Driving Minnie's Piano (17 page)

^{I actually broached that very
subject with Kenny. But he didn't want to talk about death. I think
he'd seen too much of it in the cruelest forms. I was thinking
about my father and the cancer and admitted I was flying down to
see if my father was telling me the truth - that the radiation
treatment had gone quite fine and that he was doing
well.}

^{So I sidelined the discussion
onto gun control and asked my state trooper friend how come
Americans were so screwed up that they couldn't get any decent gun
control going. It's about this time in any of my Canadian-American
conversations that I foolishly start boasting about Canada and how
far ahead of the U.S. we are in areas such as gun control and
socialized medicine, all the while realizing that some of our
advances are just holding on by a thin, frayed thread of tradition
and hope.}

^{“Everybody carries guns these
days,” Kenny said out loud, too loud, just as the aircraft was
circling Newark and getting ready to land. We did that nice little
forty-five degree tilt where I got to see the skyline of New York,
then the suburbs and oil refineries of my native state in a
splendid skewed angle. By the time we landed, I had Kenny ranting
about all the deadly hardware that people on the Turnpike packed
these days and how, when he stepped out of his cruiser, he expected
to confront any form of fire power from a cap gun to a rocket
launcher. “You gotta be ready to respond to either one with the
appropriate measures.”}

^{On our way off the plane,
Kenny was still talking about guns real loud. I was the only one on
board who knew he was a cop, but everybody else just saw a large
Black man who looked like he'd been on steroids and they gave us a
fairly wide berth as we ambled up to Immigration.}

^{My brother is waiting for me
at the airport and we drive south to Cinnaminson. Once beyond the
blight of the industrial wastelands of northern New Jersey, the
trees are tall and green with new leaves. A powerful sadness washes
over me as the landscape softens. If only we could turn back the
clock for New Jersey to somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth
century, I could live happily in such an idyllic natural
environment. But that world is gone. You can't bring back the New
Jersey that once was.}

^{In Nova Scotia, the marsh
remains brown well into the warmer days. The blessing of green is
hard won by the warmth that is kept at bay by the sea and by cold
northern nights. My garden sits on the edge of the wide marsh just
a few feet above sea level. In May, I roll the ancient rototiller
from the dilapidated Acadian shed and she starts on the second tug.
One to pull gas into the carburetor and a second to ignite the
spark. It's one of those rare miracles of a mechanical contrivance,
a rattletrap beast that functions more on sheer spirit than
physics.}

^{Pamela asked me recently about
what is alive and what isn't. This query was prompted by the fact
that I talk to things that don't appear to be alive - things like
rocks and cars and rototillers. And houses. I fumbled with an
answer. “Well, I talk to things that aren't necessarily alive but I
am sure they have some sort of spirit,” I said.}

^{“How can a rock have
spirit?”}

^{“I don't know. I just think it
does.”}

^{“And a car?”}

^{“Yeah, in a certain kind of
way. I think a car carries some of the spirit of the people who
have driven it.”}

^{We recently sold the old 1987
Aries station wagon that we'd driven for ten years. Damn, if I
didn't feel saddened by losing that old friend. I suppose it was
because the beast had served the master well and I felt a sense of
betrayal in trading it in on something newer. “This car was used in
my first music video,” I told the used car dealer. I could still
picture perfectly the great mandala-like swirling image of the
front left wheel spinning, creating an optical illusion of going
backwards. The whole idea of using one of the world's least sexy
cars in a music video had appealed to me.}

^{“No kidding,” said the large,
cigar-smoking salesmen, Jack Boutlier. He thought I was making it
up. “Better tell me of anything wrong with 'er, so I can fix things
up for the next owner.”}

^{Suddenly I was relieved. Jack
would actually improve the car, sell it to someone who needed it. I
was off the hook. “It's a little bouncy,” I said. Our deal was
already done. But I couldn't bring myself to tell him that the
shocks and struts were totally shot from bouncing up and down over
potholes on the road where I live.}

