Lighting the lamp, p.7
Lighting the Lamp, page 7
As for golf? Not a chance in God’s creation! I’d disgraced myself participating in an office tournament and won a sleeve of golf balls for my efforts, the staff’s equivalent of the booby prize. Tee off with Chuckie and his put-down pals early on a Sunday morning? No bloody way!
Curling? Not very likely, though sweeping madly as a distraction from over-exertion in the mental sphere might be welcome, particularly on a day like today.
Join Grace’s circle, to stretch and twist, and then pass gas exiting the dirty dog position. Definitely not for old Terry. Raise my quirky fulminations to a higher plane, and Namaste my soul to peaceful understanding—not within the realm of possibility for this old fart. Grace insists at the time that I will enjoy meeting and talking to the women. They’re all down to earth. Right! I’d met a few of her grey-haired grannies, diminutive crones in runners and sweatsuits, holding geriatric fruit juice drinks in their bony hands and doing a great deal of deep breathing. Not quite my scene. Nor is getting centered and listening to Gregorian chant, and tinkling Buddha bells, and made in China chimes, all under the influence of way too much incense.
The alternative, she points out in an uncharacteristically accusing manner, is sitting among the cognoscenti of the banal sucking back tepid coffee. I earnestly defend Rhyle’s coffee, the dark roast in particular, but that only makes her laugh, and then juxtapose, with hands extended upward as though proffering choices, a healthy, wholesome activity like yoga against bitch session with cronies down at The Compass Café. Crones or cronies, that’s what it comes down to, and, for better or for worse, I choose the latter.
Admittedly, Grace has a take on things that I refrain from dismissing out of hand. Hers is an enduring encouragement because hers is an enduring love. She maintains that happiness in life is never a sure thing, for she knows well the sadness of loss. And yet, she strives with everything she has to bring joy to others, especially those closest to her heart. For this I am grateful, and keep my options to self-realization open. But quick she is and understood from the get-go what makes me tick. And therefore Grace never fails to engage me. She knows what I know: that the spirit is willing but the body is weak.
“Picked up Joe Lebeau hitching to Duncan,” she says, coming into the study with the mail. Her cheeks are rosy, but she’s wearing a frown. “Tire trouble on his truck. He thinks there’s more snow on the way. Gaye Godbout was with him.”
“Ah, my compatriots, my Compass cronies.”
“Joe’s a pretty sensible guy. But Gaye, she’s the only one from among them down there that I really have any time for.”
“What, my buddies, my friends.”
“Buddies, maybe, but certainly not friends. Only Joe’s been up here to the house, and that’s mostly because Dad recommended him for that gardening job. Rhyle, Shelley, the others, they’re nothing to you beyond that deck you all perch on like a murder of over-caffeinated crows. They’re hardly what you could really call friends.”
“But, Grace.”
“I mean real friends. You seem not to have any real friends. Or old friends. No friendships that have lasted.”
“That’s what Laura used to say to me.”
“Of course she would have. So why is it?”
“No need. I didn’t make friendships easily. And Laura’s friends, well, no need there either. All Birkenstocks and granite countertops, that crowd. Led, in part, to the break-up, which—”
“Tilley hats, not included in today’s social critique, Dear?”
“I’d have included them, given a chance. And eat-fests on ocean cruises too. Believe me, Grace, these days, Compass regulars are more than sufficient.”
When Grace and I began dating (as opposed to hooking up as is said these days with more than just a hint of promiscuity), she expressed considerable curiosity about the whys and wherefores of the failed relationship with Laura, and how I felt about it all. The relationship was of short enough duration, and more of a housing convenience, accommodation to mutual but temporary needs. Laura was a delightful companion. Energetic. Ambitious. I was not, in truth, driven into any kind of blue funk when we decided to part ways. “Unlike Orpheus,” I said to Grace when discussion of the issue had run its course, “I did not look back.”
