I Was A Teenage Folksinger

Stefan des Lauriers in "High" School Attire

THE LONESOME DEMISE OF MY WRETCHED POETRY COAT

             When men first landed on the moon, I was working as an armed human scarecrow at a cherry farm. My alleged duty was to sit on top of a rickety tower and scare the birds with a shotgun. To look the part I would often wear my poetry coat.
              My poetry coat had humble beginnings as a navy blue overcoat in the Salvation Army. I liberated it, took it home; tie-dye bleached it and inscribed poems in the faded blotches. The poems were kept on the inside — it being a time when I still had some modesty and occasionally opened up to bare my soul.
             Sometimes I would employ the poetry coat as a phantom surrogate. Using the shotgun and water jug as props I was able to create a human scarecrow by placing my straw hat on the jug. The only difference between an actual scarecrow and a human scarecrow is the human element. By removing the human element I was able to come down to earth and do nefarious things, such as sneak up on my friend Michael in his nearby tower.
               During the evening when flocks of starlings flew high overhead some of the young charges would blast their way through high heaven. Of course we were supposed to just scare the birds and not kill them. Nothing in the job description, however, specifically stated that we shouldn't perforate our fellow workers.
             So it was with quiet abandon that I made my usual climb up Michael's tower. The towers had a tendency to sway when mounted, so it was difficult to ascend in a stealthy manner. Approaching the last few rungs I heard a volley of shots. Michael peered over the edge. "Now Stefan," he said, "I knew you were up to something when I saw that crow land on your hat."
             Upon returning to my tower I was shocked to see what had happened in my absence. My beloved poetry coat had been shot full of holes. I opened the walking anthology, and saw how a fine spray, and a few blasts had decimated my precious poetry. Looking through the holes I came to the sad realization that there were words, and some verses missing from some of my early works. And that was the first time it occurred to me that I should edit my work.   

 © 1997 Stefan des Lauriers

I Was a Teenage Folksinger

I was once a human scarecrow upon a cherry farm
On a tower with a shotgun didn't mean to do no harm
How that cow got in the air eludes me to this day
So many things I would have done but cows got in the way

I was a teenage folksinger with a wretched poetry coat
It was tie-dye bleached and contained the lousy stuff I wrote
With poems inscribed in the lining I'd often bare my soul
O is it any wonder — my early work was shot full of holes

I was once a world-class clown doing stand-up in canoes
Now my days of building castles in quicksand all are through
Being forced to play ice hockey I was quite a lousy skater
But did some ground breaking "work" as a jackhammer operator

I was a teenage folksinger with a wretched poetry coat…

I sat atop an upright grand beating chords out with my feet
My version of "Cold Turkey" could be heard way down the street
At school the glee club's sponsor — she said I sang "off key"
In numerous humorous doomsday ditties all devoid of glee

I was a teenage folksinger with a wretched poetry coat.

 Stefan des Lauriers, with "Magic Telescope" 

at the Cottage that was left uninhabitable 

by Hurricane Hazel

             "Firecrackers and kids are out of control, it is dusk, Victoria Day 1957; and the artist as a young boy seeks refuge in a rusty Nash behind the yellow brick bungalow." So begins my life story, which I began documenting on June 15, 1975: "Ten minutes ago; struck with the sudden urge to write an epic novel, I dashed with typewriter into the sunny backyard of my youth, only to stare at this blank paper radiating with white gold."
             The fireworks were in Scarborough, where I lived with a nuclear family before the breadwinner of our unit had a near fatal accident at Goodyear, when a tow motor load of tires toppled upon him. I had just been written up for my own near death endeavor in the Toronto Star as the "Toddling Astronaut." The headlines: "Boy, Two, Survives Brush With Death As Goldfish Bowl Gets Stuck On Head," did little to propel Canada into the space race.

REAL CLIFFHANGER
BOY STRANDED ON CLIFF RESCUED BY FIRE LADDER

A class party at Kelso Conservation Area turned into a real "cliffhanger" Saturday night when police and fire fighters had to help a young student down from a precarious perch 40 feet up a rock cliff. Steven Deslaurier, 16, of 149 Mary St. Milton clung to the rock face for about three hours before he was rescued.

Milton OPP Said the incident was not reported to them, but a patrolling constable noticed the commotion, investigated, and called out the fire department to free the youth. According to the police, the grade 10 class of Milton District High School was having a year-end party at the abandoned quarry property on the escarpment at the south end of Kelso Park, when Steven decided to try scaling a crevice in the 80 foot high rock face. He got up about halfway, panicked, and decided against climbing any higher or returning to the ground.

Milton's fire brigade was alerted and six fire fighters drove as close to the scene as they could with a pumper. Students were recruited to assist and they carried the 40-foot ladder to where Steven hung to the cliffside. Steven helped carry the ladder back to the truck.

            With a wolf at every window, our beloved nuclear family was forced to move to Milton, and we abandoned that bungalow that radiated in my eyes with yellow bricks. So we tied the chairs, the television, the beds and what have you on top of our lemon, an amber and green 1957 Dodge and forged our way west. Just forty miles, mind you, in a westerly direction, towards that old escarpment affectionately referred to as "the mountain," in my formative years. Indeed, it was in the shadow of an Imaginary Mountain that I endured the perplexities of my youth.

 
             The first page entertained mundane atrocities. Mundane if you consider white washing the dilapidated frame house, naming our dappled cat Sputnik, and tearing down the outhouse. Mundane until we discovered too late that a full-fledged hive of bees congregated in that proverbial house out back. Standing beside the verandah I watched my French Canadian father in a fedora ascend the ladder, sporadically muttering "Sacre blue." My dad was known for painting with furious speed just as Picasso was known for painting bulls with flaming light before cameras in the dark. If you are not aware of Picasso painting with light — at least try to fathom my predilection to make light of painting.

             For two years I endured a Bohemian subsistence in Toronto, thrusting myself, as it were, upon the music scene. I lived in putrid rooming houses, communes with theater people, and allegedly toiled as an itinerant petunia planter at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. As you may have heard it sung in Tour de Farce, "that summer job was a breeze." At the time of my premature but eloquent musings I'd been reading a lot, and often played Frisbee with my brother Danny. Sometimes Danny — born in the summer of '58 — jammed with me on the dulcimer, a vastly misunderstood instrument. As a matter of fact, just the other day we went to the city, to busk on the street. A passerby dropped a twenty in the case, and in snatching it up I said, "Let's quit while we're ahead." The man probably intended to give us a dollar, and may have come back for his nineteen dollars change.

CARDBOARD SPACESHIPS

Back in 1957, when I was four years old, I felt bad that Canada was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the space race and wanted to do my part. So I named our cat Sputnik and went on adventures orbiting our bungalow in my Radio Flier. I knew I needed a space helmet so I “improvised” by emptying the goldfish bowl. I had not been around "Mother Earth" for one revolution with that goldfish bowl on my head when I noticed my Oxygen supply was rapidly depleting. If it hadn't been for Sputnik running into the house and alerting my mother I might have perished. I can still see the back fins of the goldfish hanging out of the cat's mouth. (My mother, who was very strict with manners, forgot to admonish the cat with her usual “Don’t yell with your mouth full!”)

Anyhow the Fire trucks came with the firemen carrying their big sledge hammers and pick axes and I thought for sure my head would be pulverized like a grape in a vice if they used them on me. (You can imagine how scary that looked with the goldfish bowl distorting my perspective.) They managed to extract the goldfish bowl manually just in time.

Later on my father, who was a tireless worker at Goodyear, lectured me on the dangers of “home made” spacesuits. My mother took me to the Five and Dime the next day and bought me a turtle that came with a round clear plastic dish with a ramp and a green plastic palm tree. She probably thought I wouldn't get that "terrarium" stuck on my head.

My quest to propel Canada into the space race did not end there. My brother and I collected discarded cardboard refrigerator boxes and would use them as "stages" of rockets. We used to drag them behind our tricycles across the train tracks, which were a block away from our house. An earthen mound elevated the railroad so we set up our launch pad on the far side hoping no one would steal them.

At the height of our mission we had a total of 17 boxes lined up, enough to propel us to the moon and back four times! My brother and I would get into arguments over the orientation of our spaceship. I wanted it to be vertical but Kim (that's my brother's name) said the wind would blow it over, and moreover — if we did get all the boxes stacked up — it would be seen from the town and someone would steal it and commandeer it to other planets it was not designed to go to. Deep inside I knew that a square spaceship would never get off the ground so I let him have his way not wanting to burst his bubble.

My desire to propel Canada did not end until I reached "High" school. The culmination of our “homegrown” space race was when we surreptitiously assembled a life-size mock up of a 747 with a shuttlecraft on top on a runway at the Royal Canadian Airport in downtown Toronto. It never occurred to my brother that a spaceship riding piggyback on a 747 would only transport the shuttle to another airport and not the moon. But again, I didn't want to burst his bubble.

TODDLING ASTRONAUT

My radio flyer — it is bright red

It's orbiting my bungalow

The big dogs can't lick my face

Cause I wear a goldfish bow

I'm a toddling astronaut in space

And I sure miss the human race

My diapers on number two

Think I need a change of pace

II wonder what real spacemen do

If they have to go in space

Through asteroid rocks again

Take this helmet off my head

Think I need some Oxygen

Hope the fish aren't getting dead

Somebody call my flight engineer

This goldfish bowl is really stuck

Oh good my mommy's here

With the sirens and a fire truck

I've learned my lesson well

Don't put plastic on your face

And concerning those homemade spacesuits

Well just don't trust them in outer space

            THE MAGIC TELESCOPE

            It happened in the mid-Sixties when “Esso” was having a “Put a Tiger in your Tank” campaign and would stuff a tiger tail in your gas-cap with every fill-up. It was also a time when I referred to my brother Kim as the “budding kleptomaniac.” He would swipe Tiger Tails from parked cars and surreptitiously insert them into the gas caps of Police cruisers.

            I was in grade seven at the Bruce Street School and was witness to one of the most unusual spectacles in the history of Milton Ontario. Mystical Drifters had stopped in front the old limestone schoolhouse with a wagon drawn by a white horse and were enticing innocent children to gaze into their “Magic Telescope.”

            “Magic Telescope, Magic Telescope, see the star that gives everyone hope,” the Mystical Drifter said, “Only one dime.” I thought it would be something to see a star in a bright blue sky, so I lined up to take a look. I should have known better because everyone who had looked at it was frowning in disgust.

            When I peered into the telescope I was in for a shock. It was just a cheap cardboard telescope with the outline of a star drawn on the far lens. “You cheated me,” I protested, “This is just a star drawn on the lens!”