^{Cars know when you are about
to sell them. They sense it and get depressed and then things start
to go wrong with them. That's partly how I know they are alive. My
rototiller always starts on the second pull even though it's older
than me - because it intrinsically knows I will arrive one May
morning and expect it to start. It sits in the drafty old wooden
shed all winter waiting for the big moment. It will not let me
down.}

^{When I walk through the spruce
forest and feel the comfortable thick carpet of moss beneath my
feet, when my eyes feast on the healthy green of the seemingly
endless repetitive floor of this coastal forest, I talk to it as
well. I tell it how great it looks. “Way to go.” “Brilliant.” “Keep
it up.” Does it hear me? My kids hear me talking to it. My dog
hears me and none of them thinks I'm crazy. On the beach, the
lichen covers the rocks and offers up bewitching yellows, oranges,
and pale greens or greys and I smile and laugh like I am the
audience at a dazzling stage performance. Is lichen alive? Of
course, it's alive and it is stunning and perhaps proud of its
life.}

^{The lichen also grows on my
roof and must have some kind of acid that eats away at asphalt
shingles. While this is an annoying truth when it comes to home
repair, it is a comforting thought that the lichen is a slow but
persistent harbinger of natural cycles. I've seen bright yellow
lichen on ancient fishermen's sheds reducing shingle and wood back
to a powdery dust that floats away at high tides into fine
sediments drifting east towards the Grand Banks.}

^{I don't know about the
lifespan of the various lichens or about their individuality but I
know that they have a kind of peacock aura for me, strutting their
stuff on roof or rock. And what can I say, but “Hello, how is it
going? Keep it up.” And, of course, I cling to the comfort of
knowing that I can eat lichen if I am ever lost in the wilderness
and starving. Canada is full of lichen. If Farley Mowat is right,
and he damned well better be, then all I have to do is munch away
like a kid with a bag of potato chips. Bring on the tundra, the
great northern forests, the rugged, craggy coasts. The sumptuous
feast is waiting.}

^{I have tried it on occasion
and found it wanting. But I think it needs to be soaked in water,
salt water preferably, to soften it up and make it more
palatable.}

^{Recently on a trip to Tokyo, I
attended an extremely formal lunch with the mayor of one of the
city boroughs of Tokyo, Itabashi. In the lacquered box before me
was an assortment of what Sunyata would have called Klingon food -
seaweed, tentacled things, mushrooms of extremely odd colours and a
black fungal-looking delicacy that turned out to be pickled, well,
tree fungus. Where I come from, people only pickle fish parts or
garden crops. The black fungus, however, was delicious and I
devoured it with chop sticks like I'd been hanging out in Japanese
noodle parlours all my life. If my Japanese had been better, I
would have told the mayor about lichen. Instead, we talked at
length about singing Enya songs Karaoke style.}

^{One of the “assignments” I had
given to myself for my trip to Japan was to have several satori
experiences. Awareness. Discovery, eye-openers for the mind and
soul. There was no genuine satori at the lacquered box lunch where
I had to bring “official greetings from my people.” I had not
expected that. The mayor had done a formal greeting to me and I was
expected to return the favour. I was a little taken aback. Who were
my people? Lawrencetowners, Nova Scotians, Maritimers? Canadians? I
had no time to consider who my people were so I said, “I bring you
the warmest greetings from my people to everyone here in Itabashi
and I know that we have so much in common.” My translator must have
elaborated on this because her translation was a long eloquent
event that pleased the mayor immensely.}

^{The slightly off-kilter,
counterpoint conversation that followed through my harried
interpreter moved on to a discussion of Karaoke and food,
especially seaweed. I boasted of the fact that I could collect
seaweed from the waters where I surfed. I could eat it fresh from
the sea while surfing or take it home and dry in the sun. “Most of
my countrymen,” I said, because I kept reminding myself that I
should speak for my people, not just me, “scoff at seaweed but I
myself am a huge fan of dulse, Irish moss, certain chewy forms of
kelp and rockweed.”}

