Driving Minnie's Piano (12 page)

^{I was opposed to using a
second chord at first. I thought A minor was fine. But not Stan. I
wanted to kick him out of the band but Doug, usually a sombre,
quiet keyboardist, was militant that Stan was “in.” I was afraid
that shifting chords on my guitar while trying to recite my poetry
would throw me and the audience off. The compromise was that one of
the chords be A minor and the second one also a minor chord - an
easy one: E minor.}

^{I had
decided that it would be a cliché if all the SurfPoet songs were
about surfing - not that we'd done any songs yet about surfing,
just the one about cars - so I decided to use a poem I had written
called “Beautiful Sadness.” It was a bittersweet, melancholy love
poem about the
concept
of beauty and
sadness. Sad things can be beautiful, it seemed to say. It was, I
argued, a very Celtic idea inspired by sad Cape Breton fiddle airs.
So Doug found a sampled slow hip-hop loop, I found my two chords,
Stan would strum acoustic and sing backup. Doug also had sampled
recordings of women in a church singing the Lord's Prayer, which
Doug added - only those recorded elements were played backwards,
just like on the old Black Sabbath records.}

^{And so emerged a kind of
spoken word hip-hop love song that made you feel really sad - but
good. During coffee break, Stan introduced one more concept that
would revolutionize the SurfPoets forever. He took me aside and
told me a song should have a chorus - if it was going to be a hit.
It really should.}

^{I told him in no uncertain
terms that we were not in it for the money and if all he wanted was
commercial success, he should get the hell out of the basement and
out of the band. I actually camouflaged my anger and said this
politely. But it was still a SurfPoet chastisement of monumental
proportions. I saw the look on Stan's face and then I remembered
that Stan had recently been fired after his public on-air stand
against automated radio and, suddenly realizing I had hurt his
feelings, I relented. Okay, we could try a chorus. “You mean like
'Help me Rhonda, Help, Help me Rhonda?'” I asked.}

^{“Yeah,” Stan said. “Or 'Round,
round get around, I get around.'”}

^{We were talking sacred texts
here.}

^{I mulled and mired over it. I
did not want us to be “like every other band” using a flashy
elaborate number of chords, harmonies, and choruses up the ying
yang. But I had a fairly small pool of talent and realized I needed
my band members more than they needed me. Okay, I said
again.}

^{I went out onto the street
then to breathe in the diesel fumes from a couple of buses going by
and watch kids spray-painting their names on empty store fronts. In
my poem, I had already configured beauty as a character: the
abstract represented by an ideal. She was a shadowy, beautiful
woman who herself was the embodiment of beauty and sadness at once.
She was a kind of fatal attraction as well. The narrator in the
poem was me-but-not-really-me: also a sad, but not beautiful,
character. Deep down I envisioned myself as a very sad, lonely
person even though I really wasn't. It was a pose like that of the
public persona of so many other poets before me. Poets must really
like to feel sorry for themselves even though they have nothing to
feel sorry about.}

^{The streets were slushy that
day. Slush was good for musical melancholia. I would later enshrine
that slush as well as my old car, an insanely unreliable Skoda, in
the poem/song:}

^{I was always afraid of
Beautiful Sadness}

^{Because I believed she was
friends with despair and misery}

^{But now, driving on the slushy
Halifax street}

^{I realize I want to know
Beautiful Sadness.}

^{I'm only driving a small
Czechoslovakian car}

^{But I want to stop and open
all the doors to the beautifully lost}

^{I want to drive them anywhere
they want to go because someday}

^{I know I'll be one of them and
I want to know what it's like.}

^{And so it
was time to introduce a chorus. Something basic, Stan had said,
something regular people could relate to. (I didn't know what he
meant by regular - people who were not SurfPoets, I
figured.)
I'm in love with
Beautiful Sadness? I'm a fool for Beautiful
Sadness?}

^{Back inside,
Stan suggested, “A
date
with Beautiful
Sadness . . . Got a date with Beautiful
Sadness.”}

^{I didn't know if people even
still used the word “date.” I figured it came from the country
music world Stan had been escaping to since he had stormed off the
radio. Oh, what the hell. I gave in altogether. A chorus was
born:}

^{Got a date with Beautiful
Sadness}

^{Down by the corner of possible
madness}

^{Turn right at
fear}

^{In a desperate
year.}

^{A minor chord after that over
and over into infinity.}

^{We recorded
those two tracks in Terry Pulliam's (upstairs) recording studio,
Sound Market, and they became cornerstones for a CD
called
Long Lost
Planet
. I learned that in the
recording studio you could make mistakes over and over and all you
had to do was get it right once and get that one “take” on tape.
And even if you couldn't get it right you could sometimes fix up
your errors by a kind of cutting and pasting of
sound.}

^{We would eventually get back
to the roots of surfing with a Ventures-like backdrop for “Big
Left” and a rap-like Dylanesque “Nova Scotia Surf Scene Blues.”
Over the years the SurfPoets would expand and contract, add and
lose saxophones, fiddles, singers, drummers, dreamers and
techno-artists. In our own small universe we exploded and imploded
and got older all the while. Unlike other pop bands, we refused to
ride the wave of other performers' success. Ours was to make our
own wave and ride it like a thirty-foot Waimea motherlode. Carving
our own path, intermingling music, surfing, poetry as only we knew
how. This we would do even if our audience was small or even if we
had no audience at all on the beach to watch.}

^{(To listen
to or download free SurfPoets tunes, go to
www.lesleychoyce.
com
)}

^{Zen and the Art of Canadian Winter
Surfing}

^{It's one of the final days of
February. The air temperature is about minus ten degrees Celsius
but it was much colder last night. The seawater temperature is, of
course, below freezing but only the fresh water of the lakes,
streams and potholes is frozen. All the local driveways are sheets
of ice. But the sea is intent upon remaining its liquid self. It's
salty and active and full of life. I'm sitting on its surface on my
surfboard. The shoreline of Nova Scotia is only thirty metres in
front of me. I'm staring at a ragged, snow-dusted
headland.}

