I didn’t know what was so funny.
November. 1963. Afternoon recess. Grey light.
7
I will tell you as I told Blake, and I will tell you without fear of being contradicted by the most travelled enthusiasts of the game, that the Hamilton Golf and Country Club is a beautiful course. It’s beautiful in the unspectacular, old-fashioned, gently rolling way that southern Ontario can be beautiful on a cloudless blue morning.
I had the good sense to establish this context when I told Blake and Caroline the golf story the first time. I realized that an important element would be missing if they didn’t know that it was a truly lovely old course. Because that’s what saved me. Everything was so beautiful.
I needed to provide some background to Blake and Caroline for the story to work. And the background was this: that old course was especially magnificent on the summer morning when my father nodded toward the Men’s tee and said to his son, “Lay on, MacDuff.” It was seven-thirty.
I suppose the story was trotted out every couple of years or so, and eventually I began to guess that Blake knew exactly what I was describing. Not the golf, so much. He didn’t play golf. None of us played golf. But by the time Blake was in his twenties I began to get the impression that he could accurately picture what a beautiful old golf course looked like on an exquisite summer day in southern Ontario when you were on acid. I always described my father on the third green, scorecard in hand, pencil poised, peering at me with a puzzled expression when, for the third time, I couldn’t remember what I’d just shot. For the life of me, I couldn’t. And it was always at this point in the story that Blake’s eyes were at their widest and most gleefully attentive. Because he could picture his grandfather, and he could picture me, and he could easily imagine how every hole would be a saga of event if you happened to be on LSD. The number of times I hit the ball must have always seemed entirely inconsequential. Blake could see that. And that was when he started to laugh. I remember that. It was as if that steadily expanding expression had become more than his face could contain. It was one of those really special things: a story that a child enjoys listening to and a parent enjoys telling. They don’t always coincide, I’ve found. Once in a blue moon. Before we all end up dead and buried.
At the course in Ancaster there are big, mature maples and oaks in its generous roughs. A soft-shouldered creek meanders across six of its fairways. Its broader water hazards, fed by mossy culverts and tucked into groves and hollows, come upon the unwary by surprise, as water hazards often do.
Harry Colt, the designer of the course, had strong views about what worked in a golf course and what didn’t. He disliked greens that could not be seen from any reasonable lie on the fairway. He objected to sand traps and ponds and stands of trees that bore no relationship to the land’s natural state. He liked fairways carved into glens so that it looked like a river or a glacier had left their lush, shadowed paths. He liked golf’s generous, sky-high bigness, but he also liked the slow reveal of a tight, two-stroke angle. A turn in the course of play was, he felt, “an accurate test of the game”—meaning that it separated those who had the distance and accuracy and nerve to go over a dangerous point of rough from those who more prudently played around it.
Colt disapproved of a player ever having to retrace steps on a course. Golf was a progression that unfolded invariably—from one to eighteen, in order. A course has its own pace and rhythms within the unchanging sequence of play. For players to be forced to walk back, even a few steps, through a chapter that had already ended in order to get to the next tee was a flaw. No doubt there were situations of terrain and water when it couldn’t be avoided by even the most artful of course designers. But going back the way you came in order to go the way you needed to go was almost invariably a failure of design, in Colt’s view.
Reversal ran counter to the sport’s relentless regard for the future. It was like life: deep in our instinct for survival is our hope for the shot we are about to make. Colt believed that’s what a golf course was: the ordered, but constantly surprising geography of what we are about to do. He liked things that beckoned.
The old trestle footbridge and the flat wooden cross-overs along the creek were among the few obviously man-made impositions on the gracious, rustic scenery. The landscape itself gave the impression that it had emerged, only slightly refined, from the natural world, sand traps and all. The little wooden-shingled rain shelters looked like the mountain huts in which you might expect to find a holy man studying the I Ching. And while Ancaster may not be world-famous, it has always been highly regarded. Edward, the Prince of Wales, played it once. So did Nicklaus, Trevino, Crenshaw. And so did the great Bobby Jones.
Jones was probably the greatest amateur player of all time. He won thirteen major championships in the 1920s. He was a co-designer of the Masters course at Augusta National. Herbert Wind once wrote, “Golf without Jones would be like France without Paris—leaderless, lightless, and lonely.”
And I made a point of mentioning this to Blake and Caroline, and to anyone else at the dinner table at which I picture myself telling the story of the only time I ever played golf with my father, because it was an important point to make. Not only was the golf course beautiful. It was serious—serious meaning that it existed in the realm of courses that good players want to play. These were eighteen challenging holes—challenging enough that a golfer as great as Bobby Jones found them to be no walk in the park. As a matter of fact, the course my father and I were approaching that morning (our golf shoes clattering across the parking lot between the locker rooms and the pro shop) was serious enough to be the site of one of the greatest tournament rounds ever played.
Sipping discreetly but by no means surreptitiously from a flask in his golf bag, J. Douglas Edgar played an almost flawless four rounds of golf that weekend. This was (almost to the day) fifty years before the summer morning my father and I showed up to play.
