Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange

by Stuart McLean

  Even back then, I loved music. I had a cassette player and a clutch of my most listened-to tapes. Word got around that I “had music.” I was invited to the bunkhouse where the work crews stayed. Back then there was very little TV, no radio, and no women to chase.

  I entered the room. There was a haze of smoke hanging in the air. The whisky bottle was passed around. I’ve never smoked, and I wouldn’t develop a taste for whisky until many years later. I sat there with my tape player in hand. I looked at these men. They could have been right out of a history book: voyageurs, or those men who built the railway.

  I was just a kid. Not a word was said. I put my prized copy of Tommy by The Who into the tape machine. The music played and we all sat back and listened, lost in our thoughts.

  Tonight, here in Fort McMurray, many years later and many thousands of miles away, I lie in my comfortable bed in my wonderful hotel suite. I have my state-of-the-art wireless headphones on. I’m listening to a pristine, remixed, remastered CD of Tommy . The CD cover is signed “To Doug, from Pete Townshend.” The music is wonderful. And my head is full of memories of that bunkhouse in Pickle Crow.

  I’m a million miles away from my family and I’m listening to the music in my head. Nothing has changed. The moment and the memory make me happy. After a while I shut off the music and go for a walk. In these moments I’m saddened, as all of a sudden I realize that for better or worse, I’ve come full circle.

  I try to rationalize these feelings. Eventually I become comfortable with the thought that, if you live long enough, life continues to go full circle. I’m just now able to grasp that concept. All is fine.

  Fort McMurray, Alberta

  CHARLES THE GREAT

  Some years ago, my husband and I finally fulfilled our dream of living on a farm. We were city people completely intimidated by the thought of raising livestock. So, we decided to start small with some hens and the requisite rooster. After all, we thought, how hard could it be to raise a few birds?

  We were dreaming about brown, organic eggs the day we picked up our four-week-old chicks at the local co-op. They came in a cardboard box. It was obvious right from the start which one was the rooster. On the way home we were alarmed at the shrieks emanating from within.

  We were relieved to find only minor injuries when we got home, but we were left with the unsettling feeling that we might be unleashing a poultry monster into our lives.

  The henhouse my husband was building wasn’t ready, so we put the chicks in a small pen in the basement, where they flourished. One day I went downstairs to find the little rooster running around the pen holding a dead mouse by the tail. It was almost the same size as he was.

  We named our rooster Charlemagne. After a time he became Charlie.

  When the henhouse was complete, the chickens moved in. As he matured, Charlie became very possessive of his girls. By the time the hens started laying those coveted eggs, we were terrified of him. To collect the eggs, I had to wait until the hens were out free-ranging and then take the back way out to the henhouse, sneaking from tree to tree. If Charlie spied me I’d have to make a run for it. He was ferocious. He was unrelenting. He would race to get in front of me, spread his wings, and then jump at me repeatedly, landing his spurs, more often than not, on my tender shins. Sometimes he would pretend he didn’t notice me. He’d peck busily at the ground until I let my guard down and then he’d launch a rear attack. Eventually I armed myself with a water gun. A well-placed squirt in that beady eye would buy me some time.

  Charlie and I carried on this relationship for some time, each winning and losing some, until the day he came down sick. I separated Charlie from his flock. He was too ill to protest. It saddened me to see my tormentor defeated. Over the next while I kept him under a heat lamp and put electrolytes in water, which I dribbled down his throat. He had no desire to eat, but I was able to tempt him with rice and peas that I cooked especially for him. Amazingly, Charlie recovered and was soon as mean as ever—although I think he softened a little toward me.

  Charlie was eventually killed by a raccoon while defending his flock. He fought bravely. We didn’t lose a single hen that night. We still live on the farm and we know a little more about raising chickens these days. There have been many other roosters and hens over the years, but there has never been another Charlie.