^{Like an idiot, I'm thinking
about mutual funds. Alone with a playful mind that's filled like an
old junkyard full of useless scrap, I have nothing better to do
than begin to think about mutual funds. As nature's direct response
to this insult, the sea has ceased sending surfable waves my way
and I bloody well deserve it.}

^{So I stop
thinking about mutual funds and say the mystical eastern word “Om”
very loudly. I've been rereading and teaching Herman
Hesse's
twister
again and so the word “Om” has good reason
to be up there in my brain with the other iron scraps, memory
shards and jagged heaps of information about retirement investment.
A single “Om” seems to be good for a spectacular small but icy
parade of near-perfect waves that afford several damn fine
rides.}

^{I talk to the waves, giggle a
little. Hey, I'm alone and happy. At this very minute, it's
possible I am the only person surfing in Canada. This, I realize,
is another potential ego trap but I gloat on it for a minute, and
then I let it go. The little ego blimp drifts off into the
faultless empty blue sky and I try to keep my mind empty and pure,
knowing that such a deed will conjure more exquisite winter
waves.}

^{My drysuit keeps me warm. The
sun is on my face. There is little wind. Last night it howled long
and hard enough to knock down the power lines and we were without
electricity for an hour or so. But none of that matters now. Now is
now. The eternal surfing present. No other place to be. Everything
is indeed as it should be, unfolding.}

^{That's when I notice the
seagulls: about two hundred of them, directly in the air in front
of me. They have gathered suddenly into a very precise formation.
All kinds of gulls. Brownish ones, white and black ones, grey ones.
Herring gulls and laughing gulls and all their cousins. They have
found a thermal rising at the edge of the cliff and they are making
it work for them. Thermals, of course, come from heat and the sea
is somehow “warm” enough to stir the westerly breeze into a
spiralling current of air that, up until this very moment, has been
invisible - to me at least, but not to the gulls.}

^{More gulls
collect from along the coast and slip into the dance. A joyous,
magical dance of birds in a gentle rising cyclone. Last night,
before the power went off, I watched a TV version of the
movie
Twister
with my kids for the third time. The gull
wing thermal looks just like the Atlantic Ocean's version of an
Oklahoma tornado. There's no one else around on the beach or
headland to watch so this is my own personal sideshow and I realize
that there's more here than meets the eye: I've seen this very
image somewhere else. No, not in some damn movie. Something more
ancient than that.}

^{I squint, breathe in pure
oxygen to regenerate lazy brain cells, coerce slothful nerve
connections. Got it. Pure DNA.}

^{The birds spiraling upward in
perfect harmony before me have frozen into a pattern that is now
recognizable as a DNA molecule. In the fourth grade, I built a DNA
molecule for the science fair out of wood sticks spiraling upward
with a vertical metal rod holding them all together. It was a bit
static for a science display but I had a chance to become intimate
with the names of all those chemicals that make up DNA. Leave it to
the gulls to outdo anything I could have created with wood and
metal in the fourth grade. So this day has conspired and triggered
one hell of a DNA display as a reminder not to think about mutual
funds while surfing. Zen lesson number twelve
thousand.}

^{I catch a wave, turn, race,
tuck down, dip my hair into the frigid Atlantic, kick out and then
look up. The gulls have given up the joyride. No doubt that thermal
has ceased as quickly as it had begun. The gulls are now settling
onto the rocks in front of me. Seaweed-bedraggled, glistening ocean
stones, some with white frost toques of snow or ice. The gulls
watch me surf for another twenty minutes, then spread their long
salty wings and fly off in search of food.}

^{Aside from the lesson about
not thinking about mutual funds and the business with the seagulls
skydancing DNA like a full-blown ballet, I'm not sure what other
Zen things will come along. But they will. Winter surfing is a good
anchor for everything that needs to be said because: 1) most people
think it is absurd and, therefore, I too am absurd for doing it; 2)
it's full of grand metaphysical and metaphorical possibilities;
and, 3) it proves the lesson of some great Bodhisattvas who once
said that enlightenment could be achieved from absolutely
anything.}

^{Anything
I take to mean:
great ponderous spiritual thoughts, deep meditation, years of
self-actualization, studying a grain of sand, doing good deeds
everyday of your life, being a really swift Parcheesi player or,
herewith, surfing in the winter.}

^{Time is a malleable thing,
stretching and contracting and doing all sorts of maniacal things
to us and I'll not let it tangle me up and tie me down like it
often does. I'm reminded of Siddhartha learning lessons from an old
man, Vasudeva, who lives by a river and ferries people across.
Vasudeva is really fond of this river. He loves it and he knows the
river can teach him, or anyone, anything he or she needs to know.
Rivers - always moving, always different but always the same,
always flowing.}

^{Winter will probably lead to
spring, as it should, even in a cold country like this. For now,
I'll assume that the Zen I am talking about is simply this: being
fully here when stuff (like the gull tornado) happens. Not being
someplace else.}

^{Last night, I was driving home
from teaching my classes at the university. I picked up Pamela at a
house far down one icy road and had just turned onto the road where
I live - the old gravel lane skimmed over with two inches of frozen
snow and ice. As soon as I turned onto the dark road, I slammed on
the brakes because something was lying there in my path. At first I
thought it was just a big chunk of ice that had fallen off the back
bumper of a truck or something. But it turned out to be a seal.
I've coaxed seals off this road before to keep them from getting
run over. It's never an easy job.}