             “You are looking through a star,” the Mystical Drifter woman replied. “Did you ever dream that you would be able to see through a star?”

            I was just about to demand a refund when a police car pulled up with a tiger tail in its gas cap. The Mystical Drifters jumped into the wagon and raced off the school property.

            I don’t know if was the police car itself or the fact that there was a “Tiger in the Tank” that terrified the Mystical Drifters into bolting away. I stood watching as the police car escorted the wagon to the outskirts of town, with the telescope still in my hands. To this day I let people look into the “Magic Telescope” for free and it has never failed to put a smile on their faces.

{To proceed click on chapter titles on the right starting at the top with:

Attempts At My Life Story 

Then at the bottom of each page there is a "Newer Post."] 

blank space

The First Half Unabridged

Yesterday, I packed up my rough work and put it back in the filing  cabinet in the basement. I started writing my life story in 1975, and through 1976 I kept about 15 handwritten journals. For the past two months I have been editing them, omitting all the rough notes to get down to what actually happened. I ended up with two hundred pages of single spaced work. When I completed that I went through my original drafts, which were dated and could see exactly what I was doing, and what prompted me to write certain passages, I was able to see a lot of things I had long forgotten. Then, I started rewriting chapter three and posted it on the writer's list. No one responded. I’ve been a lurker for a few years and don’t communicate that much. Anyhow, yesterday my wife flew to Japan for two weeks, so I packed up all my work, and decided to stop writing.
This morning I figured out myself what I needed to do to make chapter 3 work. I will tell the story of my aledged employment at the alarm company and not focus on what I wrote while I was there.

Here is the first paragraph of part one my autobiography:


When I was young, I saw a snake with a large lump in its body crossing the road. It was halfway across when a car ran over it, severing it in two. It was a summer day, in front of my grandmother’s house in Field Ontario; the cicadas were buzzing and the lumber mill was roaring in the distance as logs were debarked and dropped back in the river. I watched the snake as it made a few last movements, then saw the lump begin to move. A frog covered in slime slowly made its way out and hopped away.

Here is the passage from part two when I have discovered the meaning of the frog and the snake.

Miraculously, the frog was reborn when the snake was cut in two. What was the meaning of the frog, the snake, and the car? The frog was myself, living a meaningless existence, doomed to die. The car was the intervention of a higher force. It would be extremely rare for a frog in a natural setting to survive being swallowed whole. The snake is the evil that we live in.

Anyhow I’m like that frog refusing to die. I will continue to write.

May 18 2008
Stefan des Lauriers



When I was a young boy, I saw a snake with a large lump in its body crossing the road. It got halfway across when a motorbike ran over it, severing it in two. It was a summer day, in front of my grandmother’s house in Field, Ontario; the cicadas were buzzing and the lumber mill was roaring in the distance as logs were debarked and dropped back in the river. I watched as the snake made a few last movements, then saw the lump begin to move. A frog covered in slime slowly made its way out and hopped away.

My dad used to tell stories about Field in the peacefulness of the summer evening, while he sat on the front veranda of our big white frame house in Milton. We had moved there from Toronto in 1957. Two tall elm trees flanked our front yard. These stories brought out his French accent.

As a boy he dived off the bridge and would emerge between the logs. One time he had to swim a great distance, for there was no space to come up for air. Usually there would be an opening in the logs but this time there was none. Finally, with lungs “bursting” he came up for air. Another time he shimmied up a tall pine tree, grabbed the first branch, fell, broke his arm, and didn't let anyone know until the pain became unbearable. Once an umbrella my father was using as a parachute gave out while he was diving from the second story roof. He hid it; waited for a real rainy day and told his mother, "Le vent casse mon parapluie!"

At the age of fourteen he had a job carrying water up a hill and taking the cow to pasture, just beyond the train tracks. One day, the cow stopped on the tracks as a train approached and wouldn’t budge. My dad would make the face of a nonchalant cow. We would laugh.

"There was a man on the other side of the river who was trying to build a house, hut he couldn't get his lumber across. There was a huge pile of two-by-fours where my friends and I played, so we found some rubber tire tubes and made them into a huge slingshot, using a big tree. It took about five of us to pull it back then we'd let it fly. The man had been praying to God, 'How can I get my lumber across the river?' When these huge 2x 4's started showering down around him, he jumped up to thank God for this miracle." As he said this, he would flick his cigarette butt to emphasize the point.

Many summers we would travel north to visit our relatives. It was a scenic drive through the French Canadian Shield; the highway cut through granite and forests. Once, it was raining heavily all the way, and splashes of water made huge wakes along the road. We were so excited to arrive, having so many cousins to play with, that the car hadn't even stopped when I ran out. It was an old, dark green '51 Chevrolet. Of course I was sternly reprimanded for jumping out while the car was moving.

My grandfather on my father's side died of kidney failure at 27, when my father was a baby, and Grandmother followed the Old Testament custom of marrying her brother—in—law to continue the lineage. My father had one or two real brothers, and several half-siblings. It was a bit strange for me to hear my dad call his father by his first name Donat. Donat was a guard at the Burwash jail, and made fine axe handles. Since he called his “father” by his first name we called our father by his — Fern.

Grandmother would cook for us on a big wood stove. She'd make us toast with a coat hanger in the fire. We always stayed at her house, and would visit the three other families in the village. Most of our relatives worked for the lumber mill, which would be competing with the cicadas on hot summer days to see who could buzz the loudest.

At the age of 11 or 12 Kim and I went walking on the logs in the river, which wasn't so wise, considering we were not good swimmers. Kim slipped and was pulled out before he got deeper than his navel. After that Kim and his cousin tried floating in a stainless steel washbasin.

There was a big white cross overlooking the town, high on a hill. Around the base of the cross grew wild blueberries. We'd pick the blueberries, and yell or bang rocks on the cross to hear it echo. The cross was constructed of hollow metal, about a foot in diameter, so it made a loud noise. From the this lofty vantage place you could see a panorama of the village, with the Sturgeon River making a big bend through it. The buzz of the lumber mill, the faint sound of the logs falling in the water and the train that skirted the village all fascinated us. On the path back to grandma's there was a pond with a few old rusty cranes and derelict trucks, Grandmother would be waiting for us just past the outhouse. "You were up at the cross weren't you? Well, the Father called and said you shouldn't make so much noise up there.”

"When I first saw your father," my mother once told me in her faded English accent, "It was in Hyde Park during the war and Fern was with a couple others, all in uniform. Later, I heard from my girlfriend Sally Perkins, that Fern had said, 'See that woman over there'? I'm going to marry her.' Bloody cheek I thought. If I'd a' known that I'd 'ave never spoken to him!" She laughed and her eyes drifted back to the moment. “I spent the day with him, and the next day we were to meet, but I decided not to see him. But he went looking for me and found me at a carnival. A year later I had Bob and was pregnant with Rick, traveling across the ocean to Canada with 600 other war brides.

“Sally and I were working at Eveready's, the battery factory, and your father was loading bombs on planes. Sally and I would ride our bikes to work, and would grab onto lorries, to be tugged along. We'd be singing all the popular songs so the time went really fast. One day we both decided to quit, and went to work at the factory across the street. We didn't like that job; so we went back to Eveready's and got our old jobs back. I worked there till I went overseas. After arriving in Halifax, we took the train to Northern Ontario. Some one came to meet me in Sturgeon Falls, and drove us to Field, in a big black car. I thought that the des Lauriers must be really rich to own a car like that, but I found out it was a taxi, the only car in the village. They took me to grandmother's house, across from the Sturgeon River. It was such a small town, with the Catholic Church and the cross on the hill, the hotel and the lumber mill. I thought it was so primitive, what with the outhouses and the wood stoves.”

"Eventually Fern was discharged came back and started working the mines in Timmins. Terry and Sue were born there, in July 1947. So then there were four children to look after. Then we moved to Toronto in 1950, and Fem got the job at Goodyear's. He went there several times before they finally gave him the job—they were reluctant because of his French accent. Then I had you." That was February 9th, 1953, at St. Joseph's Hospital in Toronto. Kim was born in 1955, Danny in 1933, making seven children altogether.

It must have been a real shock for her to arrive in that backwards commune with the outhouses and all after being reared in London. The way she described the wild lumberjacks who came to meet the locomotive with their plaid flannel jackets and axes carried jauntily over their shoulders — the black sedan that pulled up, the way she had thought the des Lauriers were rich to own such a car, but it actually turned out to be a taxi — sticks in my mind like an axe in a stump. Whenever I mention my background I often allude to my father's ancestors as probably being aristocrats who escaped the guillotine to set up a chain of mystical lumberjack communes in Canada.



My mother's parents lived in Timmins so we didn't see them so often, since it was so far north. But they moved to North Bay where some of her sisters lived so we saw on rare occasions. Granddad always made us laugh with his jokes.

"Once, while on sentry duty during World War I in darkest Africa—it was so dark you couldn't see past your hand—I felt something licking my hand. I looked down and saw a lion standing there, so I shot it with my bayonet."

Granddad came to Milton during the summer of 65. The grass in backyard was all dandelions, and we put a plank out in the back arid had Granddad do one of his vaudeville routines, "The locomotive." Usually he did the soft shoe, but now he was wearing brogues, but it didn't seem to slow him down. He shuffled slowly like big pistons, and then moved rhythmically faster like a train. For a finale he would tilt his head back and would whistle just like a train.
We went to beach with our grandparents and they sat in those old style deck chairs with the striped with striped cloth and a wood frame, end watched us. There's an old photograph with him striking a whimsical sailor's pose.

At that time I had a large, plastic Indianapolis racing car. It was bright red with yellow wheels. For many years I had wanted to become a racing car driver, or an airplane pilot. At this time, though, all I could do was spin—out harmlessly into the sand. As the sun went down the light made my toy racer glow. Children tanned bronze were diving off a platform into water reflecting the glistening mauve sunset.

At the beach with my grandparents I had my first exposure to death. One of the children had drowned that evening. It had gotten dark, and a fire truck came with its red flashing dome sending light in a circle around the inlet. The child's parents stood forlornly by the shore, the husband comforting his wife. It was like the light was pulsing on us all standing there in one universal heartbeat. I was too young to understand. To a child death may not mean much if it never touches you personally. It might mean just counting to ten when getting shot playing Cowboys and Indians, without knowing the reality of a broken heart, the sun set insensitively, as an Indianapolis racer, crashing around a curve, with the last filaments of sun being flames rising to the sky.