I make to pull out the file folder containing my notes on spirituality and human wants as a counter-argument to the implied negativity of Compass cronies, but then decide not to, and close the desk drawer. Though sympathetic to my efforts on many previous occasions, the charcoal sketches, for example, and the accompanying captions, Grace this day might not appreciate precisely what it is that motivates me to probe the philosophical multiple choice that The Compass Café offers, and I would be at great pains to explain. Moreover, she exudes purpose. I know her well enough to understand that no amount of abstract gobbledygook will deflect her from that purpose. It concerns some need on my part that she sees and I don’t.
“You’ve never introduced me,” she goes on, “to anyone you called a best friend. You’ve worked at that government office for decades, and you still—”
“You’re my best friend, Grace. Besides, just because I feel no need to apply that term to anyone now, except for you, of course, doesn’t mean that I didn’t.”
“Exactly.”
“Grace,” I say finally, hoping like hell she isn’t in some roundabout way reintroducing the golf, curling, and yoga themes as balm for the battered psyche of her ever-friendless mate, “what’s all this in aid of?”
“Do you recall that Montreal winter scene we liked and thought we might buy as a Christmas present to ourselves?”
“Yes, but didn’t. Au Coin de la Rue Marie-Anne. Pierre Bellefeuille’s effort. I admired it a great deal.”
“Joe Lebeau mentioned Montreal winters today as we drove along,” she continues, “and that got me to thinking about the painting and then about the east.”
“I follow.”
“Well, is there no one you remember who maybe remembers you? Back east, I mean. Other than your brother and family.”
“Hell, you know how that is with me. These days I can’t even remember the name of someone I just met, like that woman from your meditation circle, the organizer. Sandra, was it?”
After we met and agreed to keep meeting until death do us part, I do over time present to Grace a substantial enough personal perspective: Ma Maggie; mother’s mood swings and its effects on family life; father, whom we called JB, and his extended family; an older, more successful brother Patrick; jobs; Daniel Cleary aka Dan the Man; university days; Donna Haywood; Andras Nagy’s farm; coming to BC; a pseudo-teaching job; a relationship with Laura Jones; a government appointment. No doubt a good number of childhood and adolescent exploits work their way into my story as well. But friends, little mention of particular friends, I expect, either here or there. No need.
“Leandre. The woman’s name is Leandre. She thought you were very friendly.”
“Until she started on about your meetings, your annual retreat in Tofino, and how much her hubby has gained from tai chi and the like. But that sweet little lady is your friend, and we’re discussing mine. Right?”
“Quite right. Friends you had before coming to BC.”
“And who may still be?”
“And why not?”
“But not very likely.”
“No really good high school friends? No old hockey buddies? Or football? No university pals? No one back east to throw your life into relief? No one who visited you here?”
“I suppose there are, but none stands out. Andras Nagy, possibly, and his sylvan estate. And as for visits, Dan Cleary, shortly after I settled on the island. The early seventies, summer likely. He arrived with a girl named Joan. No, I’m wrong, her name was June. In any case, I hadn’t known her. All vague now, but a trek over to Long Beach before they left, and camping among the logs on the sand, I recall something like that with them. I’ve no journal to draw on. Lost somewhere. I tried to look Dan Cleary up the week of Patrick’s wedding—when was that, anyway? In the spring of ’75, I think, but my time was limited and pretty much focused on family affairs, and I didn’t meet up with him. My father died in ’90—taking and holding his hand as he lay on his deathbed was hard enough, but then he mumbled what Hamlet says about mortality, and that sent me around the bend. Anyway, Ma went in ’95. Dan Cleary had faded into the irretrievable past by those two dates. So had Blaise Belami O’Brien, the fictional name for Dan the Man; he arose off the top of my head when fabricating romantic intrigues was the order of my day.”
The frown that Grace wore when she entered the room has been transformed into a smile. She sits down, mail still unopened, and bids me go on about the early days and Dan Cleary.
