On Thursday, November 18, 1976, I was sitting by the turnstiles at Yonge and Bloor waiting for Melissa. Shortly after, at 7:30 pm Melissa arrived and gave me a hug. We went to Smithy’s for a coffee before heading off to two Alfred Hitchcock movies. I told her that Sam was hardly talking to me and dropped a tear in my blueberry pie. Melissa talked of her troubles. We talked for three and a half hours, heading on to Basin Street where she had two drinks to my one tomato juice. We didn't make it to the movies.
The following Sunday I woke up and called Melissa — we had planned to go to the Winter Fair at the CNE but went to the poetry meeting at the Trinity Church instead. I sat there and worked on the lyrics to Sweeping the Fog Away. Melissa arrived and sat next to me occasionally touching the embossed flowers on the blue cowboy shirt I picked up in Nashville. We were bored. Melissa implored me to stop jiggling my feet, I pointed out that she should stop biting her nails. When I read the poem about my grandfather I became quite emotional and could read the ending, about when we went the last time to the hospital when he was dying of cancer. Melissa took me out of the room and consoled me. I had never grieved for the loss of my grandfather.
The poets reconvened at another location where Melissa read 17 of her poems. Melissa said her legs were hurting her, and left to go to Mary’s shower. At the shower I sat with Paul, Kay and Mary; most of our friends were there. Sam and Mary started opening gifts just as Julia and Melissa arrived, and sat behind me at first. Soon Melissa was beside me on my left and kept pecking me on the neck saying “gotchya,” and “gotchya again.” We horsed around a bit, but she was tired and had to go home. I offered to ride with her on the subway to see her to her home, and then came back to the party. Bud Rose drove Mary, Sam and I home, and I invited Bud in for some tea. I told Bud the last time I saw Melissa at the Art Gallery he left with me, and the same thing has just happened. I played him Soft Shoe and Gently Fly Whooping Crane.
Well it’s 4:21 pm, Friday December 24, 1976, and I’m sitting at the railroad restaurant at Union Station having coffee and toast after just having a whirlwind talk with Melissa who exited from the Nutcracker Suite with her mother and Andrea. They were first ones out; I walked to the corner with Melissa holding my hand and me greeting her intimately. Said she was working with the theatre in Ottawa. I told her Sam and Mary’s wedding was beautiful, that Sam put the marriage certificate in a baseball encyclopedia. She was on her way home to help her mother with the dinner. I told them that her father had told me where they were; Melissa asked when I was going to Milton, I said on the 4:43 train. I gave her a gift of a calendar and copy of the Golden Asse; she said she had not prepared a gift for me, not anticipating seeing me. Said to call me when she got back; that she was staying till January 5th.
(When I met Melissa I can't recall if I had my green canvas Trapper Nelson pack with me, or whether I stashed it at Union Station. If I had it with me it would been odd for her mother to see me ambush them with a big backpack. Whenever I went home for the weekend I would take my laundry home for my mother to do, and Christmas would not be an exception. Many times I would write in my journals that I had taken my laundry home, and my mother would also take note in her logbook that she "Did Stefan's washing." In actuality there are about seven instances when my mother corroborated doing my laundry.)
By the time I got off the bus and walked along Bronte Road past the refinery behind Kim's house, it was dark. As I passed the refinery, lit up in the dark like an eerie fairyland, I thought back to when I was four and first heard about the "Fairgrounds;" how I had imagined it to be a place for fairies. Kim picked me up at the Go Train Station and stopped at his home to show me his new tools before driving on to Acorn to spend Christmas at 49 Mary Street.
While waiting for the kettle to boil Kim tap-danced loudly for his son Dylan to imitate. Dylan looked cute in his checkered suit. Kim and Cindy cursed at each other as they carried Christmas gifts to the 1974 Blue Lincoln Continental, and Dylan smiled at me in the back seat as we drove along. Kim talked about the scatological poem that I had left on the kitchen table one time, and how our neighbor, Mrs. Jones, used to come over for tea time and would show ma her naughty poems. Then we talked of Ken Jones, and his silver balsa gas powered model airplane that crashed into the checkerboard sign beside our driveway.