^{I think my long-winded remark
lost something in the translation, for the mayor looked puzzled and
consulted with his several deputy mayors sitting on his side of the
table. I tried to restore the comradery with the innocuous remark,
“The sea is such a wonderful provider,” and a quick translation
brought smiles all around. I decided to become less loquacious and
nibbled heartily at my fungus, making satisfactory noises that
needed no translation.}

^{A Zen master once said,
“Enlightenment is an accident but some activities make you accident
prone.” Like celebrating simple life forms such as lichen. So
whenever I hike across the beautiful rubble of boulders near the
east end of Lawrencetown Beach and the lichen is out in full
plumage on the grey stones, I celebrate the possibilities. If I was
far, far away from home and starving, I'd have plenty of hope.
Because I celebrate, I have made psychic contact with lichen
friends and I may be crazy but I am happy. Lichen makes me happy, I
admit it. In a world where you have the choice between being happy,
feeling disgruntled or having no feeling at all, I prefer to be
happy. Lichen happy. What do I have to lose? If you find joy in a
thing, it probably has a spirit (a life, if you prefer) or else,
perhaps, your joy in it has given it a spirit.}

^{And what about rocks then? Are
they alive? For the sake of argument, I'll say yes. Most rocks have
good spirits - if you want them to. I'll tell you first about one
bad rock, though. I was twelve, a pubescent mineralogist, a
collector and namer of rocks. I had a great rock collection all my
own with glued numbers on every specimen and a notebook with a list
of corresponding numbers and names - milky quartz, slate, amethyst,
the fickle shiny flaked mica, granite (rockhounds repeat the
age-old pun about this one whenever possible. “I'm not a hundred
percent sure what it is but we'll take it for granite.”), on and on
into the more exciting geodes and the ignominious slag. My father
wasn't sure if slag was something you could consider a rock. “Slag
is what's left over after you burn coal.” There was a lot of slag
in New Jersey in those days. I liked slag, however, because of its
asteroid-like quality. It was like something that would be left
lying around after a nuclear blast destroyed the world and, at
twelve, I thought war, any kind of war, was cool.}

^{One day, fellow rock fan Bobby
Yeager and I, while hiking through the sandy South Jersey fields,
came across a hard white rock that looked like a golf ball. It
wasn't in our identification book so we called it a moon rock
because we deduced through no logic whatsoever that it had come
from the moon. It was perfectly round, white, heavy and hard. Bobby
wanted to throw it at something. A wall or a window. He wasn't a
real rockhound like me but preferred to find rocks and throw them
at things, usually in hopes of breaking something. Vandalism was in
his nature and unlike the Zen master, happy to simply sit and be
with a rock, or me who wanted to catalogue it and keep it in an egg
carton like a prize, Bobby wanted to destroy something with it.
Bobby was a really nice guy, older than me, who had taught me to
smoke cigarettes and look at topless women through a miniature
picture device on his father's key chain. All I had to offer back
in friendship for these gifts was knowledge about rocks and
minerals and, of course, slag.}

^{The moon rock fit nicely in
the palm of the hand and I held onto it tightly, realizing that
Bobby could probably not hold back from throwing it at a passing
car or a bird or the glass insulator on the power lines. After some
more hiking around in the early afternoon sweltering heat of a
southern New Jersey summer day, I discovered I had a headache. “I
think I better go home,” I said.}

^{“It's the rock, man,” Bobby
said. “It's an evil rock. It gave you the headache. Let me see
it.”}

^{I reluctantly handed it over.
Within minutes Bobby had a headache too. The moon rock was doing
something weird and evil to our brains. I had never encountered
this problem with all the other benign rocks I had collected in my
youthful days. Perhaps there was an alien life form inside the rock
or some Russian mind control device. I was twelve; anything was
possible and even likely.}

^{“We have to break it so it
won't destroy our minds,” Bobby said. Smacking things or breaking
them was his solution to most problems. Breakage was his favourite
form of creative communication next to throwing
things.}