The LSD was the best I ever had. I was surprised I hit the ball, frankly.
It must have been some kind of survival instinct. Because I can remember that in the car, sitting beside my father while he drove us out to the golf club early that summer morning, I consciously reviewed my golf lessons. Step by step. Instruction by instruction. It seemed the only sensible thing to do. Fortunately, as per usual in those days, my father was not inclined to talk.
As the reality of the first tee presented itself, I could see that there was risk of real embarrassment here. For a moment I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to balance the ball on the tee.
I stepped back to take a couple of practice swings. And this was when something unexpected happened.
My review of my golf lessons in the car had been quite detailed. I was surprised I could recall them with such clarity. But even more surprising: my practice swings. My body seemed to understand something that had previously escaped me. The torque of hips, the stationary shoulders, the unmoving head. I could feel how it all worked, and this was (somehow) inextricably bound up with how beautiful everything was. As I say, it was very good LSD.
As a teacher, J. Douglas Edgar resisted breaking the golf stroke down into sequential elements. A little mystically, he called his teaching method “the gateway.” He believed that a swing was such an organically fluid movement it was as if everything in it happened at the same time.
Mine were not astonishing shots. They were not particularly long. They were not particularly high. But they were decent. And I remember feeling proud of myself as I marched off down the first fairway with my father. And he was right. It was a beautiful morning. “Not bad,” he said. “What do you say to ten cents a hole?”
8
When our house in Toronto was first built (1887) the room at the front of the ground floor was called the parlour. Sometimes the front parlour, although there was no other.
When it was the parlour it was the most formal of all the rooms in the three-storey,
semi-detached house. The house was owned by a Toronto contractor named William McBean. He constructed a number of nearly identical houses in the late-nineteenth century throughout the old core of the city. Nearly identical houses being his line of business.
It wasn’t that McBean lacked imagination. It’s just that he was familiar with the economic constraints that came to bear on a particular swath of the city of Toronto’s growing population. These were the hard-working citizens—neither rich nor poor—who bestowed on Toronto the industrious and modest civic personality that prevailed throughout most of the twentieth century.
Their homes embodied the practical, frugal nature of who they were. Shopkeepers. Teachers. Factory workers. Merchants. Clerks. That being the case, there weren’t a lot of variations on the theme. Variety added costs, and McBean houses were priced for respectable members of Toronto’s middle class—of which William McBean himself was a proud, by-his-bootstraps member.
And let it be said: No moss grew on William McBean. Our house was his model home—a residence he lived in with his family but that had a purpose beyond the strictly domestic. Across the room from the wall with the oil painting I looked at every morning was McBean’s hearth.
The front parlour is where, fire lit, McBean smokes his pipe and reads the Toronto Evening Telegram when he gets home from work every day. It’s an unchanging ritual—which is an illusion that interiors help create. The insides of homes don’t change very quickly—the newspaper and pipe where McBean left them, the city’s dusk reflected on the wallpaper, the same as ever. I remember this myself: our mornings of packing school lunchboxes, of waving to Caroline and Blake from the front door, of picking up groceries for dinner, of insisting on piano practice, of helping with homework, of lying in bed after making love and hoping (sleepily, happily) that we didn’t wake the children. There was a time when our world seemed to go on and on. It actually did feel like it would last forever and now, looking back, it feels like it lasted no time at all.
McBean can show you the hearth (handsomely tiled) and the armchair he prefers. And here (as if the idea of showing his own home to a prospective client is only now occurring to him) he points the way down the narrow but neatly proportioned hall (note the wainscotting) and through this panelled door: his wife is feeding their two cherubic children in the kitchen. A happy scene. Ample cupboard space, as you observe.
William McBean was a good salesman.
McBean owned a number of lots nearby, none of them very wide, all within an easy walk of the shops of Harbord, College, and Spadina.
The garden is the size of a postage stamp. That’s sometimes how people described it. And that’s how my mother always did. She often invited us to Hamilton for a visit, especially during the summer. She was a great believer in children running around—something she didn’t think ours did often enough in the notorious slums of downtown Toronto.
“But they’re playing in the garden right now,” I’d say on the phone on a Saturday morning when the weather was starting to get hot and her invitations became more insistent.
“But they can’t run around there, can they? It’s the size of a postage stamp.”
So, yes. The back garden is small. McBean wouldn’t have denied it. It wasn’t a backyard that took very long for our children to outgrow.
Going through the gate to the sidewalk on their own was a big step. Like almost everything else to do with being a parent, it came earlier than I expected.
I still use the geography of Caroline’s and Blake’s steadily expanding Toronto as a way of ordering my memories of their growing up. “Only to the corner store” was something we shouted every now and then from whatever we were doing. No longer contained by the postage stamp of our back garden, they got to know the alley behind our house quite well when there was catch or hide-go-seek. Then, the neighbouring streets became places they were allowed, apparently, to go. By the time they were ten or so, they managed the reach of the subway.
