OUR BARD

In one of those unexplainable quirks of fate I told the story of my Gordon Lightfoot/Sundown memory in my last blog entry just hours before he passed away.  It’s one of my favourite memories for so many reasons and it had seemed like the perfect time to tell it.  I’m glad it happened in that order – the spontaneity of my thoughts seems to offer a truer tribute than if I had written it after I had heard he died.

As it was, it was a friend of mine who messaged me about his passing late that night and we spent some time in conversation about Gordon’s contribution to the Canadian identity.  I think it was his song The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald that showed me that Canadians were made of special stuff. That we have our own brand of ‘cool’.

That on the world stage we are unique. 

That we value things differently. 

That this is something to be proud of.

In the year 1976, when The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald spent 21 weeks on the billboard charts and peaked at #2, it was up against not only the hot new craze of disco boogie but also bands like Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, the Eagles, Paul Simon, and Queen.  The formula for a hit was a love song no more than three minutes long and here was this Canadian singer with his rich baritone voice singing of a real-life tragedy in a historically correct ballad more than double that length, and people couldn’t get enough of it.

At the sound of those first chords we all know what comes next … “The legend lives on, from the Chippewa on down, to the big lake they call Gitche Gumee …”

And by ‘we’ I mean people all over this planet.

In one of the many tributes I’ve read this past week someone used the word ‘bard’ and I instantly recognized this was the perfect title for Gordon.  Not the present day way that ‘bard’ is used in the English language which reduces its meaning to just an every day poet, but the original designation of traditional reciter of epic stories and oral history; a national poet, a minstrel.

Back in the days of castles and knights when the written language was only for nobles and priests, historical records were kept and told by bards in poetry accompanied by music.  A kingdom’s identity – their battles and victories, their sufferings and celebrations were carried from generation to generation in song and verse.  Gordon Lightfoot personifies the true meaning of ‘bard’.

His words, his music, his voice – they tell our tales.   

Facebook has been full of people paying homage to the man and his music.  The stories from his close friends and fellow artists offer a peak into the world of stardom and the passion they have for their art.  While they speak in admiration of Gordon’s talent, the warmth of friendship that comes through make their tributes special and genuine.

It’s the other tributes that resonate most with me though.  The ones from people who had never met him. The people like me who only know him through his music.  His everyday people.  They, too, say that losing Gordon feels like losing a close friend, a feeling that I share.  He is a piece of who I am – especially as a Canadian, but also deeper than that.  His music features prominently in the soundtrack of my life; its down-to-earth-ness echoes in my soul.

In this way he lives on.  We may have laid the creator of his music to rest but the songs ring on.  The words are written in indelible ink in our hearts and on our psyches.

“The legend lives on, from the Chippewa on down, to the big lake they call Gitche Gumee ….”

 MUSIC IS MAGIC

A couple weekends ago my favorite channel on SiriusXM featured a show with all the hits that made it to #1 during the ‘70s decade.  They repeated the show three different times and one more time the next Wednesday.  I listened to it every time.  It was the best.

I’m pretty sure that my kids, and now my grandkids, or anyone else trapped in my car with me for that matter, inwardly groan at my choice of music but I love the way it makes me feel.  It’s my version of a mood-altering drug.  It’s also my own, personal time machine.

Ever since that weekend I’ve been trying to think of the words to describe how listening to music – especially music from this era – enhances my life even these many years down the road.  It’s hard to express a feeling in language so I went wandering in Google-land for help.  I emerged from that scouting trip an hour or so later having learned in the first five minutes that music improves our moods and our memories (that’s just what I said), and then I backed this information up with listening to some of my favorite mood enhancers for further proof.

People who know me have heard me say that I am 26 years old.  In my head, I am 26.  I don’t know why that’s the magic number, but, on the inside, I’ve never got past that mark.  My mirror keeps reminding me that my outside is not nearly so resilient.