Not long after that visit grandparents were both dying of cancer, and we rush up north. All I remember though was a big red brick hospital, because my parents wouldn't let me see them. They wanted the kids to remember them as they were in better times. About all I remember was the blue and red cowboy cardigans that grandmother knit all the grandchildren, and the cardboard cutout of Buckingham Palace that granddad had given me. Waiting for my parents to make their visit, I assembled the Queens guardsmen in the cars rear window,

Teatime was still a popular tradition with my mother when we first moved to Milton in July of '57. She kept it up for a few years, collecting bone china teacups. Perhaps this was the one thing that could remind her of a more refined life in London. I never knew that the measure of a good teacup was whether it could support the weight of a Rolls-Royce convertible.

On Oct. 4 1957 the Soviets put up the first satellite; we named our cat "Sputnik" after it. Fern bought a brand-new 1957 gold and white Dodge, but it was a lemon and lasted little over a year. They were entering new frontiers of space, and we were heating our house with coal and wood. Dad would take the red-hot embers from one stove to another to start a new fire, and some coals would spill.

Our house in Milton was quite dilapidated when we bought it. We had to sell our brick bungalow in Scarborough because my father had injured his back and lost a year off work. He recovered and worked really hard restoring the house. The dun yellow paint was peeling, It was a two-story frame house with a large veranda around the side and front; just big enough for a family of eight. Bob, Rick and Terry helped by tearing down the barn in the backyard. It was fascinating to watch Dad paint the house incessantly; it ended up white with pink shutters. As much as I wanted to paint, Dad never let me, though in later years he could never get us to help him. Sometimes when he made a mistake he would start speaking in French — usually comments deeply rooted in his Catholic upbringing. Dad always gave this advice, "If you ever decide to go to church, go to the Catholic Church because it’s the best one." The last vestiges of his belief — a tiny box of small white plastic crosses — were kept for years in the tiny crawl space above the bathroom.

I had no idea of what it would be like to be raised in a backwards village by a stepfather, having so many siblings. He had to support himself from when he was 14, and then go overseas to fight in the war. In spite of a drinking problem dad always prided himself in being a good provider. He never lost a day at work due to drinking and there was always food on the table, even if it meant having to be moonlighting as a bartender. Everyday he would drive the 40 miles to work in a factory where no one really cared. After 25 years at Goodyear he received a pewter dish to commemorate his faithful service to the company. The company also awarded a dinner for the employees but not their wives, so my dad refused to go.

For many years Dad drove a 1956 Buick Special, which was a washed-out green color with thick sheets of house-painted aluminum bolted over the rusted fender wells. Commuting the McDonald Cartier Freeway, he'd be passing cars a decade newer proudly smoking a cigar. He'd spend the day inspecting tires, lifting them and putting them back on the rack. It was a tough place to work: He told me the workers would weld the vending machines to the ceiling if they lost a quarter in them. I knew he was exaggerating.

The first night in Milton I looked out the window towards the tennis courts behind the house, but couldn't see anything, being near-sighted. The next day we searched around and found some tennis balls. It was a clay court surrounded by century-old elm trees, which were a nuisance with their showers of keys. Dad built a sandbox, among other things with the barn wood, beside the clothesline stoop. Among the many tall trees throughout our neighborhood there were several chestnut trees.

In August I958, Terry and Sue would take us out collecting chestnuts, but at that time they were still white, and had to be forced out of their spiky casing. We would put them into a sock, and store them away thinking they would turn brawn. I came home from collecting chestnuts one day and there was baby Danny in a tiny crib on the kitchen table.

Mother planted peonies and carnations around the house. A trellis for roses clung to the side of the veranda, ants crawled on the peonies, and huge bumblebees cut the scenes of summer into puzzle-dust with their tiny traces of pollen.

I was named after a Polish pianist in a movie called "Dangerous Moonlight," I’d sit in front of the hi-fi and she'd play classical pieces for me. My favorite was the Waltz of the Flowers. As time want on I'd 'conduct' various pieces, before an imaginary orchestra. For a finale I'd conduct the piece with my feet. Mother had high hopes for me.

The first time I fought with Kim was with my mother to register for kindergarten. Both of us were wearing our cowboy cardigans, which were knitted by our grandmother, fighting over a cap gun. For many number of years we would be fighting and playing together.

Someone taught me how to write my name before I went to kindergarten, and I was so proud of it, even if the 'n' was backwards, In my kindergarten class I drew a picture of the swings in our backyard, with a pile of lumber in the background. There was one girl in the class with golden hair; I took a fancy to, named Donna Wriggles worth. I used to walk with her from school, until she said that my picture was just "scribbles." (On July 7, 1976 I noted in my journal that I let Ken Whiteley try my Gibson F100, and he played a couple of intricate riffs. I referred to his guitar playing style as “scribbling.”)


Kim and I would be dressed up in our blue blazers and grey flannel pants and sent to Sunday school. We'd be scrubbed clean with hair parted perfectly. Bonny, my brother Bob’s fiancée, was Kim's Sunday school teacher; Kim insisted on sitting next to her. If he couldn't he'd sit under the table and pout.

After Sunday school Bonny would take us to Marg's restaurant, which had diner-like counter and stools, for milk and toast. We bought an ice cream for Kim once, taking it home for him. Oh the way Bonny was licking Kim's cone, so I asked her why she was doing that, thinking she was taking from Kim. She said, "It's so that it doesn't melt onto my hand." I thought it was wrong for a person to lick another person's ice cream. That was the extent of concern for my fellow man.

Every time I went to Marg's Restaurant I would ask what flavors of ice cream they had, despite the fact they were all listed on the wall. The waitress would tell me all the flavors; then I would ask, "What's special of the month?" She would tell me, and I would think very carefully and say, "I'll have vanilla." I did this same routine every week, and always paused a long time before requesting vanilla. I wasn't that fond of vanilla, but felt it was necessary as part of the gag.

I was a Smart Alec Kid, but not as bad as my younger brother. Nevertheless, I was an expert at burping incessantly. I burped incessantly during Sunday school class. This got me kicked out of the church. The minister himself came to the class and escorted me out. This was my first and last meeting with the minister. In spite of this "God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall" is still one of my favorite hymns.

Often I would venture downtown myself, to look in the pet store window or to just explore. I found a pretty life-sized cardboard lady advertising Coca-Cola. I dragged it home, and it disappeared mysteriously. I'd walk past Victoria Park, past the arena, to Main Street. At around six years old I ventured off to the pet shop, and looked at a salamander.

Twice a week Dad would shop in Toronto to save money. He'd return with a trunk full of groceries, and would rush them into the freezer; Rusty the dog would be jumping all over him, which made things difficult, because we seldom helped carry the groceries in.

My first buddy was David Bird, a real bully. To prevent him from being rough with me I made up a story that my father had been to darkest Africa on a safari and had returned with a bag full of deadly spiders, which were kept in the attic. Unfortunately they escaped and one bit me on the back, so I had to be careful about roughhousing. He believed me, and it kept him off my back. David Bird and I were flicking letter cards around in our first-grade class. Our teacher strapped the two of us. I didn't cry, but was surprised that David did. The only other time I got the strap was in the fifth grade, for being in a fight.

Another friend of mine was Lawrence Whitney, the son of an Indian fur trapper. His house was just two blocks away; they had lots of German shepherds. We constructed an underground fort out of half of a hill of earth at a nearby coal company lot: by the train yard. We thought our fort was completely camouflaged. Inside Lawrence's house I was shocked that to see how his father would use a bear trap and a plastic racing car to amuse the baby by setting the traps then springing it with the car. Lawrence would make spears out of a broken hockey stick to hunt muskrats in the creek. In the winter we would follow the creek to school, cutting across the fairgrounds, sliding under the bridges that spanned the roads. Mrs. Gemmel, our grade three teacher had Lawrence sit at the back of the room because she couldn’t bear the smell of leaks on his breath.

My best friend was Bruce. The first time I met Bruce was in grade two; at recess our scarves became reigns as we raced horses across the school ground. That was around the time they broadcast over the PA system that Alan B Sheppard Jr. had ventured into space, for fifteen minutes. Once when I got soaking wet I refused to change clothes in front of his mother, who said, "You can change in front of me, I'm a registered nurse." Bruce's father spent some time in India and sometimes cooked potato pancakes.

I wrote about Bruce on one of my exams in grade 2. The assignment was to write something I did after school: "After school Bruce and I play in the barn beside the railway tracks. We build tunnels in the bales of hay. It is lots of fun and soon we are tired."

As members of the Young Naturalist Club we made nets to catch butterflies. Bruce would stand for hours on the edge of the pond trying to catch a dragonfly. We used to propel ourselves across the water on an old door with broken hockey sticks. Once a huge gray bird flew overhead and we thought it was a Whooping Crane. Bruce was quite studious and used to type out information about animals from an encyclopedia. I recall him drawing a clumsy picture of a Jaguar. We watched Wild Kingdom whenever it came on, as well as Walt Disney.

We would ride our bikes all over the place. Once Bruce's father caught us speeding through a stop sign, and scolded Bruce. His parents would tell us to be careful that big trucks could suck us in. Once Mrs. Carter, my grade four teacher, said she saw Bruce and I riding down Thomas Street looking like, 'Drenched rats.'

Bruce often ordered Chinese food from the Lido Restaurant. I'd never had Chinese Food; in fact I never ate out when I was young. My dad didn't believe in restaurants unless it was on a long trip and all the peanut butter and jam sandwiches had run out and the kids were screaming. The sandwiches were heavy on the peanut butter; my mother adhered to the theory that a quiet child is a child with a mouth full of peanut butter. Sometimes when we traveled there would just be a few jars of peanut butter and a spoon for each mouth.

We both made model cars; Bruce would invariably have gluey fingerprints on his creations. Mine didn't. Bruce had every Beatle record from the beginning. He was always the leader in play, always one rank above me. Bruce and I bought five and dime store derringers that shot red plastic bullets. Bruce never came to my house because my parents smoked too much. He said they were like, 'Smoking guns.'

Sometimes Bruce would invite me to his parent's cottage at Port Severn. When we reached the Port after the long car ride, we would stop at the store for cashew nuts and Beanie and Cecil comic books. He would sit for hours on the dock fishing for sunfish. Lots of turtles could be seen sunning themselves on logs. We raced swimming, wild dog paddles. I was at the cottage when Bruce's adopted brother left in a huff. They were getting ready to go skiing and I was asked to pass a life preserver to the adopted son. I couldn't reach him so I passed it to Roger who threw it at him. The life preserver landed in the water precipitating a flare up. I thought it was my fault the kid ran off, because I didn't pass the life preserver.

When Bruce was engrossed in a book it would be impossible to distract him. Sometimes Mr. Powder, our grade five teacher would stand beside him trying to get his attention in class. Mr. Powder entrusted Bruce with his pet skunk. Also Mr. Powder asked Bruce to care for Major, his Dalmatian. One Christmas his parents gave me a book called The Earth Is a Spaceship. It was the only book ever given me in my childhood. I still have it. It became the inspiration for the song: "Look Out Ma; I Think This Spaceship Earth is Gonna Crash."