  Orillia, Ontario

  THE MAN ON THE HILL

  My name is North de Pencier and I’m seventeen years old. I live on top of a big hill, between two rivers, so the only way to get anywhere is to walk down the hill. On my way down there’s a house where people receive help and support. I don’t know what common quality binds the people in this house; maybe they’re recovering from illness or addiction, maybe they’re being reintegrated into society after some traumatic experience.

  The first time I walked down the hill, I noticed that there was an older man sitting outside on the porch. This man wasn’t there every time I walked by, but I saw him at least three times every week. Whether it was winter or summer, he was always bundled up. He seemed to spend all his time people-watching. At first, I reacted the same way as everyone else who walked by. When the man said hello I ignored him. I’ve been indoctrinated with the “don’t talk to strangers” mentality from a very young age, so I react with suspicion to any sort of contact from people on the street.

  I began to wonder if the man recognized me. After all, he saw many people come and go every day, and I was only one of them, just another teenager going down the hill. I wondered what he saw in the people he watched. He was the only point of stillness in a constant crawl of people.

  I felt guilty about being so uncharitable. Finally, after about a year of passing him by, I began to answer his hellos. He would wave delightedly at me as I walked down the hill, and again when I walked back home again. I suppose it must have been exciting to get a reaction from one of the people who usually pretended he wasn’t there. Soon, it was me who was saying hello as I walked by. He would blow me a kiss and wave, and no matter how cold or grey it was outside, I’d always be cheered that I’d met someone who cared about the people around him.

  I went away this summer. When I came back my friend wasn’t on the porch anymore. I looked for him all fall, to no avail. I considered writing to the residence where he lived to see if he was okay, but then I realized that I really had no right to approach a man with whom I’d never exchanged more than a hello and who lived in a house that was careful to maintain its privacy. Still, if the man on the porch of the house who always said hello is out there, I would love to let him know that I appreciated every wave, and that his presence on the way down the hill is missed.

  Ottawa, Ontario

  GOOD CATCH

  It was the night of my fourteenth birthday. I’d already had as much of a party as I’d been expecting. There was school the next day, and even though it was pretty early, I was tired. The only thing left to do was shower and go to bed. Modesty wasn’t an issue at our house, and no one was around but my parents, who were watching TV, and my kid sister, who was already asleep, so I went upstairs to my room to undress. I wrapped a towel around my waist and held the two corners firmly on one side. I walked back downstairs, through the TV room to the stairs that led to the basement, where our home’s only shower was.

  While I was there, visitors came by to wish me a happy birthday. It was Mrs. Day and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Marilyn Day. Mrs. Day was Mom’s best friend and my music teacher. She was, and still is, a darling woman. Marilyn Day was going to be my wife one day, though she hadn’t realized that yet. For her birthday, just two months earlier, I’d given her one of those elegant, don’t-play-with-it-it’s-not-a-toy porcelain dolls. It was dressed in a white satiny dress with a bonnet. A wedding dress, I decided. It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. The doll had dark, shoulder-length hair, just like Marilyn Day. The doll had deep brown eyes, just like Marilyn Day. The doll had a soft, demure expression, just like Marilyn Day. The doll was Marilyn Day, dressed
for our wedding. It was as much of a hint as I could muster. She didn’t get it, apparently.

  The gift pleased Mrs. Day because it had prompted her daughter to clean her room so that the doll could be properly displayed, but for Marilyn, it was just another reason to bake something in reciprocation. Her mom brought her over on the night of my birthday to surprise me with a large box of homemade chocolate-chip cookies.

  They sat down in the TV room with my parents to chat. Mom and Dad had apparently forgotten about me because they didn’t let me know I had visitors. Not only that, they looked just as surprised as Marilyn and her mother did when I opened the door at the top of the stairs and stood in their presence wearing nothing but a wet towel held about me with one hand.

  The room was suddenly silent. I noticed, with horror, Marilyn sitting in a chair facing me. In her lap was a brown cardboard box; on her face was the same stupefied expression as the rest of us.

