Driving Minnie's Piano (25 page)

^{And she had read my infirmity
as a kind of aloof nonchalance.}

^{The death of
her brother had powerful consequences on Cherie's life. In many
ways, it was also a tragedy for me. I believe that if had achieved
that single mutual romantic relationship with a girl back then, it
would have changed my life. If Cherie had openly expressed her
feelings toward me and if I had found the courage to show real
affection back then, and had her brother
not
been
killed in Vietnam, had she been at that party . . . well, I would
have evolved as a different person. A less confused kid. A more
complete person. Maybe this change would have affected me just
through high school. Maybe for the rest of my
life.}

^{By the end of our high school
days, Cherie had decided to go to college to major in the new field
of peace studies, to work at conflict resolution on a global level.
But something sidetracked her from that calling along the
way.}

^{The death of Cherie's brother
was the first awakening for me to the stupidity of the American
involvement in the Vietnam War. I went on to actively oppose the
war in writing and demonstrations and eagerly confronted riot
police in street action from New York to Washington and once even
found myself marching into Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in a
demonstration led by Jane Fonda, urging army recruits to refuse to
participate in the conflict that had killed Cherie's
brother.}

^{Somewhere in the early 1970s,
I had explored the possibility of escape to Canada should I get
drafted. Having the luck of the draw of a high number in the
lottery, I avoided the draft, but was trained by Quaker anti-war
counsellors to teach others how to make the move to Canada without
getting caught if need be to avoid becoming fodder for the war. My
own brother came perilously close to being drafted and I had
explored an alternative for him: Montreal, maybe Nova Scotia. But
he never had to execute the escape plan.}

^{After Cherie and I had
unravelled the threads of the failed relationship I embraced her
and walked away to my room in the motel stunned by the revelations,
angry at myself - or at least that diminutive fourteen-year-old
self. I tried to blame adolescence or the times we had lived in for
my inability to communicate but I could not. It was like so much
else I had learned about history in my research for writing books
about the United States and Nova Scotia and Canada. Our lives are
shaped by our inabilities at least as much as our abilities.
History, personal or otherwise, is the product of ill-informed
decisions, wrong-headed action or no action at
all.}

^{I wished that I could somehow
gather up Cherie's high school pain and suffering with my own
ancient anguish of those days and turn it into something of beauty
and truth, something more than a haunting echo within both of
us.}

^{The lives of our many selves
from the past do not disappear as the days cascade into a future
which becomes another chapter of the past. But the past is
geography as well. There is a small nation that still exists and it
is inhabited by Cherie and myself and dozens of other people who
were part of my life back there in the sixties. Maybe I am the
faulty president of that small, sad commonwealth, and like all of
the citizens there, we fumble badly with the information that
filters our way. We barely recognize each other and we are forever
at war with the belligerent enemy states that surround
us.}

^{Amazingly, no one that I knew
from my graduating class of 1969 was killed in the war, despite the
fact that it raged on and consumed many American young men. It had
something to do with us being white and middle class and heading
off to colleges of our choosing. Cherie's brother was an anomaly
but he was not alone. During my war protest days, I became a great
fan of Canada as a haven of draft dodgers and, partly because of
this, it would one day loom large as the real estate that would
suit me well for my republic of the future. My perfect art of the
inarticulate, that great crushing skill that had stifled me back
then, made me appear, of all things, to be aloof. It evolved, I
suppose, into a mad and chronic desire to communicate, to write, to
get it all down on a page. To make sense of the incomprehensible as
best I could.}

^{The last time I saw the late
great bearded, socially befuddled but brilliant writer, Alden
Nowlan, was the day he died. I was not in the hospital room in New
Brunswick where he was losing his battle with throat cancer. I was
in my garden and Alden appeared to me as an elegant white bird, a
cattle egret. It was spring and I was scratching at the ground and
planting seeds of chard and kale and spinach. The cattle egret,
rare for Nova Scotia, is a stork-like creature with long thin legs
and a long pointy beak and a tuft of yellowish feathers on its
neck.}