On a hike to Rattlesnake Point lead by Mr. Powder, Bruce said 'turn around,' and I made a face, knowing that Bruce would be photographing me at that instant. When Mr. Powder asked us to collect firewood, I brought back a big log and asked if this would do. Bruce captured the moment on film.
Bruce's dad had a Peugeot dealership at the Plaza, and Bruce would point out every Peugeot he saw. Bruce and I would get paid fifty cents each to sweep the shop, and then we'd race our way through strawberry milk shakes. There was a burnt down barn beside the Plaza, the stone foundation became a castle for us.

I lost track of Bruce when he moved out of town at the end of grade six. In January of 1976 I discovered that Bruce was teaching classical guitar at a music store in Kitchener. After an evening of talking and sharing songs I crashed out in the guest room and awoke to hear his parent's talking. It was as if nothing had changed since I was a child; I had a peaceful feeling when I woke up.

We had not seen each other since the two of us had joined Steve Copperfield, in the summer of '66 when he smashed every window of Homes' barn. Steve had gotten into his father’s liquor, smoked a stale cigarette and read us some choice passages from a dirty pocketbook called “Fanny Hill.” Bruce and I both admitted to throwing only one stone, but were considered 'just as guilty.' At the candy counter of Kelly's gas station Mrs. Holmes told me the replacement windows would cost $9.32. I can still see her ominous reflection in the glass of the candy concession as she approached me from behind. For some reason I recall buying a box of 'Smarties.'


At the bottom of the stairs to Rotary Park there were two picnic tables. There was a group of tough kids sitting at one table, and I would stare at them with contempt as I walked past. They were playing cards and carving initials into the table.

I walked to the other side of the pool I saw Kim in an argument with Maurice Cassidy, a boy five years than I and seven years older than Kim. He was grabbing Kim and threatening him. I walked up to him and said, “Leave my brother alone.”

“This little bastard keeps kicking over my gas can and wasting all my gas.” He attempted to hit Kim, and I punched him in the jaw, reaching up, because he was taller than me by a foot. It knocked him against a fence and a number of bikes. He punched me in the mouth, and my mouth began to pour with blood. I was crying and blood was all over my t-shirt.

As I passed the picnic table “Touch” laughed and said, “I knew some day you’d get yours des Lauriers.”

Kim and I walked home; I cleaned up my face and put on a clean t-shirt. We went looking for Rick and found him in the pool hall. We got into Rick’s white 1964 Pontiac convertible and found Maurice cutting the grass at the Rotary Park. Rick stopped the car and we all got out.

“Now wait a minute Rick,” Maurice said. “Before you get mad let me tell you what happened.” Rick was twice as big as Maurice quite strong from working at the steel plant.

“It better be f***ing good.”

“Every time I cut the grass here Kim comes along and kicks over my gas can. If I leave the top on he unscrews it then kicks over my can. I have to have to stop my work and go to the garage to refill it. It all comes out of my pocket. This time I caught him doing it and grabbed him, and then your brother came along and punched me in the mouth. I was so mad about the whole thing that I hit him. I didn’t mean to hurt him that bad.”

“Kim has been known to act up on occasion. He won’t be knocking your can over anymore.” Maurice was quite relieved that Rick didn’t beat him up.

I had a fat lip that could be seen from two blocks away. Kim thought it was really funny.


Around grade one I started playing hockey in the arena, two blocks away from our house. My older brother Rick worked there as a 'rink-rat,' scraping the ice with a shovel between hockey games, and was able to find some shoulder pads for me. The rink—rats' nicknames were written on the bright red plastic with white paint, including the name I'd given Rick; "Ricky-Dicky-Bird." While changing in the locker room I'd get funny looks. It wasn't as bad as the catalogue my dad used to use far shin pads when he was a kid. (In winter, Dad made a little rink for us in the backyard, flooding it with the garden hose.)
My whole family would come out to watch when I played at the Arena with Rick in the stands mouthing off... "Hey Ref, You're missing a good game!" Kim played goalie, and would watch "Hockey Night In Canada" with Dad all the time. Sometimes dad would watch the game from the kitchen using a mirror set up to reflect the TV in the living room at a 90-degree angle.

Kim and I would spend a lot of time in the arena, since it was just up the street. We used to collect hockey cards, and play games tossing them in the back halls. The manager of the arena once lifted me up by the scruff of the neck to throw me out. My only claim to fame as far as hockey was concerned was to have my picture in the Canadian Champion; dressed in my Crest Hardware uniform. I only played hockey for a dew years; I was never that enthused about it, for I was terrible on the ice. My skates wobbled; I was too nearsighted to see the puck. When I scored two goals in one game once, I was so happy I came home to tell everyone, but no one was home. The only one to share my victory was Rusty the dog, who jumped all over me.

I didn’t last long in Boy Scouts. I went to a camp out one time and had a great time running the obstacle course. The bright green forest, the old cabin, and the leader who threw out a whole steel barrel of milk because there was a fly in it—were all vivid images. On the last day of the outing there was a bit of a rebellion going on. For my part, being sympathetic to the fringe element, I was expelled from the organization.

Later the following autumn, we were building a fort out of some cedar trees that had been cut down in the empty lot beside our house. There was a big post with a checkerboard sign where the street dead—ended into the lot; we were using this sign to lean to support the cedars to make a fort. I was sitting on top of this sign holding onto my football. Kim came along with a pole and was poking me, and I threw the football at him and fell, I realized upon landing that my arm was broken, and ran into the house screaming, The pain was mostly from looking at the twisted bones. We had relatives at our house at the time, but I refused to be in any of the home movies that were taken. My football ended up being chewed by the dog, but I had despised it as much as I despised Kim. I had great satisfaction to see that Kim received a good licking for his part.


My parents took several home movies taken in those years, pictures of Christmas, with Rick wearing his silvered shirt, pouring ketchup on his eggs in a comical manner, before heading out to California. Many of these movies featured the circular (portable) pool in the backyard where we'd swim with an inflatable dinosaur floating around, or of Rusty chasing rubber balls. The best pictures were of Annual Good Year Picnic at Crystal Beach.

Terry and Sue used to take Kim Danny and I up to the escarpment every day, during our summer vacation with Terry telling us tall tales all the way. Terry was popular in town, and won a cup in 1966, called the Terry des Lauriers citizenship cup. When he was presented with this cup, the principle had my parents sit in the front row. One of the teachers compared Terry to Saint Francis of Assisi, and that that there was a saying at school; "Terry will do it." (The real saying was “Let Terry do it.”) Terry was active in the athletic department, and was on nearly every organization at school. He was also head of "Toc Alpha," a student organization concerned about alcoholic parents. He was an active Sunday school teacher, a co-coordinator with the recreation department, as well as a clerk at the stationary store, where he repaired typewriters. Terry could always be heard coming home whistling. In the winter, Terry would jog for miles through the countryside, and students on the school bus would see him; jogging through the snow, and he would still snake it to school before them. Many would say to me, "Why can't you be like your brother?"

The brother I wanted to emulate was Rick, who was the president of the Spartan Car Club. He used to get me to go upstairs to get his red silk jacket with the clubs name embroidered on the back. Whenever Rick washed his car, he would get me to help by washing the wheels, but I would never get them clean enough. Rick would customize his cars, putting special taillights on them, or purple lights in the interior. His first car was called "Midnight Special," with hand letters on the rear fender. There was never any insurance on these cars. Rick always said that his Saint Christopher's medal was enough. Rick had gone to a Catholic school and often talked about doing penances. When he had to do fifteen "Hail Mary's" he would just say the words Hail Mary fifteen times. Rick might have been a more positive influence towards religion, but regretfully, I became more interested in cars than God. When Rick went to California, and sold encyclopedias door to door, I was beginning to make model cars.

One of my early ambitions was to become a racing car driver, or an airplane pilot. I had been influenced by my older brothers to be interested in cars, and both Kim and I knew the names and years of every model. One time my grade five teacher, Mr. Powel, saw me driving a go—cart at the Fall Fair very recklessly, and just shook his head in disbelief.

At this same Fair, Mr. Powel saw Gordon Christie drop a school textbook in the mud, and took him back to the school to give him the strap. One time sitting at a front desk fidgeting with a ladybug during class, Mr. Powel put his strap on his big oak desk, to discourage me from continuing to play with it. I left the ladybug alone. You’d think that a teacher might be more lenient towards a hands-on experience with entomology.

One day Mr. Powel came to class with a black armband, because President Kennedy had been shot. The impression, from TV, is something I'll never forget. Mr. Power once asked us how many hours we watched TV each night. When I said five hours a night he was shocked. Then he asked everyone in class who had clean socks. I said I hadn't, and he asked why. I said that my mother was in the hospital, and began to cry.

Mr. Powel used to tell us about the folk club that he belonged to in Hamilton. He would sometimes sing us some of the songs, such as Peter Paul and Mary tunes. Actually, from grade one we had all been singing "Blowing' In the Wind," which was nearly as popular with us as “A Capital Ship.”

The Beatles were very popular at that time, many girls who saw their movie at the Roxy Theatre screamed. That was the year that I started wearing glasses. I cried so much at the time, when I was told I had to wear glasses, but was astounded, to see the world so clearly, to see every twig on every tree. Mr. Powel stopped by my desk and cleaned my glasses for me.

The summer of 1965 mom and dad took Kim, Danny, and I on a trip to New York City in a ’61 Chrysler, that kept overheating. We arrived in New York City after taking the back roads through the Catskills, and went up to the Empire State Building, and looked cut the binoculars at the Queen Elizabeth that was in the harbor. We didn't stay up there long, because my father was either afraid of heights, and was paranoid that someone would steal the cars hubcaps. We only spent an afternoon there, and turned around and went back. It was beautiful traveling through the New Big land states. We stayed at motels with swimming pools, and would have a swim in the mornings. Esso stations, at that time, had a "Put a Tiger in your Tank" advertising campaign, and we would often leave the gas station with a little furry tiger tail hanging out the gas cover.

In the photographs of that trip, we were wearing tourist type T-shirt's and blue jeans. Usually we always wore striped T-shirts, and jeans, before they became the fashion. I had thought that jeans were "farmer clothes" and used to feel funny wearing them to school. I had an “Indian” belt with the “Canada” written out in beads. When our grade eight class sang "The Old Chisholm Trail" at music festival, and Mr. Bossman was irate because I wore an old cowboy shirt, but it was the only white shirt I had, and it was a hand-me-down at that. I think what really got Mr. Bossman mad was that I had secretly encouraged the boys in our choir to bob alternately up and down during the competition as if we were loping along the trail on horseback.