  I suppose Marilyn just didn’t know what else to do to rid the room of this dumbfounded, choking sensation. At least her heart was in the right place when she stood and, with forced cheer, declared, “Hey, A.J.! I made you some cookies for your birthday. Catch!” She chucked the box at me.

  I caught it—with both hands.

  Prince George, British Columbia

  WE DANCED

  When I first met Anita, four years ago, I was delighted to learn that, like me, she was interested in ballroom dancing.

  We signed up for classes on Thursday nights at a local college. We quickly learned that we’d be acquiring two skills: the basics of ballroom dancing and the basics of communication.

  Our instructors taught Anita and me several dances: the cha-cha, the rumba, the swing, the foxtrot, the waltz, and the tango. They stressed that if we wanted to succeed we’d need to practise on our own. So, we danced. Over many Saturday evenings we danced in Anita’s kitchen and worked out the steps together. By “worked out” I mean we practised and fought over the steps as we struggled to get them right. There are few ways to get to know someone better than dancing. We discovered that Anita verbally counts out the steps to the dances and I intuitively feel my way through the beats. Many times I would wait, arms crossed, toe tapping, while Anita counted out the steps. This led to many disagreements.

  Some of the disagreements we could resolve verbally, but others could only be resolved physically, as we danced.

  One memorable February evening, after dance class, Anita was driving me home and we were verbally working out the steps for the chase turns in the cha-cha. We had reached an impasse and could only settle things physically. So Anita stopped the car and we stepped out onto the cold, icy Edmonton street. As we met in the centre of the road, our eyes locked and we squared off against each other. I took her hand in mine and placed my right hand midway down her back. She placed her left hand atop my shoulder and we danced, in our ski jackets, in the middle of the deserted street. The street-light was our spotlight and the frozen road our dance floor. Oblivious to the cold, we worked out the steps together in our different ways: Anita counted in her methodical manner, while I felt my way toward perfection.

  I would never have imagined myself dancing on the frozen, forbidding winter streets of Edmonton. But I had found my partner, and we danced.

  Edmonton, Alberta

  MY LIFE IN TRAINS

  I grew up on a remote lake in northwestern Ontario. Our village was accessible only by rail or boat. When I was small, in the 1950s, we had two steam trains a day, one eastbound and one westbound. We could catch the eastbound just before breakfast, ride the hundred miles into Port Arthur, do our business and grocery shopping, jump on the evening train and be home that night. I was about six years old the year they took the steamers off the rails. I remember coming out past the Neebing yards and seeing the steam locomotives being busted up for scrap. I cried my eyes out.

  Over the years, as the highways were built, the train service diminished. By the 1970s we were one of the only places along the line between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay with no road in or out. We went from two trains a day to one: eastbound Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, westbound Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Soon enough they took our real train away and replaced it with a railiner. You know the kind: two cars with a combined engine/baggage car up front and a coach behind. Not a real train, but it got us to town and home again. Often the only passengers we saw on the train were retired railway guys riding on their passes.

  Usually when I rode the train, I’d ride in the baggage car. I’d sit with the mailbags and the stray pieces of local express freight, chatting with Bernie, the baggage man. On one memorable trip, the engineer was eating his lunch out of a classic gunmetal tin lunchbox. As he was chewing the last of his sandwich, he turned to me and asked, “Ya wanna drive?”

  Like any self-respecting fifteen-year-old, I said, “Sure!”

  I sat down on the seat, my foot on the deadman’s pedal. “Just keep ’er out of the ditch,” he said with a chuckle.

  I was fifteen years old and I was driving the CN train. It’s a very strange perspective to see the rails disappear under you from the front of a railiner.

  The engineer, having finished his sandwich, started in on a butter tart wrapped in waxed paper.

  “Pull the whistle,” he said. “There’s a crossing coming up.”