I like to think my father felt what I did when I took our kids to the airport for their first big trip somewhere. But I don’t know. I was his eldest child on my way to Europe for the first time. He was, I think, apprehensive. As was I. Did they have their passports? Did they have their wallets? Did they have their phones? But I wonder if my father would single out waving goodbye at security as a particularly proud moment. Because I would. They were on their way somewhere. I could see they’d manage.
There were periods in our family’s history when the space that had been McBean’s front parlour and that was now our never-quite-sorted-out living room was not without activity. The piano was there and that meant that for a few years the living room was useful for at least half an hour a day.
Otherwise, its activity was intermittent. It’s where everybody shouts Happy New Year. It’s where the four of us always had our Christmas mornings. The living room was where the kids would make forts with the cushions sometimes, when their friends or cousins were over.
But that room could have been the subject for an article for an interior design magazine, and my wife could tell you why. It was off the beaten track. The natural currents of our daily comings and goings in that house passed it by. My wife, who is a designer, hates rooms that have no purpose.
That could have been my article’s opening sentence. And there was a time when there were half a dozen magazines in Toronto that might have paid fifteen hundred dollars for an amusing but informative piece about what to do with a room that could go for days without anyone stepping into it.
There were a few magazine writers in more or less the same situation I was—friends mostly, knocking around Toronto editorial offices, pinched by mortgages and household expenses. We were looked down upon by creative writers. Such, at least, was our belief. They wrote about sex and death. We’d write about throw pillows if the per-word fee was enough.
We shared a few editors. We shared a few restaurants and bars where we met editors. Sometimes it seemed we shared the same narrator: the calmly bemused, curiously well-informed, comfortably well-off but by-no-means wealthy representative of everyone born white and middle class between 1948 and 1964 in North America. When we bought a house, we wrote about residential architecture. When we had children, we wrote about childcare and education. When our children went away, we wrote about houses that were too big.
A feature article about the challenge of an under-utilized interior would have fit right in—probably in a lifestyle monthly, but there were even general interest magazines that might have run it. The easy humour of the article would make it clear to readers that my wife’s and my particular solution to the problem of the un-used room is not an answer for everyone.
That’s because there’s a band set up in our living room. It gets together once a week. The gear is always there.
Two keyboards, a drum kit, various amps and mic stands and guitars. There’s a PA, with two monitors, one of them perched on the piano we inherited from my wife’s parents. There are patch cords everywhere. There are tambourines and maracas and a couple of acoustic guitars. And there’s usually one or two not-quite-empty wine glasses left from last week’s practice. Blake sat in on drums sometimes.
One of the least endearing characteristics of my generation is its assumption that every other generation is interested in what we are doing, and so, naturally, I wrote a few articles and columns about the band for various newspapers and magazines. There were a few girls in Blake’s class in grade eight who thought it was pretty cool that Blake’s picture was in GQ. George Clooney was on the cover.
Rock and roll. Some classic R&B. A bit of a miracle for me, actually. It’s the only band I’ve ever been in.
Someone I’d worked with a lot over the years suggested we start one. He’d often been my editor. We are friends. We’d known one another for a quarter of a century. I thought I knew John pretty well. But I didn’t see this coming. At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard hi
m correctly. Aside from the occasional “O Canada,” I never sang anything. My guitar playing was what might generously be called campfire strumming.
All the reasons not to start a band presented themselves immediately to me. We’d be terrible. We’d look ridiculous. We would conform (with dreary precision) to one of the most predictable stereotypes of the aging male. Not a motorcycle. Not a sportscar. Worse. Electric guitars we didn’t know how to play and amplifiers with lots of switches we didn’t understand. I thought: “Mustang Sally.” And my heart sank.
When someone you know well, like a lot, and for whom you have the greatest professional respect makes a suggestion that you think is crazy, conversation can be difficult. What do you say when what you want to say is: Are you out of your mind? But John continued, untroubled by my silence.
He told me that when he was a boy he used to listen to the radio in his bedroom in Toronto. He could pick up stations at night—sometimes from great distances.
He’d adjust the dial with the care of a safe-cracker. He narrowed in on the slender, silvery beams of 50,000-watt clear channels. They came from Buffalo or Cleveland or Cincinnati or who knows where in the south, carrying Louis Jordan or Elvis out on the airwaves through the cold and frictionless air. John’s pop-music centre of gravity was earlier than mine and more authentically American, I felt. He told me that when he first heard Buddy Holly on his little transistor (and these are his exact words) his head practically exploded with how good it was.
He stayed up for hours that night trying to find another station, somewhere on the airwaves, playing “That’ll Be the Day.”
He said he wanted to have that music back in his life. That was all. He didn’t think we’d look cool on stage. He didn’t think women would be impressed. “Quite the opposite, probably,” he said. He just wanted to play songs like the songs he heard when he was a boy and the nights were clear. This was his only reason for wanting to start a band. It seemed like a good one to me.
Likeness Page 11