THE MAGIC TELESCOPE

It happened in the mid-Sixties when “Esso” was having a “Put a Tiger in your Tank” campaign and would stuff a tiger tail in your gas-cap when you pulled in for a fill-up. It was also a time when I referred to my brother as the “budding kleptomaniac.” He would swipe Tiger Tails from parked cars and surreptitiously insert them into the gas caps of unsuspecting Police cars.

I was in grade seven at the old limestone School house on Bruce Street and was witness to one of the most unusual spectacles in Milton’s history. Mystical Drifters had stopped in front the school with a wagon drawn by a white horse and were enticing innocent children to look into their “Magic Telescope.”

“Magic Telescope, Magic Telescope, see the star that gives everyone hope,” the man with the handlebar moustache said, “Only one dime.” I thought it would be something to see a star in a bright blue sky, so I lined up to take a look. When it came my turn I gave the nickel to the Mystical Drifter woman and was handed the Magic telescope. I should have known better because everyone who looked at it was frowning in disgust.

When I peered into the telescope I was in for a shock. It was just a cheap cardboard telescope with the outline of a star drawn on the far lens. “You cheated me,” I protested, “This is just a star drawn on the lens!”


“You are looking through a star”, the Mystical Drifter woman replied. “Did you ever dream that you would be able to see through a star?”

I was just about to ask for my money back when a police car pulled up with a tiger tail in its gas cap. The Mystical Drifters jumped into the wagon and raced off the school property. I don’t know if was the police car itself or the fact that there was a “Tiger in the Tank” that terrified the Mystical Drifters into bolting away. I stood watching as the police car escorted the wagon to the outskirts of town, with the telescope still in my hands.

To this day I let people look into the “Magic Telescope” for free and it has never failed to put a smile on their faces.

One day coming home from grade 6, a number of men were leafleting the students, with advertisements promoting music lessons. Both Kim and I signed up; Kim played the accordion, and I took up the guitar. This was a fly-by-night operation, and among their questionable dealings, they sold me an electric guitar, at twice the list- price. Each lesson, I would learn about two notes, so I became disenchanted with them. My teachers would dread to see me flounder through a lesson.

In the Christmas presentation for our grade seven class, Mr. Bossman enlisted my talents to play "Greensleeves" in front of the whole school. For about a year I had been taking lessons on the electric guitar, but I hadn't done so well with my lessons, I only knew the first two notes of the song, and wasn't so enthused about falling flat on my face. My dad helped me by suggesting that I not go to school that afternoon. In later years my dad would continue to discourage me from playing guitar, even when I did have the confidence to pursue it. By then I was doing experimental numbers, using my brother Kim to saw a five cent fluorescent green guitar in half as I played it, and performing various “Day after Thanksgiving” versions of John Lennon’s Cold Turkey in which I would scream as loud as I could in a mock tortured voice.

Mr. Bossman was keenly interested in Canadian literature, and introduced us to Stephen Leacock's "Sunshine Sketches on a Little town." He would read us stories from this hook, in the old limestone Bruce Street School. One time he predicted that solar energy was the wave of the future, when the sun would power cars. He was very strict with us and would give us a hard time if we were negligent in our homework. I used to be so terrified that I would get in trouble for forgetting to bring a newspaper clipping for current events, that I had a generic clipping of an article concerning a massive pile-up on the LA Freeway, just in case. When I finally did read it, he was upset with the content, saying that it "wasn't pertinent." Many times we would be caught goofing off, because Mr. Bossman would leave the door half open, using the window as a mirror to monitor our activities. It was not uncommon for the boys in the to break out in a spontaneous hockey games bending our rulers back just enough to make slap shots of our erasers. Even the slightest infraction of decorum would incite the wrath of Mr. Bossman and I made the mistake of chewing the end of my lead pencil one day and he pounced in. He ultimately wrote in my report card some disparaging comments: "Upon returning from my illness, I found that Stefan had to be moved to the front of the room for disciplinary purposes," However, I was very surprised once, to see that the whole back bulletin board was used to display a painting that I had done. The painting was a sunset wash of purple, with a solitary silhouette of a tree. After that I became very interested in art, and produced a slew of watercolor sunsets.

“Why don’t you do something different than a sunset?” My teachers would ask.

“I did,” I’d say, “That one is a sunrise.”

When the tops of a row of cedars were cut on the lot adjacent to our house, Kim and I used them to build a lean-to fort on the checkerboard sign. (Aunt Else and uncle Ron were visiting from North Bay.) I sat on top of the sign with a rubber football, as Kim was below with a long stick poking fun of me. I threw the football at him, lost my balance fell and broke my left arm. After seeing the shape of my arm I ran into the house screaming. It was put into a newspaper sling and I was taken to the hospital. When I returned home with a cast on my arm, everyone was hamming it up for a home movie, but I wasn’t in the mood to be filmed. I found the football under the bed; it was deflated after being chewed up by Rusty, the dog.

Bulldozers dug near the path and we would give the workers drinks of water in tin tumblers. They could taste the remnants of Cool Aid in them. We left them with a pitcher of water. I used to stand with my hand s on my hips, watching them, as if I were the boss.

We had a circular above ground pool in the backyard, with an inflatable dinosaur floating device. Once little Heather from two doors down was swimming, and she asked what’s the bump in your bathing suit. One time I threw a grab apple high in the air to startle her and it hit her on the head.

Fern made and drain pipe to empty the water in the creek, and eventually planted tomatoes in the circle when we outgrew the pool.

Kim and I would finish our paper routes in the winter and would play hockey in the streets. We'd set up lumps of Ice for the goal post, and would play by the light of a street lamp. We'd use a tennis ball, and broken hockey sticks that we had prepared, as a good stick would be ruined quickly. It would be dark and cold, but we loved playing hockey so much. We played so much street hockey, that Terry bought Kim and I hockey nets for Christmas. I got in trouble, because-from the veranda, I could see into the window where Terry had the Eaton's catalogue opened to hockey equipment so I knew what it might be, and suggested as much to Terry.

With my paper route money I would buy model cars and spend hours putting them together, not stopping until I had finished them. It would sometimes be late in the morning when I finished them. One Christmas I received a '58 Chevy from Rick, and assembled it as Sue played her Roy Orbisons's greatest hits album incessantly.

Christmas was always a big event at our house, even though we weren't so religious. Our whole family would get together. One earlier Christmas I went to bed with mom and Bob putting out cookies and Coca Cola for Santa Clause, and awoke to see that Santa had refreshed himself, and left a tin castle for me, with knights and all set up. When we first moved to Milton dad would take us out Christmas caroling, I would go with Rick, who would know instinctively the houses that would give bug donations, and would skip all the rest. Even though I knew none of the words I would sing along anyhow. After we'd drive around and look at the Christmas lights sometimes stopping at Eaton's department store to look at the animated windows. Nearly every house would have '-strings of colored lights around it, some would have nativity scenes in the snows. At home there would be Christmas cards strung up, -and many presents beneath the tree. I thought how incredibly long the time was between Christmases, and would feel the day was very special. This I usually pondered as I ate some special candy. It would move me to think that countries at war could stop fighting at Christmas, if only for one day, and longed for eternal peace in the world.

Kim and I rode our bikes to Mohawk Raceway one Easter break when we were 12 or 13. It was about seven miles there and we managed to get in the stable area to look for some jobs. One man asked me if I’d ever cleaned a harness before so I said yes. I just smeared the dirt around and did a lousy job. Someone offered a job cleaning a stable, but I turned my nose up at it. I walked a horse around after a run. We ate in the cafeteria and saw a couple deer in the clearing. On our way home Kim had a flat tire and had to walk his bike. Since we were in Campbelleville we decided to take the short cut by following the train tracks. We both had our bikes balanced on the rail and were singing “I’ve been working up at Mohawk” at the top of our lungs by the Brick Factory, which was a loud factory so we couldn’t hear the train until it was right upon us. I dived off the track, and Kim did too, narrowly missing being run over.


There is a comical picture of Danny in the family Photo album amid the corn stocks my dad had planted in the backyard. On Danny's birthday in 1966 Terry rented an antique open bus for Danny and his friends to drive around in; the bus was part of the Antique Steam Preservers Reunion which was held every Labor Day in the fairgrounds.

One Christmas Eve, I think it was 1966; I was so upset with my family, that I wanted to run away. When Rick returned from California, I no longer shared a room with him, we used to have a room with a picture of a silver Corvette Stingray on the wall, cut out from a magazine. Rick returned from California in a '58 Chevy that he sold to Terry. Rick had said that he didn't want to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. Dad used to fight with Rick, then Rick moved out and dad fought with Terry. Terry moved out, and then dad fought with me One of my very first memories is that of my mother packing her suitcase to move out. The only reason I didn’t run away on Christmas Eve was because I'd miss out on the presents.


Kim would try often to get me to fight with Terry, so that Terry would lose his temper, and would hit Kim. Kim would go crying to his dad, then dad would hit Terry, and Kim would laugh. Whenever dad was drunk, it would be easy for him to lose his temper and beat us. Especially when Kim and I tormented him. My mother hated that he drank so much, usually a case of 24 a weekend.

At dinner when dad yelled at me I would refuse to eat, and my dad would say, "Then I'll eat your food."

Mom would say, "Here, eat mine too," Dad got angry with that and threw his plate at her, breaking tier tooth. He said he was sorry for this, on one of the very rare occasions when he apologized; Mom always sided with me, and dad always sided with Kim. Kim would always manipulate dad, taking advantage of him because dad was so fond of him. Kim impressed dad with his mechanical abilities, I had the opposite effect for my interest in models cars rather than real cars.

One time, for no reason Kim went into my room and busted all my models, including the airplanes I had hanging from the ceiling. One I was particularly fond of was a Fokker Tri-plane, the plane the Red Baron flew in the First World War. (I had read the Blue Max and was intrigued by the two insulting words that started and ended in “F's" that were written on the wings in bold letters to goad the British.) Perhaps Kim was a bit jealous that I could make models and he couldn't; in an arrogant manner I must have scoffed at the paint and glue that blotched his attempts. I went in a rage to my father, who said, "You must have done something to provoke him."

"I didn't do anything to him, he just came in and busted them."

“Well, you should have put them someplace where he couldn't get at them."

"They were hanging from the ceiling."

