more gear than a Sherpa for Martha Stewart—food, magazines, my diary, a harmonica, even an inflatable pillow for naps.
When I heard about Canicross my first thought was: this is for me.
Canicross? The latest exercise craze. Apparently it began with some anonymous dogsledder in Lapland looking for a way to exercise his doggy cohorts in the summer, snowless months. What he or she came up with is essentially one-on-one dogsledding minus the sleigh.
Oh yeah—and instead of holding the reins, the human portion of the equation (formerly the sled driver) is lashed to the dog by a harness.
You’re familiar with walking the dog? This is running the dog. Fido picks the trail and sets the pace. Your assignment is to keep up and stay vertical.
Oh, and in order to keep your hands free for balance (and to make it extra interesting) Fido is attached to your crotch.
Pretty much. The Canicross harness fits around your waist and loops about your upper thighs, terminating in a snap buckle in front of your . . . front. The buckle attaches to about six feet of leash, the other end of which clips to the dog’s collar. All you have to say is “Go!” and you are officially Canicrossing.
Canicross is pretty green as sports go. Historians have traced it back to its Scandinavian origins in the early 1970s. Within a decade it had spread south to France, where the world’s first Canicross meet was held in Paris in 1982. Since then it has blossomed, eventually hopping the Atlantic to take seed in Eastern Canada and parts of the US.
I know—you’re asking yourself why would anyone willingly attach themselves to a dog and let it drag them through the bush.
Because in this hectic, stress-heavy world we’re stuck with, where people fumble with their BlackBerrys even as the waiter is handing out menus; where parents text their offspring on the bus because it saves time—in our world, Canicross is the very essence of multi-tasking. It enables you to take care of two chores at once: your dog gets exercise and you get a serious cardiovascular workout.
How perfect is that? I’ve got a dog and I’ve got a gym membership. But there are not enough hours in my day to walk my dog AND toddle downtown to the gym. With Canicross, I don’t have to.
I ordered the starter kit. It includes the human harness (they call it a hands-free belt)—for fifty-two dollars—and a pooch harness (they call it a Shorty Ripstop Sport Harness)—for thirty-four dollars. I donned the belt, attached a long leash to it and clipped the other end of the leash to my dog, Homer.
“Go!” I said.
I don’t speak fluent canine and Homer is a critter of few barks, but I’m quite certain his response was the dog equivalent of “Huh?” Homer cocked his head, looked at me sideways, wagged his tail and sat down.
Homer (he is named after the doughnut-driven Homer of Springfield, not the Greek) is a bearded collie. He has never been a ball of fire, nor is he the Einstein of his breed—but he knows bedrock Stupid when he sees it. For the next hour we stumbled around the neighbourhood together, Homer sniffing, peeing, pausing briefly to scratch and then onward to sniff and pee and scratch some more.
Homer, I mean. I merely followed behind, a flunky biped, tethered to my dog by eighty-six bucks’ worth of clearly superfluous yuppie gear.
Garrison Keillor famously said, “Dogs come when you call; cats take a message and get back to you.” Mr. K. never met Homer, who is unmoved by the command “Come!” Nor does he respond to “Mush!”
Anybody want to buy a barely used Canicross starter kit?
Double Your Pleasure
I wouldn’t tell just anybody this, but I suffer from Peanuts Envy.
“Peanuts,” I hasten to add, was the sobriquet my Old Man bestowed upon my younger brother after he came home from the hospital wrapped in a blanket, red-faced, squally and looking very much like, well, an angry peanut.
I was twelve years old at the time, and unabashedly enthusiastic about having a younger bro. I looked forward to hours of road hockey and bike riding; of climbing trees and chasing pop flies. I anticipated the advantage of having an in-house fall guy to blame for my misdemeanours. I even imagined we might become a neighbourhood Force to Be Reckoned With.
“Uh-oh—here come the Black brothers.” That had a nice ring to it.
Alas, a dozen years is a wide gap for kids to bond across. By the time he was in kindergarten, I was seventeen and discovering girls. When his voice went from falsetto to bass, I was hitchhiking around Europe.
We grew up apart but, oddly, came together in our adult lives. He met and married a West Coast island girl; I also made my way across the plains and over the Rockies to settle on the same island. The same street, in fact. We live a five-minute drive apart.