I see no reason not to go on as long as I can keep at bay any reference to chakras and mantras, curling and golf. I had been over this part of my personal saga with Grace before, about attending high school for a couple of years at Yamaska College where I met Dan Cleary and must have failed, judging by her present interest in any possible old friends of mine, to mention anything beyond my having achieved modest academic success while enjoying a kind of supervised fraternity life in a spectacularly beautiful setting on the shores of Brome Lake. So, to Grace’s great delight, I fill in a gap, describing Dan the Man in a particularly brilliant light. Among other things remembered about him, that he was a free spirit, for instance, and a charmer unbound by convention. I mention that he had a predilection for storytelling and could make from the most mundane of everyday experiences a tale of epic proportions that led, more often than not, to general laughter. He had in those days, and presumably still does, a gift for mime in both word and action. His John Wayne was most convincing. We shared much over the years, had a lot in common but were very different. The Terry that I was back then wanted to be more like him but didn’t know how in the real world to become so. Besides, effort would be required. Easier was the creation of a fictionalized version of Dan, called Blaise Belami O’Brien. And Dan the Man was a ladies’ man par excellence. During our extended friendship we were never rivals, and neither of us had a vocation to a life of contemplation or a desire to get tattooed in the name of love. He protested in the name of social progress, however. During the October Crisis, Dan was picked up and held incommunicado for several days. My protest was mostly abstract. We were both into nature, him more than me, and both had reasonably stringent religious upbringings.
“But you really do remember a good friend,” Grace tells me when I finish.
“As I’ve said before, a lifetime ago,” I answer, aware that what I’ve presented to her is more a revelation of a younger Terry Burke than a description of the charismatic Dan Cleary.
“Why don’t you—?”
“—don’t I what?”
“Since you’re not in the least interested in joining us for our retreat in Tofino, while I’m away, why don’t you take a trip back east, visit Patrick and his family in Toronto and renew old friendships wherever you find them.”
“So, that’s where you’ve been going with this.”
“Well?”
“Decision for another day.”
“That’s exactly what you said about that Bellefeuille oil painting.”
“Summer’s months away, Grace. Got to get through this winter and its discontent. And a disturbing death in the village to rationalize.”
OR NOT
A wind blows in across Cowichan Bay, whipping one way and then another a few threads of recently unravelled metaphysical speculation that continue to flap about in my head—the dead man theme, still not put to rest. The snow from that stormy night has become the stuff of slush piles next to doorways and entrances. Dark patches of pavement glisten in the sunlight. Water runs this way and that, heading back to the sea. Residue as pathetic fallacy: nature transforming what was to what is to what will be all over again. The snowfall Joe Lebeau was fretting about failed to materialise. There’s even talk of an early spring. I’ll believe that when I see the buds and hear the birds, and engage in awed appreciation of vintage cars and old pick-up trucks that exhibit mirroring chrome and magenta paint-jobs in the local show and shine events.
Penelope exits the bakery as I approach. She starts a beat-up, flower-decaled VW Beetle parked in front of The Compass Café, cuts out in front of a delivery van, and heads along the estuary road. I wave to her as she passes, but she doesn’t notice me.
Goaded by images of a ram’s head tattoo and a tattered fleece-lined coat, to say nothing of writing on the washroom wall, I make for The BlueNote. O’Shea is arranging new lighting in the music room. I move aside and watch. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” emerges distantly out of corner speakers. The phrases “no direction home” and “a complete unknown” begin echoing over and over in my head. It takes some time before I realize they have insinuated themselves into the haunting flute music that follows Dylan. Excellent selection of tunes, I tell Rick when he discards his screwdriver, and then compliment him on his sporty tweed cap angled at a jaunty forty-five degrees off the side of his head.
“Styling!”
“Indeed, it is.”
“Hey, man,” O’Shea says, poking a finger in his ear, “you ever get that ringing sound up here? It’s like a mechanical bird piping its way, I don’t know where, to Byzantium, let’s say.”