Leafing through my mother's book on The Royal Family, Christmas morning, I thought back to the Saturday afternoon a month earlier, when I first wrote Sweeping the Fog Away. Reciting it for the first time, at the Mirror Tree Poets' workshop, I was choked with emotion. The words, “But they wouldn't let me see him dying of cancer,” were impossible to form. I had never dealt with the loss of my grandpa, because my parents had not let me see him towards the end. My mother told me that whenever she had been sad, her father would tell her look for the silver lining. Thinking of England, I took out my notebook and started revising the poem.
SWEEPING THE FOG AWAY
You can't always find a silver lining in London; sometimes you have to create it yourself. That's why my Granddad used to say: "Here's the broom go sweep the fog away."
I have two black and white snapshots of Granddad; in one he stands by a moving van with wooden wheels; in the other he strikes a comical sailor pose. Granddad was a mover by day; by night a tap dancer, performing vaudeville.
In the early Sixties, Nanny and Granddad left London's East End and settled in Timmins, a mining town in Northern Ontario. They came to visit us one summer; one of the few times I saw them. I dandled on Granddad's knee on the veranda as he joked around. Some dandelion seeds floated by and he called them, "Paratroopers." The war had left a deep impression on Granddad, but he tried not to let it show. I asked my mother why his eyes looked away. She said it was 'shell shock' from the trenches.
Nanny and Granddad gave me a cardboard cutout of Buckingham Palace. I lined up the miniature guardsmen in the car's rear window as we headed to the beach. Granddad struck the pose of a sailor and Mom took the shot with her Brownie camera.
Before they left we put a thick plank in the backyard for Grandad to his train dance. The dance mimicked a locomotive, starting slowly, a little faster then roaring down the track with his heavy brogues a blur. I called it a 'Dandy Lion Train,' perhaps because our yard was so full of dandelions. Granddad's hair was gray; his fedora bobbed like smoke from a stack. Granddad was undaunted that summer. With an "About Face!" regiments of dandelions lost their yellow.
Not long after they left I heard my mother say, "He has a heart the size of London. Whenever I was sad he'd hand me a broom and say..." My mother had learned how to cut through clouds herself; she kept a stiff upper lip.
We made the long trip north and parked by the red brick hospital. Everyone went in except for me, and my brother, Kim. They had told us that Granddad was dying of cancer. "It's better if you remember him the way he was."
The next day I moved the plank and saw that the grass beneath had turned white. No one had touched the plank since hearing the bad news. In the silence Dandelions stood like the Queens guardsmen with their fur hats. The spheres were like another world. A breeze blew the mane off a dandelion. I thought of what Granddad had said: "Here's the broom, go sweep away the fog."
Throughout the workshop while I worked on Sweeping the Fog Away Melissa warded off Bud Rose, by folding her arms. I had overheard her confiding in some one: "You don't think I'm a snob do you? A lot of my friends don't have fathers as wealthy as mine; this whole thing is depressing. I've become a walking cliché." She had embarrassed the budding poet by challenging him to recall something he couldn't remember. "It's probably just as well that you suppress everything."
After the reading I had coffee with Melissa, as a teardrop fell into my blueberry pie. She sat beside me, gently drawing rings around the embossed flowers on my blue cowboy shirt; the shirt I had bought in Nashville. (Kim and I used to wear cowboy sweaters knitted by our grandmother. We both had them on the day my mother walked me to Kindergarten the time Kim and I fought over a cap gun.) As I watched her finger swirling on the little embossed lilies, it brought to mind Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the song "Vincent" by Don McLean. I used to sing "Starry Starry Night" to myself when I went walking in the meadows by the abandoned brick factory. Were the tears for myself or for my granddad, or for seeing someone like Melissa, who was ultimately unattainable?