But it is a small island and my brother and I, despite the twelve years, look very much alike. Some have called us dead ringers. We get mistaken for each other. A lot. “Hi, Jim,” a stranger calls out to me at the checkout counter. “How’s it goin’, Jim?” I’ll hear from a passing motorist. I seldom correct them. It takes too long—and frankly, I’m flattered. Being mistaken for a twelve-years-younger version of yourself is a bit of an ego boost. But it’s better than that. In addition to having inherited my outstanding good looks, ineffable charm and magnetic personality, my brother is an incorrigible flirt. He buys armfuls of roses on Valentine’s Day and hands them out to every woman he meets. He hugs anyone who gives off a whiff of estrogen and treats her like a goddess.
He is, in short, a popular guy with the ladies. And if, every once in a while, some strange woman should mistake me for Jim and wrap herself around me in front of the town post office in a smothering embrace . . . well, where’s the harm?
I figure if you’re going to have a doppelgänger it’s helpful to keep it in the family—although instances of mistaken identity are always fascinating.
True story: Once on a train to California, two blushing ladies approached a distinguished-looking silver-haired gentleman in the club car. “Have we the honour of speaking to Professor Einstein?” they gushed. “No, unfortunately not,” said the stranger, “though I quite understand your mistake. He has the same unruly hair, but inside, my head is altogether different. However, he is an old friend of mine—would you like me to give you his autograph?” On the back of a train menu he wrote: “Albert Einstein, by way of his friend, Albert Schweitzer.”
Oh, those Alberts. They all look alike.
Part Two
Getting Along with the Neighbours
The Not-So-Friendly Skies
I observe but one cardinal rule as I am being prodded and scanned by sullen strangers in the meat processing and dignity-rendering plants our airports have become.
No joking.
No one-liners, Shaggy Dog stories, gags, puns or witty banter with the wand-wielding Gorgons at Security. If I see my old pal Jack in the lineup I may wave, semaphore, whistle, warble or tweet a greeting to him. What I will NOT do is bellow, “Hi, Jack!”
Generally speaking the Rent-a-Gropers who staff the security check-ins have limited imagination and absolutely zero sense of humour. I know that any behaviour I exhibit that separates me from the milling herd can lead to an exceedingly tiresome visit to, as Paul Simon called it, that Little Room.
And it’s not getting better. Paul Chambers, a twenty-eight-year-old Englishman, was arrested and convicted for making a joke while on his way to the airport.
It happened like this. Chambers was en route to an airport in Yorkshire to take off for a winter vacation. A snowfall closed the airport. Chambers tweeted to his friends: “Crap! The airport’s closed. They’ve got one week to get their s—t together; otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”
A lame joke for sure—but Mr. Chambers did not send the message to the airport headquarters or to a newspaper reporter or a radio station hotline show—he sent it to his small circle of Twitter friends. His message was somehow intercepted and sent to the Yorkshire police. Chambers was duly arrested, charged and convicted of sending a “message of menacing character.”
Mr. Cham
bers hired a lawyer and went to the High Court in London to have the conviction overturned. His defence? It wasn’t a “message of menace”; it was a joke.
His lawyer opened the argument by quoting a line of poetry: “Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough . . . ” Surely the author of those words was at least as culpable as Mr. Chambers? Better hope not. The line comes from a poem by Britain’s one-time poet laureate, John Betjeman. And it was meant as a joke.
Exhibit B: Some scurrilous advice from a chap named Shakespeare who wrote, “Let’s kill all the lawyers.” To which the Lord Chief Justice commented: “That was a good joke in 1600 and it is still a good joke now.”
Mr. Chambers’s lawyer added, “And it WAS a joke, my Lord.”
Indeed. I’m happy to report that Mr. Chambers won his case, his conviction was quashed and it is once again okay to make jokes—even on Twitter. Even about airports.
And there are some splendid airport jokes. Such as the one involving a harried and self-important MP caught in a crowd at the MacDonald–Cartier airport in Ottawa. Once again, a snowstorm had hampered operations; flights were delayed and rerouted, passengers were milling around like herring and the lineups were long.
Nowhere longer than at the WestJet check-in booth where a harried ticket agent was doing her best to placate irate travellers. The MP barged through the line and bulled his way up to the desk, demanding a boarding pass. The ticket agent looked at him and said, “Sir, as you can see, there are many passengers ahead of you. We’re doing our best to get everyone through just as quickly as possible. I’m afraid you’ll have to get back in the line and wait your turn.”
The MP went postal. He thumped the desk and roared, “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”
Not missing a beat, the WestJet ticket agent picked up the public address microphone and announced to the entire airport, “Attention, please. We have a gentleman at the WestJet ticket counter who does not know who he is. Anyone who thinks they may know this man is asked at this time to please step forward and identify him. Thank you.”