Although I know this “age” of 26 is a silly thing to hold on to, I also know it feels real to me.  And it never feels more real than when there is music playing in the background.  It can be any kind of music but mostly it’s the music of my youth.  It’s like those familiar notes wrap me in happiness for a few minutes, and then releases me again as they fade away.  It leaves me feeling gifted with an eloquent, enduring connection to a much younger me.  It’s not that it ‘takes me back’ so much but that it transcends me to the time and place I first heard it.  There’s a difference.

One of the songs I looked up while on my little adventure in Google-land was Gordon Lightfoot singing Sundown.  I love where it takes me.

If you head straight south of Moose Jaw toward a little town called Willow Bunch the highway you take is #36.  I haven’t been on that road in more years than I care to count but the first time I travelled it was the day we moved there.  There is a spot where you can park at the top of a hill with the road spilling away in front of you in what looks like miles and miles of ribbon candy … undulations of prairie hills and hollows from here to eternity.  You feel like the world has been laid at your feet.

We stopped there to take in that view.  Gordon Lightfoot was singing Sundown on the radio.  We were expecting our first child.  The sun was warm on our shoulders.  The grass was just beginning to green up.  We were full of questions about the coming months.  What would the new job be like?  What new friends would we meet?  The road seemed to be inviting us onward.  

That moment is distilled to perfection in my mind and the sound of Gordon’s voice transports me to that hilltop every time I hear him sing those words.

That’s only one of my magic memories though.  There’s singing Bobby Goldsboro”s Honey with my high school BFF.  Or singing Three Dog Night’s Just An Old-fashioned Love Song with my sister.  Or Jim Croce’s If I Could Save Time In A Bottle.  Or John Denver’s Annie’s Song.  Or Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.  Or every single thing Neil Diamond ever recorded.

The list goes on and on.

Hearing this music suffuses the magic elixir of perpetual youth (or in my case, the age 26) into the very air that I breathe.  I am unaware of grey hair and creaky joints.  I am surprised by the lady who looks back at me from my mirror (who is she, and how did she get in there anyway?)  How can I have so many candles on my birthday cake and yet intuit as a much younger self?

Maybe It’s like I said earlier – it’s hard to put ‘feelings’ into words.  Maybe I have to just leave it as ‘feelings’.  Maybe I don’t feel old because every time I hear one of these favourites I get a fresh dose of youth.

Maybe I don’t feel old because I still know how it feels to be young.

 

RECOGNIZE   HONOR    CELEBRATE

Last week a bunch of us (and by ‘us’ I mean local volunteers) met for a quick noon hour meeting to touch base and share information about what each of our individual groups were planning for the year ahead.  On a practical level the benefits of this are obvious – we can coordinate our efforts and grow the event status for the town (ie: if the Chamber of Commerce knows when things like ball tournaments are on they can add things like sidewalk sales the same day). It just makes sense to pool our energy in promoting our community as a whole.  There is a side effect to these meetings, though, and that is the feeling of camaraderie when people of diverse interests, but common goals, get together.  It’s not all business; it’s good to visit with our peers as well.

One of the many topics that surfaced in this meeting was volunteer appreciation. 

Volunteers are the life blood of everything we try to do.  They are invaluable to our community, and yet while their work is vitally important, the people themselves end up standing in the shadows of what they have accomplished.  It’s not that they are offering their time and talents for glory or fame, but so many times they don’t even hear their names mentioned when the work is done.

As Fate would have it, a day or two after this meeting an email arrived announcing that Volunteer Appreciation Day was coming up on April 20^th.  This letter also offered a whole range of ideas of how to thank volunteers.  The part that caught my attention was that they used the same three words that I had been thinking about: recognize, honor, and celebrate.  This is exactly how we need to show our appreciation to people whose work benefits us all.

I hesitate to use the word ‘work’ though.  It gives volunteerism a bad reputation.  It makes it hard to recruit new members.  Nobody wants to take on more ‘work’.

I am reminded of when I was a kid and doing the dishes was a job that my sisters and I had to do.  It was drudgery.  It took forever.  We argued constantly about who did what.  It was a fight every night (sorry Mom).  But when the extended family got together for a big meal and there were countless more dishes to do, it was the adult women who cleared up and did the dishes.  They did this much larger job with cheerfulness, conversation and cooperation in half the time.  They did it with laughter and light hearts.