Sweeping the Fog Away, with its images of dandelions, brought the memories of granddad back to life. I could envision him a blur on that old gray plank amid the dandelions conjuring the image of a raggedy locomotive. When I recited the poem at the reading I had made it up to the part where his brogues become a blur. I almost walked out of the room, but walked back in to complete it. (In grade five I experienced the same feeling when Mr. Powder asked everyone if they had changed their socks that day. Being honest and admitting that I hadn't, and asked why, I said, "Because my mother's in the hospital.") As granddad would have wanted me to — go on with the show.
I finished working on the poem and went out for a walk, to where the tracks pass P. L. Robertson's screw factory, at the end of the Rotary Park. I paused at the small train trestle by the railing where Kim used to do his daredevil walk. He would always be up there pushing the limits, walking faster each time. Although Kim seldom got hurt when he defied gravity, it was when he was minding his own business that he would get nailed. Fortunately he seldom minded his own business. Whenever Kim encountered one of the town cops he'd either yell a stream of obscenities at them, or give them a friendly wave and say "Hi dad." Kim would always try to insult me by saying "You'd make a good cop."
My eternal response was: "Only God can make a cop." With daring impudence Kim walked the thin line between death and mute elation.
As I stood by the railing thinking about my brother, a young kid with a Dalmatian came by telling me that his dog's name was Lisa, that he got it for Christmas. "There's always an oddball in a litter of Dalmatians," the boy said.
Walking along the willow path beside the Mill Pond, I thought of a conversation I had a couple of weeks before, the morning I showed the passage about running away to Niagara Falls to Mary. At the quiet time before the banks opened I would have tea with Mary when she arrived for work at the Crazy Alarm Company, and would read her what I had written on the night shift. "You keep telling me," Mary said, "That since you were five your parents would let you run in the streets, and one would get the impression that you could do absolutely anything you wanted to. If you ripped up the curtains would your parents get upset about that?" I told her about the time when I was five and picked one little pink blossom from one of my mother's bushes beside the veranda, and she had told me not to do that. "Well they did have some rules You see, Stefan, your parents did discipline you. It must have been really hard on your mother having a bunch of kids like you." I had to fight back the tears.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, writing in my journal when my father walked into the room. He offered me some Christmas cake then went to the fridge to get a beer. Some red liquid had spilled at the bottom, he pointed it out to me, and said "Someone was killed and no one told me about it." Your mother did good. She got all the presents going out sometimes with Sue and she's still sick. Yesterday she made two peach cakes and I cooked the dinner. I didn't want to get drunk and spoil the dinner, So I only had one bottle of vodka. I don't remember anything that happened after dinner. Well it was a good dinner. Did you like the gravy? "What did the dog say when you brought him his breakfast? 'What took you so long?'" He went to the glass cabinet. "Do you want some of these? They're German Farts. We got only two inches of snow this year. They got five inches up north, the bastards. Do you want a beer? Well what the (*)(^)(*) do you want. Here have some peanuts." He demonstrated eating them. "This is the third time in a row that all of us have been here for Christmas Eve. I hope we can all be together next Christmas." He walked back to the cabinet and asked if I wanted a beer. Then he picked up a little framed picture of the Queen and moved it a bit. "You know Stefan, I guess I sometimes I didn't treat you as well as I should have." He walked towards the door and said "The cats dead. He doesn't know its Christmas." Then he walked back to the fridge, and said If the cat cries give him this," pointing to some food. "Do you want a beer? It's Christmas. It only comes once a year."
SWEEPING THE FOG AWAY
Granddad had shell shock from World War One
Yet his heart was the size of London
He did a little soft shoe like a raggedy rogue
One last time made pistons of his brogues
A gentle wind could shake up your world
When dandelions turn to gray
Just think of Granddad
Sweeping the fog away
He gave me a model of Buckingham Palace
Cardboard guardsmen assembled in a row
He was undaunted with an "about face"
Dandelion regiments lost their yellow
I was just a child dandling on his knees
As dandelion paratroopers floated on the breeze
I didn't get to see him those days were too gray
Granddad said "Here's the broom
go Sweep the fog away"
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