“Yes, I do. It’s as you describe it, but without the exotic allusion. More like wind through a keyhole. Sometimes it manifests itself as a hum, and sometimes like an eighteen-wheeler in the rain on the Trans Canada. I don’t hear it unless it’s quiet. One ear. They call it tinnitus. My mother, bless her soul, suffered from it terribly.”
“Tinnitus, eh? Tin ear, more like. And it sucks bad, bad like a black hole.”
“Right, tin ear. But you’re anything but tone-deaf, Rick, with all your music interests. On that score, I must take a second look in here.”
I duck into the john, still intrigued by the story of frustrated love that I assume still lingers there. Instead of those words that so moved me previously, I read new graffiti, most of it marine humour. Here be dragons! Beware icebergs and clashing rocks! Around the periphery of the board and tagged by T.S., the following, Fall from grace, leap of faith, egg on face—
“Sorry, man,” O’Shea says when I tell him of my disappointment. “Was tabula rasa time.”
“I see Thomas Shelley’s been in.”
“Tom? All the time. Great blues guitarist, eh. Hasn’t missed a session here yet.”
“Looks like you’re adding a little more mood to your stage area.”
“Right on, man,” Rick replies with a twisted smile as he works to secure a fixture on the ceiling. “Got a good deal on these lamps from somebody Joe Lebeau knows. Directional lighting, eh.”
I glance out the back window, taken with the shimmering light and the undulating reflections of masts, and tarps, and houseboats. Rooted in the rot atop a barnacle-encrusted pile driven into the silt, a leafy string of dormant growth hangs down with no apparent raison d’être. A random unfolding of organic truth, unnoticed before, now aesthetically arranged in shadow and ice for— For what? My personal edification at low tide? My growing awareness of the ephemeral? Life on a houseboat has always produced in me a sense of living beyond the quotidian, in a kind of floating dream world where mud and slime are somehow transcended by the benign influence of the moon. However, low tides reveal too much that is real.
“I researched Poussin, his Cupid’s arrow imagery,” I say, turning back to O’Shea, who is now grunting. “But it didn’t actually clarify much for me about the fellow who died, not that I really expected it to.”
“Not a lot new on that unfortunate dude. Sometimes it takes a while, months even, before all the facts are known.”
“His death makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it, Rick? How life’s worth is measured? By beliefs? By actions? By tokens of love?”
“Dude, you’ll really dig Penelope’s latest. She rehearsed it in here not five minutes ago. Trippy, man. It’s like her lyrics answer those very questions.”
“I caught a glimpse of her driving along the strip.”
“Next blues night, she’ll do that song.”
“I’ll bring Grace. Now tell me, ever have a melody that plays over and over in your head despite every effort to stop it?”
“All the time,” O’Shea says. “Lasts for hours or even all day. An earworm.”
“A what?”
“An earworm. It can be a couple of bars, or a whole lot of them strung out together.” At this point, O’Shea breaks into a Dylan song that speaks to the ambiguity of love. When his voice peters out, he reaches for his bottle of water, takes a swig, and after a deep breath adds, “That’s from my personal four-letter-word retrieval system.”
“Interesting repertoire. I know that Dylan tune as well as the one we just heard. Takes me back. This musical spin-in-the-head, this earworm as you call it, is another form of obsession, I suppose. Like the story of the dead man, only in a different way.”
“Want me to put on a pot of coffee?” His screwdriver discarded, O’Shea begins rubbing his wrist.
“Don’t bother, Rick. I’ve got coffee waiting for me at The Compass.”
* * *
Today Rhyle sits at his counter window arranging coins into sensible piles. He tells me I might like some of the new titles that arrived earlier and recommends Bertrand Russell’s autobiography.
I nod.
“You should have your own column,” Joe Lebeau says when I sit down with my cup of dark roast to join him and Gaye Godbout. He has the editorial page in the previous week’s Chronicle open on the table before him.
“Then you’d all be writing in to contradict me, Joe.”