How could such an enormous job be turned into something that sounded like fun? I don’t know how old I was when it finally dawned on me that the difference was a simple matter of attitude.

When a group of volunteers are working on a project together this same kind of magic happens.  I’ve said this before many times: “Many hands make light work!”. 

Being a volunteer is a vitally important contribution to the community in which we live.  It’s how we build our community, but it’s also what makes our community worth building.  It’s where we weave our lives together, where friendships blossom and grow, where we build a collective resilience to both weather setbacks, and build on our successes.

A volunteer’s work is so valuable we could never afford to pay them, but our town wouldn’t exist without them.  That’s how important they are.

So, tell them ‘Thank You’.

I know to a large extent that means this means mutual ‘thank yous’ back and forth as so many of us are the very volunteers we wish to honor, but it’s still important that we recognize each other. 

And for once people, don’t be so humble.  When someone thanks you for the work you do, accept the praise – you have earned it! 

Go ahead – celebrate your good deeds!  You are the true Hometown Heroes.

 

DON’T LOOK ETHEL!

I don’t know that I would win any awards for my driving skills, but I can say that in the only accident I’ve ever been in I was not the one behind the steering wheel at the time.  I’ve never even hit a deer. One did hit me once, but I don’t think that should count.

What I do know is that I feel better when I am the one in control of the speed/steering/brakes.  I don’t know that I can claim I’m an excellent driver but I totally confess to being a horrible passenger. The perfect illustration of this was a trip I took with my very capable, intelligent, in-charge daughter to the British Isles.

At first it was lovely: we visited with my Aunt in Oxford for the first week and then we took the train north to Glasgow where we rented a car and drove the reminder of the trip to Edinburgh.  I just refreshed my memory with a look at a map of Scotland; the distance we drove is negligible.  Paltry.  Puny.  Compared to the ground we cover here on the prairies it is miniscule.  It aged us both several decades.

The obvious hurdle was that we were in a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road.  This should have been no problem because the girl I was with had spent more than a year in New Zealand and Australia – she knew what she was doing in that department.  The trouble was more that this arrangement puts the passenger sitting where a Canadian driver should be but doesn’t give her a steering wheel to hang on to.

I’m not going to say that I didn’t go into it without a little trepidation.  The whole ‘wrong side of the road/wrong side of the vehicle’ thing is a little mind bending.  It’s not even safe to cross a street unless you look the wrong way (but that was a whole other trip, and nobody died, so it’s all good).  Even as we took out the rental car I wondered why on Earth they would let people from other countries even do that, but off we went anyway, heavily insured. 

A couple things about driving in a medieval city: the streets are narrow, the signs give you 1.7 seconds warning of where to turn, and there is no where to pull over and take a breather. Even so we made it out on the open road where it would have been lovely to stop and experience the Scottish Highlands but again, they don’t do the ‘pull over and go sight-seeing’ thing over there.  We drove on.

I had joked ahead of time that she would do the driving and I would do the praying.  By the time we’d been on the road for a while I commented that maybe there were circumstances where valium was a good idea.  Not long after that my sweet daughter muttered through clenched teeth that this was certainly one of them. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures: I glued my mouth shut and my body to my seat, not saying another word or twitching another muscle as my contribution to safe arrival.  It worked.  We saw the sights (well except for the Loch Ness Monster; nobody ever sees her) and lived to tell about it.  It’s been twenty years and the story is funny again.

What I learned from that experience was that I’m better off not looking at the road if it’s only going to make me all anxious and jittery – my antics only make the driver anxious and jittery too.  I am much better off to focus on something else – you know, for the safety of everyone involved?

Fast forward to last Tuesday, #1 Highway between Portage and Winnipeg.  The sun shining brightly, the sky is blue above us, but there is ground drifting with white-out conditions and the pavement is warm enough for the snow to stick and turn to ice.