This made me really mad. In a similar exchange at that time, he closed the curtains, and started whipping me with his belt. Usually I would laugh till I cried, but this time I was indignant at the injustice, and turned to kick my father, in retaliation. Then my father gave me a kick it would take me years to forget. When mom returned home from shopping for a wedding dress for Rick's fiancée, Mary, she heard from the neighbors that I had been beaten by my father, and that I had run away. Usually when I was beaten the curtains would be closed so the neighbors didn't see, but they always found out. When I came to from lying on the kitchen floor, I ran fifteen miles down a busy railway track crying all the way. The police in the next town found me, and drove me home, but I didn't tell than what happened.


When I was in my singing class I thought about how I used to yawn in Mr. Pepper’s class. I yawned too many times, and once, it was reported to me, when I was absent someone else yawned and Mr. Pepper turned to my empty seat and said, “Now cut that out Stefan.”

Also thought of how I used to torment Mr. Horner, my music teacher in grade 8. We would make up fake name cards on our desks; mine was “Ogey Mun Mun.” I would be wearing my red velvet Ponderosa shirt, with the leather laces at the v-neck. I would slouch and Mr. Horner would say sit up, and I would ignore him until he grabbed me and forced me to sit up — then I would calmly brush the wrinkles on my crushed velvet. He would get angrier and send me out of the room. One time I really riled him by taping the word “repent” to my forehead.

In my grade eight class there was one girl, Cathy O’Neil, who seamed to have a fancy for me. In Science class I would turn around and look at her, and she would have her head propped up on her arm and be looking at me. One time her bike and my bike were leaned against the Five and Dime store, and when hers accidentally tipped mine, she grabbed my bike to save it from falling. 'Good catch eh?' She said, *I rescued your bike.' I thought for a girl to rescue a boys bike was a sure sign of love. After about six months of such incidents I was beginning to become interested in her. I wanted to have her for a partner in Square Dancing Class. It was spring, and I finally got enough nerve to ask her to go roller-skating with me. She refused.


The next day I could see her and Mike Merrit sitting at the back of the room talking about me, and later, Mike teased me about it. I went home and planned my “suicide.” I dug out my chemistry set, which had been a Christmas present that I received but had never actually done any experiments with. I poured some of each chemical into one container, which bore the skull and cross bone warning. That evening my head was filled with drama, and had I been into poetry at the time, I could have written my first and last great poem. I put everything into my gym bag which had ‘Expo 1967” on it.


May the 8th was a normal day at the Martin Street Senior High. It was an old school, constructed of dark bricks. It once had a dome of green dome but it had been removed. The desks were the old style, two parallel pieces of ancient oak, with the top hinged. It was not totally contained, from the back of the room everything inside could be seen. By putting my arm inside the desk, it was possible to slice away with a razor blade, so that no one would notice. I cut several cuts into the top of my whole left forearm, so that it was totally covered in blood. The plan was to put the 'acid' on top. It was at this point that Debbie Aikenhead, spoke out: "Stefan's bleeding!"


Mr. Higher walked to the back of the room and saw that my arm was hidden in my desk. 'Let's see your arm.' I pulled it out very slowly, and he picked up the jar of poison, 'You were going to pour this on your arm?' I nodded yes. He sent me to the nurse’s office. My mother made the following entry into her dairy that day:


" Stefan cut arm. Constable Picket came. Went to Doctor McKay's." May 11, my mother's wrote: "Stefan bought new handlebars and went roller-skating."


On May 13, a Saturday morning, I got my dad to help me to put a new tire on the back wheel of my bike. When it was finished I said, “I'm going to try it out,” setting off, without anyone knowing, to Niagara Falls, some 80 miles away. He thought that I would just be driving around the block.


I was headed for New York City. Planning to stand on the ledge of the Empire State Building, I would threaten to jump off, unless someone paid for plastic surgery. At the time, I felt terribly ugly. I had a big red birthmark covering the right side of my face. I used to always ask my mother for a dime for a chocolate bar. Usually she would say "Can I have Can I have, is that all you can say?" But one time she was short of patience and said "You're an ugly kid."


There had recently been a project at Senior High to put all our baby pictures on a bulletin board. Mine was one of the cutest pictures on the board. Patsy Rosener, standing with a few girls looking at pictures said, “You were such a cute baby, too bad you can't be so cute now.” I didn’t realize that she was just kidding.


As I rode my bike there were trees blossoming in a canopy above the road. I stopped in a general store for a can of pop and saw men lined up to buy perfume. I traveled on. It got dark and I slept in some woods, with only a sweater. It was very chilly and I didn't get much sleep. Sunday morning, I reached Niagara Falls, and spent a couple of my ten dollars on pancakes for breakfast. I asked a man how much for a helicopter ride, he said “Five dollars — you're not from around here are you?”


I crossed the rainbow bridge to get to the United States. Halfway across I stopped and looked at the raging waters below. I thought for a moment about jumping over the railing, but didn’t. When I got across the US customs sent me back to the OPP. I fell asleep on the bench and woke up when my ride home arrived. Rick, Mary and mom picked me up in Rick’s white ’64 Pontiac convertible with the red interior. Rick said, “You keep getting further and further away each time.”


The next day, I went for a ride on my bike and my dad came and got me, threw the bike in the trunk, and drove me home. Terry and Mom took me to a psychiatrist in Oakville the following week. I did well on an aptitude test, and the Doctor said that I would have been qualified to be a fighter pilot in the Second World War. It was his opinion that it was my father who was the problem with his bad drinking problem. Things settled down, but for about five years I fought viciously with my father. Sarcasm was our main weapon. I'll never forget though, how sorry I was that my mother was hurt, when she came to get me at Niagara Falls. I had no idea that it, Mother's Day. Had I realized the day it was I might have prolonged my trip until Father’s Day.


Our class was taking a trip to Ottawa to see the parliament buildings. Everyone was talking about me jumping off the parliament buildings as a "Centennial Sacrifice." Word spread fast about the suicide. Mike Merrit suggested that I could jump off the roof of the apartment buildings on Ontario Street. He'd even show me how to open the roof hatch.
I must have disappointed a lot of students, because I played hooky the day of the field trip.





It was 1967 in Acorn, the year the illustrious town fathers commissioned the beautification of the Mill Pond as a Centennial project. Dynamite was being used to clear a channel beside the 16 Mile Creek and one particular blast woke me from my reverie as a grade eight student at the nearby Marten Street Senior Public School. As I oft times recall the blast ominously shook the can of muddy brown paint that I was dipping into. We were in the midst of painting a backdrop mural, a prop for a Centennial skit. It was about driving the last spike in the railroad that was to connect our fair nation. The highlight of the skit was to hold up the section where the northern rail of the westbound track runs into the southern rail of the eastbound track.

Our class was taking a trip to Ottawa to see the parliament buildings. Everyone was talking about me jumping off the parliament buildings as a 'Centennial Sacrifice.' Word spread fast about the suicide. Mike Merrit suggested that I could jump off the roof of the apartment buildings on Ontario Street. He'd even show me how to open the roof hatch.

I must have disappointed a lot of students, because I played hooky the day of the field trip.

I played Hooky a lot that June, going to Kelso to swim. Mr. Bell, who always brought his lunch in a black tin lurch box with the upper lid curved for the thermos, confronted me about my absence, expecting me to say that I was sick. 'Where were you yesterday?'

'Kelso' I said, referring to Kelso Conservation Authority beside the escarpment, some six miles away.

'Sick...' He said at first, before being flabbergasted that I told him the truth.

'I was at Kelso swimming.'

I had to stay after school for two weeks, doing mathematical problems. It didn't help much, for I consistently failed in math at high school- There were two others it detention with me, John Caruthers was one. John tried to get in a fight with me for a week, chasing me on his bike. Finally I let him catch me, and beat him up.

In the spring of 1967 Kim and I were still doing our paper routes and playing ball-hockey in the streets. One day when I picked up my newspapers I was wearing a t-shirt with the words “Flower Power” written on it with a Magic marker petals. We built a tree-fort in the chestnut tree beside the driveway, and had a huge stack of Playboy magazines, which we had rescued from the Wheeler’s garbage. Perhaps we built the tree house because we needed a place to stash our magazines. Kim hammered every nail; who insisted on doing everything himself. I played tennis incessantly and won a tournament against everyone in town, including the police chief. Our grade eight class commemorated Canada's Centennial by painting a mural of the founding fathers. I bought myself a light green short-sleeve paisley shirt. Rick was married in the Anglican Church, and our family went to Montreal, where we saw "Expo 67." I stayed behind for an extra week, taking the train home. On the train I sat next to a woman named Mary Olan Miller who sold teak furniture. I told her about my crush on Carolanne Hearnes.

Terry picked me up at Union Station in Toronto and stopped on the way back at Yorkville Avenue, the hippies hang out. That was my first encounter with counter—culture. We talked to some who were kind enough to offer us some chocolate covered raisins. I declined, thinking there might be drugs in them.

FALL FAIR AND TARZAN FLIES THOUGH AIR

At the Fall Fair of 1967 when I was in grade nine, it was not long after walking down the midway that the irritations that had been growing for the past few days became overwhelming. I visited a doctor and was sent to the hospital to have my tonsils removed. At the hospital, Marg Regis, a classmate who volunteered as a Candy Striper came to visit me. Marg talked to me quite a bit at school. A nurse had just given me a backrub, the oil and the nurses breath on my back was still lingering when Marg walked in with her pink and white striped uniform giving me “caterpillars in the gizzard.”

Once in Geography class Marg told me a joke about a teacher asking her class to show something depicting great excitement. One drew a horse running, another drew a hockey player and one drew a dot. When the teacher asked the boy to explain the dot he said, “It’s a period. When my sister missed her period there was a lot of excitement in the house.”

I became very serious and asked her to explain, not letting on that I knew what the joke meant.

“A girl has periods,” Marg said.

“What’s a period?” I asked.

“Every month a girl bleeds…”

“I’ve never seen a girl bleed.”

“The joke meant that after missing her period, it meant that she was pregnant.”

“I thought that a girl could tell she was getting pregnant cause her stomach got bigger.”


Once in English class we were given an assignment to write a letter to some one in our class, and I wrote Susan Vansicle the following: “Tarzan fly through air, Tarzan loose underwear, Tarzan no care, Jane make Tarzan another pair. Boy fly through air, boy lose underwear. Tarzan no care, Jane make boy another pair. Jane fly through air Jane lose underwear, Tarzan no care, Tarzan like Jane better bare.”

RINK RATS REVENGE

The Rink Rat’s mission was to scrape the ice at the arena before hockey games, then to flood it with a cart full of boiling water. I lived a couple blocks away from the arena and could return there a few scrapes in the evenings. Kim worked as a Rink Rat as well as me and would often be at odds with the manager. This went back a few years from Kim gathering broken hockey sticks, which we would repair to play ball hockey on the street, and running around the back halls of the arena. One time the manager picked Kim and I by the scruff of the neck and escorted us to the door. Kim never forgot such things and ultimately filled the carts up and “forgot” to turn the water off. I have never seen so much steam in my life.