  One short and one long pull on the cord. The whistle sounded just like what I’d heard all my life.

  The butter tart now gone, the driver pulled out a package of Players Navy Cut and a set of Vaughn papers. He rolled himself a smoke. We all smoked hand-rolled in those days. Tailor-mades were a treat from town. The engineer seemed reasonably sure that his train was in good hands, so he reached into the pocket of his jacket that was slung over the back of the seat. Out of the pocket came a mickey of Hudson’s Bay rye. Without a second thought, he twisted the cork plug. It made an eek-eek sound as he pulled it out. He took a long pull from the bottle. After wiping his lips with his sleeve and gasping gently, he reached out his hand and said, “You wanna slug?”

  It was becoming clear why the train seldom, if ever, ran on time.

  In a few years CN took the train off completely. The community that existed died along with it. We remained isolated until a logging road touched our lakeshore in the mid-1980s.

  I still miss the train.

  Atikokan, Ontario

  THE TRUTH OF TOWERS

  It was the summer of 1963. My father was in the Canadian Army, and we’d been posted to the little town of Soest, Germany. There wasn’t much to do if you were a girl living on the Canadian Forces Base in Soest. TV was all in German, so nobody bothered getting one. We didn’t even have telephones. There was a big Quonset hut that had been converted into a clubhouse called “the Teen Hut.” It was a place where teens could hang out, dance, and play ping-pong or cards. But you had to be thirteen to belong to it. I was twelve. I longed for the day when I could walk through that door, select a Beach Boys tune, and show everyone that I could dance as well as my big sister, Hazel.

  The day I’m writing about had nothing to do with the Teen Hut, but everything to do with showing Hazel that I was as grownup as she. The plan that day was to pack some sandwiches and go to the pool.

  Of course, as soon as we got there Hazel and her friends ditched me and headed to the tower in the deep end. I watched in awe and envy as they climbed the big tower and plunged into the pool. I was paddling around in the “kiddie” end, bored.

  I knew what I had to do.

  I climbed out of the pool and headed to the tower. I got five steps up the ladder when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was one of the lifeguards. BUSTED! He spoke English. He was stern with me. He shouted, “You cannot go up the tower! You are too small!” I argued with him. While I wasn’t the strongest swimmer at the time, I knew I was capable of jumping from the tower and swimming to the ladder at the side of the pool. Finally he said, “Okay, you prove to me you can swim ten lengths of this pool and I will allow it!”

&
nbsp; He blew his whistle and cleared a swath for me along the side so that I could start my swim. Now, this pool wasn’t just an ordinary pool, it was an Olympic-sized pool. I climbed into the shallow end and started my Olympian feat. By the time I got to the end of my first length I was exhausted, but I was buoyed by the laughter and splashing made by the older kids—and Hazel—as they continued to jump off the tower. I managed to make it back to the other end of the pool without stopping. I desperately wanted to pause for a minute and take a breather, but I knew that if I did it would be the end of my tower dream. With great difficulty, I started out on my third length. My lungs felt like they were going to explode. My arms felt like they were detached from my body and working entirely on their own. My legs were the only part of me that worked as commanded. I tried to keep thinking about the tower and how much fun it would be.

  And then it happened. I could feel myself beginning to sink. I remember thinking that if I could just keep my legs going I’d be okay. By some small miracle, I reached the end of my third lap.

  That’s when I heard the whistle. It was the lifeguard. He was standing over me at the end of the pool. Pretending not to hear, I turned around, put my feet on the wall, and drove off mightily. I felt a hand on my bathing suit as he tried from the edge to pull me out of the pool.

  I turned around and punched his hand away.

  That gave me enough of an adrenalin surge to keep going. I could feel my arms again, and my lungs responded as well. I veered away from the edge of the pool, out of the lifeguard’s reach, and kept going, knowing that this might kill me but I was darned if I wasn’t going down without a fight.