I wasn’t the one driving (thank goodness!) so in an effort to distract my dread I picked up my phone to text loved ones a fond farewell, thinking my feigned calmness would relieve some of the tension.  Much to my surprise I was asked to “Put that thing down and help me watch for things!”

That’s how bad it was folks, he wanted me to back-seat drive.

I guess four eyes are better than two.  But also, whether it’s two times zero or four times zero, the answer is still zero.

Long story short – both the driver and the navigator, plus the oblivious dog in the back – made it there and home again safely.  Sometimes you get to cross something off your Bucket List that you hadn’t even put on it.

 

 

WOMEN HOLD UP HALF THE SKY

I love this : Women Hold Up Half The Sky.

 From the first time I heard it the truth of this ‘word picture’ resonated through me.  I wonder, has it ever been depicted in art form?  Is there a painting or sculpture where female and male figures together support the sky?  There should be.

I’ve been using this quote for years.  It has an uncomplicated, natural ring to it and perfectly describes how the weight of society is carried on both male and female shoulders.  Because it was so simplistic, I had assumed that the saying came from an unsophisticated indigenous culture but no, the words come from none other than Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s.  I guess his motivation was observing that half of China’s population wasn’t realizing their full Communist worker potential.  As much as I hate to concede to this grittier version, it is just as true. 

For millennia society has denied half the world’s population participation in many aspects of life, depriving the world of their capabilities.  Imagine running an engine on just half of its pistons, or a row boat being paddled on just one side – so much potential is lost. 

And, it’s not so much that women were blocked from positions of power – that’s one side of it.  But also that what they did contribute, the nurturing and teaching they did within their families and communities were not recognized for the incalculable value it has for all of humankind.

Whether we are working shoulder to shoulder with our male counterparts, or shaping society as the vital foundation of family units, we are indeed, holding up at least half the sky. 

My gift to myself on International Women’s Day was a two-hour lunch with a friend/mentor/advisor/ philosopher/life coach/listener who has a great sense of humour and a wonderful, robust laugh to back it up.  We share ideas and hopes and dreams.  We proudly announce our accomplishments to each other and feel safe enough to confess our failures too. Conversations with her are a mix of stimulating, thoughtful conversation, and laughter as an antidote for the rough patches in our lives.  I always come away feeling refreshed and strengthened.  We refer to these lunches as therapy, and we try to schedule ‘appointments’ every couple months, or so.  

When we were setting up this latest date we had multiple days to choose from but when I noticed that Wednesday was International Women’s Day I knew it was the perfect day.  We weren’t the only ones celebrating the day, either.  The restaurant was full of women and our server said everyone’s theme seemed to be the same, honouring women – mothers, daughters, sisters, friends. 

And this is the secret women’s power. 

It’s the reason we have the strength to hold up our half of the sky. 

We lift each other up first.

 

SO OUT OF PRACTISE

I know I can do this.  I know I’ve done it before.  Multiple times even.  But man, am I ever rusty.

In the extreme distant future … well, it seems like it right now … we are going to Mexico for a week.

We’ve been there/done this a time or two.  It’s not hard, just get out your credit card, pick your resort and time and away you go.  This trip is even super easy because the date and destination have been chosen for us … next January at the Riu Vallarta.  There’s going to be a beach wedding and we are invited to join that party.  It’s going to be a fun family time.

What’s not to love about warmth and sunshine in January?  The luxury of wearing summer clothes and sandals all day?  Of walking along the beach, the waves rolling in and splashing against your ankles?  Searching for sea shells?

And the biggest luxury of all … not having to cook even once for a whole week!  I tell you, that part of travelling is coming back to me as clear as a bell. 

It’s all the painful business details leading up to the good part that are a struggle.  They say a person tends to block out the negative memories.  Maybe that’s what’s going on.

First of all, the travel agency wanted us to buy our travel insurance through them.  Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that.  We need travel insurance.  Once upon a time I decided that we didn’t need that and it was the one and only time (so far) that plans changed and we didn’t get to go.  That’s a couple thousand dollars I will never get back.  That’s NOT going to happen again.