^{The hair stood up on my own
neck and, as the egret followed me around the garden in my humble
pursuit of planting, I knew that something profoundly significant
was going down somewhere. Later, I learned that this event occurred
at the very time Alden was dying. I didn't even know he was in the
hospital.}

^{After the news of Alden's
death arrived, I remembered the poem he had sent me for the
magazine I was editing - the one where he took the persona of a
large white bird flying through the clouds. Really good poets have
a way of making metaphors work, I guess, because there he was in my
garden, still kind of shy and awkward, but now a beautiful,
graceful white winged creature watching me plant the seeds that
would grow into lush green plants as the days grew longer and the
sun warmed the rich, dark summer soil.}

^{Hair, Surfing and the Meaning of
Life}

^{I like hair, lots of it. Hair
on the head, at least. I like long hair on men and women. I'm an
enemy of fashion unless the current trend is to endorse long,
natural, full-flowing hair.}

^{My interest in hair is long
and complex and I have strong opinions on this subject. I think
short hair is a disappointment on just about anyone. Baldness is
forgivable and if a man grows a beard it's an indication to me that
if he could, he'd have a big long wonk of hair on the top of his
head too. People have aimed accusations of sexism at me for my
disapproval of short hair on women but then I don't seem to have
much effect on short hair trends, anyway, so consider me more
concerned about the hair issue than gender commentary. I've taken
my lumps for my hair opinions already and should know better. For
example, I wanted to name my band “Downtown Lesbian Haircut” as a
kind of rueful rock and roll statement but I was nearly booted out
of the band. So I'm well aware that I'm on shaky ground but some
things have to be said.}

^{As far as I can tell, the
first significant long hair statement in my life was made by Jesus
Christ. Now, I don't have a clue as to what the real Jesus Christ
looked like, but at the Palmyra Moravian Church where I went to
Sunday school and sometimes even a tedious but sincere church
service, there was this floor-to-ceiling painting of Him on the
wall behind the pulpit. There was Jesus H. with a flock of sheep.
It had a slightly Maxfield Parrish feel to it, as I reflect upon
the image now. Jesus was holding a lamb and his sheep had those
really cool ethereal sheep faces that made me have early thoughts
on vegetarianism.}

^{I had grown up with that image
of Jesus with his flock in what appeared to be the Valley of
Darkness from the Lord's Prayer. Jesus had really long, flowing
hair. There were, however, no men in the congregation with hair
like that, certainly not the minister or my father. At that point
in my life - I was twelve, it was 1963 - I'd never even met a man
with long hair around Cinnaminson, New Jersey.}

^{My own hair was pretty close
to what they call a buzz cut today. It was my mother's idea. She
was way ahead of her time. The haircut itself was always
perpetrated upon me in our basement beneath fluorescent lights near
my mother's African violets. I hated getting my hair cut. I kept
asking over and over why it was necessary and there was a veritable
concordance of lame answers to this. None of which made the
slightest bit of sense.}

^{The litany went something like
this. You needed short hair in the summer because long hair was
hot. In the winter, well, it was matter of looking neat. Long hair
was dirty or it made me you “look like a girl.” That phrase was one
of the great emasculators of my day. And definitions of masculinity
were pretty narrow in those regimented days of the early 1960s.
Guys had short hair. Girls had long. How could such a dictum be
questioned by mere youth? Sometimes there were even religious
arguments. Aside from a few of my contemporaries who were prone to
steal bikes and smoke cigarettes, the only person who was willing
to approve of longish hair was my grandmother, Minnie. While my
grandfather hated long hair nearly as much as he hated Democrats or
the black fungus that grew on his summer corn, Minnie approved of
the wildness in appearance that went along with ill-trimmed
hair.}