The manager of the arena had a new office built at one corner of the ice, and directly above it was a small viewing area with a railing. I was standing above the office with John Sampson, a classmate and fellow rink rat, when John stomped on an inverted paper cup to make a loud echo. Right away John ran off and I continued watching the game. The manager, thinking that I stomped on the cup kicked me very hard in the rear end. I should have gone to the police, but didn’t know any better.


My Grade nine High School English class had assignment to write poetry, which inspired my latent muse. "Sirens Wailed" became my first poem. Shaped like a mushroom cloud it expressed the need to repent for creating the ultimate weapon. (I had read 'Hiroshima' in Grade six; Mrs. Robins snatched it o-it at my hands thinking it was a dirty pocketbook; it had a profound affect on me. When I took the poem to the "Canadian Champion" to have it published I asked them to print it in tie form of a bomb, hut it didn't work, until I clarified my intentions.

There was a girl in my grade nine class who offered to type my poem for me, in return for having me write a poem that she could hand in as her own. She invited me to the Sadie Hawkins dance, but I was too immature for a relationship. I went to her house to meet her parents, and they were put off by some flippant comments I made. Also, while walking along Thomas street with her I saw that a school bus about to pass us would splash us and stopped without telling her, letting the puddle splash on her.

The English teacher had me help as her assistant, giving the students advice. As soon as I finished a poem I would show it around, sometimes even to students I hardly knew. I decided that I would become a famous poet, like T.S. Elliot. Most of my poetry was really lousy though.


Henry Gibson acted the part of a comic-poet on TV's "Laugh In," dressing strangely with wide outrageous ties. At an assembly before 600 students I imitated him, wearing a wild tie, carrying a bouquet of flowers. Although the poem had a funny ending, when I finished it there was no reaction from the crowd. No one laughed, booed or clapped. So I dropped my flowers and my face and everyone laughed. It turned out that the microphone had not been on.

It was at the Mariposa Folk festival on Toronto Islands, my innate longing to perform took wing, with my first taste of live folk music. Paul Foster, an artist a few years my senior took me there; amid the willow trees and the yachts docked nearby I fell in love with the music of Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Joni Mitchell and Pete Seeger. Thousands of people had taken picnic baskets with them on the ferries across the harbor to spend three days immersed in music and crafts, and folk—dancing, Paul Foster told me that several young singers, who are just starting get a chance to play here. I decided that I would become a famous folksinger. The first song I wrote was called "In fin Old English Meadow." It was about a knight defending the honor of his lady. The melody was so complicated that I only managed to play it a couple of tines. From then on I became obsessed with songwriting.

"God Bless the Grass" was the theme of our first festival, put on by our high school folk-club. There, I made my debut wearing an Indian robe of thick white cotton, with a beaded design on the front. The robe went down to my ankles, so when I sang, sitting cross-legged, a sort of tent was formed, to conceal my shaking stage fright. Among the songs I sang were "Talking Dust Bowl Blues" by Woody Guthrie and "Love Minus Zero/ No Limit" by Bob Dylan, These two singers, along with Leonard Cohen and Ramblin' Jack Elliot were ones I emulated. Even before I played guitar, when I heard a Dylan song on the radio I would be elated from the opening notes.

A torrent of criticism came down on Mrs. Turner, the English teacher who sponsored our club, because of the theme of our festival, many had their own interpretation of what we meant by "grass." This had not been the first time that folk-music put Mrs. Turner on the spot- She was fond of recalling how she had attended Fete Seeger concerts during the fifties, during the red scare, and having the R.C.M.P, take down her license number. I had no idea what the Communists were up to, or why there were red scares. From that time on, I was forbidden to sing in all folk—festivals at the high school, because Mrs., Turner said I "sang flat." when I heard that, I became even more determined to become a famous singer, just to show her she was wrong.

My father also tried to discourage me from playing guitar, thinking that I would never amount to anything. It would have pleased him if I found a job at Good Year, A few years later he did take me to the Good Year plant to apply for a job. Wearing a jean jacket, jeans a red bandanna and knee high laced riding boots, I didn't get the job. Perhaps it was my long hair. It was not uncommon for my father to stop for a couple beers on the way home, -and then take a nap in his room across from the stairs. I would often burst into song and run up the stairs, waking him up. It is no wonder he wanted me to quit singing.

In the summer of ‘69 I had a job working as a bird controller at the cherry farm on the base of the escarpment. Towering over the orchards were a dozen platforms, made of three triangular T.V. antennas and a railed platform. With a cheap shotgun, and shot that came all the way from Russia, we would scare crews away from the crops, There weren't so many birds coming around, so I had a lot of time to writs poetry. I had a tie—die bleached a gabardine raincoat, and wrote my poems on the inside, calling it my "poetry coat." While at this job as a human scarecrow, I heard on my transistor radio that the United States had landed a man on the moon, and fired a few shots in celebration.

On a few mischievous occasions I wore my poetry coat to school. Most of my wardrobe I had bought on one shopping spree with Paul Foster in Toronto, My most risqué outfit was of orange Elvis Presley pants, like the ones I had seen some star at Mariposa wear, a Tuxedo top with tails and a t—shirt with Mickey Mouse holding a joint. Often members of the folk-club, dressed in strange clothes would gather around acting strangely. Once, a conversation with Gary G. convinced the school janitor that we were dealing drugs.

My classmates who were involved in drugs thought that I was an informant to the police, and my teachers thought that I was a pusher. When I walked by "heads" at school dances they would sneer at me and call me a "nark."

Mrs. Mc Arthur, who was in charge of our Grade 10 home room had me stand in the hall for fidgeting while "0 Canada." was being aired over the public address system. Another teacher, who wrote at the board for lung lengths of time, turned around once in the middle of class and found the whole class had participated in a "great escape." It was in this class that I would sit at the back of the room playing catch with Dean Story, who whipped an apple, at my head. The boy on the other side had quite a fast pitch, and the apple splattered on the wall. The teacher didn't say a word, just shook his head sadly at the end of the period. He probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't screamed. In typing class, I was thrown out for calling my baby finger a "pinky." Usually I managed to arrange my typing pad in such a way that it would send paper flying about the room whenever I tore off a sheet. At physical education class, I broke the lights twice, once by throwing court long basket, and once with a skipping rope "that just flew out of my hands." My favorite ploy was to push the teacher just as far as I could, then suddenly revert to being a model student just before they kicked me out. Even as I was going out the door, I would try to make the teacher laugh, for if they laughed then I could say, "You can't send me out now that you're laughing."

During science class the teacher would leave us assignments, to go off to the teacher's lounge, so the boys in our class would conduct their our own experiments, using such rudimentary apparatus as rulers erasers and rubber bands. Any projectile was fair game. The girls took themselves quite seriously, and never played along with us. One boy we were fond of teasing was lured to the back of the room and ended up in the "snake pit." Kevin Smithereens fit perfectly, unfortunately, he busted his pen on my head when he got.
It was customary for students to be given detention of excruciating nature, having to write out long boring poems after school. My first detention was in Grade three, when I was obliged to write “Antarctica" fifty times fear deliberately misspelling it.

Our English teachers were usually very innovative. Dot Richardson let us sit in any seating we wanted, these would change at the drop of a hat or the whim of a fart. Always the guilty party would have a great grin on his face; everyone would have picked their desks up and moved ten feet away.

For an assignment, I was to put the poem "Willie the Lion" on tape to present it to the class, I stayed after class to make my tape, but made a special recording on both sides. The English teacher didn't trust me and had me play it for to make sure it was presentable. It was, but the next day I played the other side, which was inspired by the opening segments of "Mission Impossible," a popular TV show. "Good morning, Miss Pallet and class. Your mission today is to study the poem "Willie the Lion." Should you or any of your class get sent to the office, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. As usual, this tape recording will self-destruct in five seconds (1,2,3,4,5,)...bang.

"A Real Cliff hanger. Boy Stranded On Cliff Rescued by Fire Ladder"

"A grade 10 class party at Kelso Conservation Area turned into a real "cliffhanger" Saturday night when Steven des Lauriers, 16, of 149 Mary St Milton had to be rescued by a fire ladder. The incident was not reported; but was noticed by O.P.P. constables who notified the fire department. According to witnesses, Steven had already climbed halfway up a crevice at the abandoned quarry property at the east face of the escarpment, got half way up and panicked, and decided not to climb higher of descend. Steven clung precariously to a rock ledge for four hours, until the pumper unit arrived at the scene. The truck could only make it to the base of the hill, and students were recruited to assist firemen carry a ladder to the base of the hill, where Steven was rescued. Steven helped carry the ladder back to the truck,"

When I gat home that evening I didn't say a word about it, I just had a bath and went straight to bed. Must nave looked disheveled, but no one noticed. When the paper came out I had two nicknames, my previous "killer" and the temporary one "cliffhanger."

THE LONESOME DEMISE OF A WRETCHED POETRY COAT

When men first landed on the moon, I was working as an armed human scarecrow at a cherry farm. My alleged duty was to sit on top of a rickety tower and scare the birds with a shotgun.

To look the part I would often wear my poetry coat. My poetry coat had humble beginnings as a navy blue overcoat in the Salvation Army. I tie-dye bleached it and inscribed poems in the faded blotches. The poems were kept on the inside, it being a time when I still had some modesty and would open up on the rare occasion to bare my soul.

Sometimes I would employ the poetry coat as my phantom surrogate. I'd prop up a crate and drape my coat with the shotgun holding the arms on the railing. Using a water cooler in place of my head, I would put a straw hat on it, and place it where the railing converged, thereby creating the illusion of being on the job. The only difference between an actual scarecrow and a human scarecrow is the human element. By removing the human element I was able to climb down my tower, and do nefarious things, such as sneak up on my fellow worker in the nearby tower.

During the evening when flocks of starlings flew high overhead some of the young charges would blast their way through high heaven. Of course we were supposed to just scare the birds and not to kill them. Nothing in the job description, however, specifically stated that we shouldn't perforate one another.

It was with quiet abandon that I made my usual climb up the other tower. The towers had a tendency to sway when mounted, being made of aluminum radio antennas, so it was difficult to ascend in a stealthy manner. Approaching the last few rungs I heard a volley of shots. One of the young charges peered over the edge. "Now Stefan," he said, "I knew you were up to something when I saw that crow land on your hat."

Upon returning to my tower I was shocked to see what had happened in my absence. My beloved poetry coat had been shot full of holes. I opened the walking anthology, to find a fine spray had decimated my precious poetry. Looking through gaping holes I came to the sad realization that some of the words were missing. And that was the first time it occurred to me that I should edit my work.