Therefore, one needs cancellation and interruption insurance.  Anyone who participated in the Christmas break disaster this year can testify to that.  I only watched it on TV and want nothing to do with such a debacle, so I kind of gagged a little at the extra cost but knew I had to do it.  Thank goodness someone smarter (or with a better memory) than me said she was checking out what was automatically covered on her credit card.  Oh yeah, that’s a thing!  And now it’s a thing on my “Things To Do” list.

But, that’s only one kind of insurance we need.  It’s all coming back to me now. There’s that health insurance bit too.  That’s another phone call, and it will be a long one.  The last time we travelled was pre-Covid and only one of us was over 65.  They sure get interested in a person’s health after you reach that magic number.  In the intervening years I have passed that milestone as well, and my fellow traveller has made it into his 70s.  Maybe I can do this online?

But once those things are done (and nothing else I’ve forgotten comes up) all there will be left to do is stock up on sunscreen and  a) lose enough weight to fit into my pre-Covid clothes, or b) buy a whole new summer wardrobe.

Oh yeah, and find someone to babysit our dog.  Our usual dog sitter is going to the wedding also.  That’s the best part of this trip … the grandkids are coming too.  The plan is to bury Grandpa on the beach … you know, like pirate’s treasure.  It will keep them all busy and happy for days.  We may even dig him back up and bring him home again if he’s good.

This past week or so, with the temperatures down around the Siberia mark, I’ve had time to nail down these troublesome details and start looking forward to just getting there. 

That’s another part that I had forgotten – anticipation absolutley adds to the fun, but it’s so hard!  It’s cold outside!  Spring seems like a million years away!  I want to go to Mexico NOW.

 

IN THE TURNING LANE

It’s that time of year again.  It’s not spring by a long shot, but somewhere in the middle of one of these mild, just-barely-freezing nights we have turned a corner.

Well, maybe not turned a complete 90 degree corner, but we are wandering off in a slightly different direction.

This thought struck me as I emptied my washing machine this morning and had a sudden longing to go hang it all out on the line.  I glanced out across the backyard and managed to squelch the urge.  It would mean trudging through snowbanks higher than my boots and only having two feet of hanging space between the line and the snow, so not worth the effort.  I carried on with putting everything in the dryer, but now that the longing for the scent of clothes dried outside has been established it will only a matter of time until I’m out there tramping down snow to make it possible.

And, while I’m out there I will haul my shelving unit in and set it up in front of my big south-facing window in the living room and plant seeds and clippings.  I’m not ready for that round of mess and clutter yet, but we’re close.  We’re very close.

I’m not the only one feeling that the seasons are shifting.  The cat has decided that he would rather be out than in overnight.  I have no idea where he goes but it isn’t doing him any harm – he’s always back on the deck in the morning, looking for his breakfast.

It’s also the time of year when the resident farmer starts to critique Mother Nature’s distribution of snow for the winter.  Apparently for 2023 he thinks she should top it up a bit more before seeding. 

“But not too much.”

“And it should be a slow, steady melt so the moisture all seeps in.”

“And a warm, dry May.”

“And then timely rains in June to establish a good crop.”

Ending with “They should just put me in charge.”

I hear this every year, as predictable as dandelions.

There are other voices talking to me too.  My deep freeze keeps showing me how the garden’s crop failure last summer is affecting meal planning, and my bank account cries out in pain when I go to buy fresh vegetables.  I, too, hope Mother Nature is a bit more cooperative this summer.

The real clincher this afternoon, though, is that sunshine warming up my deck.  If I close my eyes and breathe in deeply I can smell the sweet peas or the fresh-mowed grass.  I can hear the bumble bees and hummingbirds. 

Best of all, I remember all those summer afternoons of friendly conversations over whatever beverage suits the day.  It’s a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and all the men will be watching football on TV.  What a shame to waste this moment just because it’s technically still February!

Okay.  Okay.  Maybe I have made a 90 degree turn after all.