^{The church hated long hair
through the fifties and sixties even though everywhere you turned
you bumped into another painted portrait of a long-haired
saviour.}

^{The big church painting of
Jesus clearly portrayed him with long locks. Oh, those were
different times, some said. No scissors, no knives? What? No barber
shops or mothers with noisy hair sheers in their basements? I think
someone tried to tell me once that there was an error in the
painting and here's why. The big Jesus with his flock in the Valley
of the Shadow of Death was painted during the Depression by a bum -
or at least a guy with no money or home. In those days, even nice
people looked like bums (possibly with long dirty hair) so you
tried to be nice to them. So this artist, let's call him Van Gogh
just for the sake of the story, is looking for a hot meal and a
place to sleep for the night where he won't get rained on. He is
walking down Route 130 - called the Camden Pike in those days - and
he stops by the manse of the Palmyra Moravian Church. He goes into
the church to pray and sees they have this big empty wall staring
him in the face and he wants at it.}

^{A deal is struck and Van Gogh
paints Jesus as he thinks Jesus looks. And it is very, very
Biblical and the sheep have those cool loving eyes and, although
it's not wildly original (Moravians would not have approved of a
Dali or a Magritte - both would have been turned away without a
crumb), it's a fine job.}

^{Van Gogh received some small
financial reward and went on his way, presumably to paint another
Jesus in another church - maybe the same image, I don't know.
During the thirties apparently, people weren't worrying about the
long hair/short hair issue. There was joblessness, starvation,
economic ruin and a Dust Bowl to keep everyone
occupied.}

^{But skip foreword to the
fifties and those of us trying to grow up in ensuing decades where
fifties ideas would not suffer decline. By the 1960s, I had
considerable ambitions: I wanted to grow up, spend a lot of time
surfing and making out with girls and letting my hair grow to
whatever length it wanted to. Fortunately, there was already a
vanguard of forward-thinking individuals who would forge a path in
the wilderness, so to speak, to make my dreams come true. I'm
referring to surfers, beatniks, college radicals and the general
anti-establishment rebels.}

^{By the time I started surfing,
I had convinced my parents to allow me to grow my hair long enough
to cover the tops of my ungainly ears and, in the front, to let it
cascade halfway down to my eyebrows. I had to keep explaining to my
brother that I did not have “bangs.” Even with such modest hair
fervour, I took abuse from the less radical tribe in my gym class
or on the street. But I was sussing out secrets codes in the Beach
Boy songs I was listening to on my record turntable. The lyrics may
seem banal to most. “Round round get around, I get around,” or
“Let's go surfing now, everybody's learning how, come on a surfari
with me . . . ,” but when I saw those California singers on TV and
they had hair dangling down over their eyes, I knew my hair could
do that, too, if it only had half a chance.}

^{So I slid downhill in the eyes
of the community after that. I bought clam digger pants (a pawn to
the fashion industry), a couple of “bleeding“ Madras shirts and I
steadfastly refused to go down to the basement and get sheared
among the African violets. I bought the 9’ 6” Greg Noll surfboard
on Long Beach Island and I learned to surf small choppy waves. I
could knee paddle, take off, turn left (but not right) on a wave
and cruise. I learned to walk the nose and do a Quasimodo and
eventually a head dip. Hair is a very important part of a head
dip.}

<sup>What, you might ask, is a head
dip? It is thus. While you are voyaging across the face of the wave
- in my case a three-footer - as the wave begins to break in front
of you, you walk to the nose of your long board and tuck your head
down, under the lip of the wave. The wave then smacks you upside
the head but you don't mind. When you come back onto the shoulder
of the wave, your hair is soaked in seawater and if you have long
locks they are hanging down in your eyes so you can't see a damn
thing. Then you artistically flip your hair out of your face,
flinging droplets of seawater in the sunlight and you smile because
you know this is all very, very cool. The more hair you have to
fling back, the more stunning the move is to anyone or no one who
happens to be watching.</sup>