The urge to travel hit me during my summer vacation in 1970, and dad made eight peanut butter sandwiches for me, for a short journey to Sauble Beach, just a hundred miles away on Lake Huron. I made it to the beach after a ride in a red Corvair with a man with hand controls. I thought I was doomed, for Ralf Nadar had condemned that car. Once at the beach, stringing beads for a head shop helped me earn enough to buy a felt hat. Wading with ‘Beatle’ boots sticking out of my army jacket packets with bell-bottom jeans completely hiding my toes, my harmonica made mellow blues. Some one said, "You must be naturally stoned."

A line for a song came to mind 'As gulls flew across the skull of the sky.' Stayed at a campfire at a secluded spot with a number of kids. I was acting up a bit. I had worked all afternoon at a boutique stringing beads in exchange for a black felt hat, a guitar was passed around and I played 'Rocky Raccoon' on it. They were surprised that I could play.

I went to a Dairy Queen and was acting weird again, and caused an old lady in a car to push the lock button of her car. The girl at the counter said 'You’re from Acorn aren't you, you ran for President of the student Council.'

'Did you vote for me?' I asked. She said no. 'That's why I don't know who you are.'

Running for President in my final year of High School, Kim was about my only active support, helping me plaster the school with hundreds of letter size copies of my poster. Paul Foster came to the assembly to hear me give a speech that I would now prefer never to recall. I lost, getting almost a hundred of the six hundred possible votes.

I talked to about everyone I met about Betty. I would ask her out and she'd saying she had to baby sit. I said that's a lousy excuse so she said that would have to do. I told her the scrambled egg story, which ended up in my flamenco talking blues song 'Scrambled Eggs and Pretty legs.' In grades ten and eleven I had a crush on Betty C. I started out by asking her out over the telephone every couple weeks, but then decided to ignore her, and wrote an “x” on a calendar for each day totally ignored her. After many months of ‘ex.’s Finally I got her attention, and arranged what I thought was a date…

On Friday, before my “date” with Betty, I saw Pam Branch outside of Art Class. She tried to tell me that Betty had second thoughts about meeting me in Toronto, and that I should not see her. At that point, nothing could stop me.

The next morning I woke at about nine. I shaved the fuzz that was under my neck. Holly Stinson had told me that I had a tendency of going without shaving for a week at a time, so I shaved real well.

So I went to Toronto, and I visited the Harrison’s at Duplex Crescent. After my short visit, I walked down to Avenue Road, stopping at an Esso station to wash my face to make sure I was clean. The day was quite sunny and it was the height of Autumn. I was wearing blue jeans, with a blue shirt and my blue plaid lumberjack jacket. It was the happiest morning I had ever had.

I was to meet Betty at two o’clock, at the Bronze statue in front of Roschdale. I got there a little before two. I was talking to a man who walked away just as Betty showed up. Betty asked if I was talking to that man and I said yes, he was black. Betty said that doesn’t matter. She was wearing a raccoon fur coat and brown corduroy pants. I can’t remember what else she was wearing. There was a game at the Varsity Stadium and every now and then I could hear a roar from the crowd. Betty asked me if I’d ever been inside Roschdale. I said no. She knew a back entrance and we went walking through the halls that were covered in posters and filled with smoke. There was a cat walking around, and bonny said, “That must be a freaked out cat.” There was Jimmi Hendrix music playing on someone’s record player, and she wanted to hear it. She said she liked Jimmi Hendrix. She seemed quite different, her image, than she was at school. At school she seemed to be shy, but it Toronto it appeared that she was quite the opposite. We went outside and she said, “You wanted to buy a pair of pants, didn’t you” I had mentioned the fact that I might be going to Toronto to buy pants, when we spoke earlier that week at school. She took me at that and started to return to her friends place nearby, at a rooming house in the Annex. I stood before her a while, and she discouraged me from going inside. I made an advance, and she drew back and went in the house.

I walked away, feeling the worst I’d ever felt. All the way down Yonge Street I cried, not caring who saw me. I saw Betty again that evening at Union Station as I was waiting for my train. She ignored me. This was even worse than before. I sat in the Go Train in the steps by the door and sobbed, playing my blues harp to console myself. I hitchhiked home, and got a ride with Marg Elliot and her parents. I didn’t tell them, what happened.

Rock festivals were very popular after Woodstock, and many promoters tried to recreate the event. One of my classmates, Paul Perot, who had accused me of being a nark, attended one of these Rock outs held outdoors wearing a white leather jacket with long fringes dangling from his sleeves. I made myself a conservative style Indian vest of green suede with fringes; hut never had a big enough ego to look like Elvis Presley.

Though I initially wanted to live a drug free life my resistance gradually wore thin. One night a friend of mine took mine the escarpment overlooking the lights of Milton a mile away. On a strategically secluded hilltop I tried my first marijuana. I had tried hard to always be naturally stoned, but it was difficult. At a Black Sabbath concert I had seen a wild looking drug addict show off his needle by unraveling layers of silk handkerchief, as if the needle was some icon to be worshiped. The sight of his tombstone eyes rolling in anticipation turned my stomach.

Don Makowski, a classmate, and I hitchhiked late one night to a three-day Rock out at Mosport. Our ride was filled with freaks, including one with dark spooky hollows around his eyes. When we arrived at the festival site, early in the morning, we could hear heavy music in the distance. Past several heads with motorcycles, we came to a lake where people were skinny-dipping. After taking a casual dip, we got dressed and left, not even hearing one group.

Sometimes visiting Toronto, I'd sell Guerrilla newspapers, fronted by the counter-culture group that printed it. I used to have a comical routine standing on Yonge Street saying to the ladies, "Are you tired of your Guerrilla? Then try this..." On the wall of their office amid the black—light posters I detested, was one poster with a wise story, meant to dissuade people from ripping them off. It told of a man living as a hermit in the mountains who came back to his hut to find that all his belongings had been stolen. He just sat on a rock and said, "I wish I could have given the thief this beautiful moon as well."

When Afghan coats were the rage, I returned home with one that I'd bought on Yonge Street, much to my mother's chagrin. At eighty dollars, and stretching down to my knees it was just too much for her. The coats were fashioned of goatskin; fur inside with the hide outside, with some primitive embroidery on it. It caused quite a sensation with the fireman who saw me as they marched in the Remembrance Day Parade down Main Street. My mother took me back to the store and made them refund my money.

Walking through the school cafeteria Joe Miller yelled out "Hey Killer,” from among his frat friends, "Why don't you kill yourself?" I punched him in the mouth, and was sent to the office by my typing teacher. It was almost suicide to strike Joe for he was a big athletic guy. We were both suspended for three days by the vice-principle, who was known as "Commander Tom."

During my three days off, I worked with Kim demolishing a greenhouse, using a sledgehammer to knock out a chimney. Kim removed the panes of glass painstakingly, but came back after hours and busted them all after a labor dispute with the contractor. It didn't bother me to be suspended, but for Joe it was different, for his father was the proprietor of the local tavern, and was concerned about his image.

A week later, I was in the Rotary Park when Joe finally caught up with me and caused my mouth same considerable damage. Since I had not provoked him this time, I went to the Police and pressed charges, and he pressed counter-charges against me. I should have pressed charges against Bob Collins who was with him. I could have said it wasn’t fair, Joe had a friend with him to back him up. Joe said that our differences went back to the time when he had thrown firecrackers at we while I was playing tennis. My father sided with Joe, and accused me of "not making friends." I felt betrayed by this, and the pressure to drop the charges, because my father was such a good customer at the tavern.


Before we went on the grade 12 New York City trip, Ann Mc Arthur said to me, “Now Steven, don’t bring your banjo and don’t wear any of your weird clothes.” I wore my bell-bottom jeans an orange tie-dye shirt and a green leather buckskin fringed vest that Paul Foster helped me to make.

Upon landing we made our way to the Westbury Hotel. Before we went to the UN building most of us stopped in at a liquor store. John Mac and I went to the UN but most of the kids skipped that tour. I filled up a glass tumbler with Scotch, downed it in one go and threw it up immediately. I went at it again in moderation.

The next day we went on the Circle Line tour of Manhattan. Some students went to the musical “Hair.” Then we took a tour bus to Chinatown.

I went shopping and bought a jean jacket and some riding boots. Came back wearing them. Went to Washington Square. A man was holding up a piece of paper and giving a sermon. He would hold the paper up, and then let it fall quickly, as if it personified the frailty of man. Another person played with a snake that wrapped around his neck.

As far as academics went my only ambition was to get by. I felt that University was unnecessary for a folksinger. No one tried to encourage me to further my education. I did go to summer school to catch up on math, but failed again, so that altogether I would fail Grade 11 math 3 times. To fail a subject three times in a row, I received a credit for it, and this ended up being the one credit I needed to graduate from grade 12. I didn't realize this till after graduation, but had already left town.

With eight cans of beans that my father gave me, I hitchhiked out west when school let out, and made it to Regina by the time the beans ran out. To my dismay, at the government sponsored hostel beans were the main course. The Canadian government, and the media inspired an estimated 50,000 youngsters to see the country, setting up hostels in all the major cities. It was a good way to see the country and taste a lot of beans.

I met Steve Patterson on my first day traveling at the fork in the road. He had swirling curly hair like the river he was standing in; his hair was dry at first, but when he washed it in the whitewater water beads streamed off then soaked in. He dealt acid, and even painted houses on Acid. It was at Sauble Falls, a campsite at the Provincial Park.

When my vision turned to rivers we went wading in the falls that went like steps. The boulders themselves were raging with fossils that seemed fresh and alive. On a bough over the water, gnarled like a million smiling trolls peeping from dark borrows, on smooth grey we sat, dangling our feet over water black with molten glass. Walking in the river, up to our twists, it tugged at our rampant imagination. Inside a combination candy store and gas station. Steve bantered with the girl at the pump. Inside the old clerk who was like a sailor captain or a pirate of a chocolate sea wrapped in paper served me. I was shy as the down side of a flipped coin.

Outside tramping around, we passed a puddle, and Steve said "Watch Out!" This magnified in my mind and made me think of rattlesnakes. I stood petrified; till Steve said, "It’s only a puddle." The meadow was incredibly beautiful; my eyes were open to the splendor of nature. The puddle, with just one piece of litter blemishing a perfect picture was more than my heart could bear. Nevertheless — relieved that it wasn't a snake I walked boldly through. The geometrical design of a pine forest that had been planted by the forestry department with the symmetry down to the pine needles amid golden grains of grass, each blade of grass golden in the reclining sun was too beautiful, the grass was like clusters of hands praising the sky. He picked up pinecones, and whipped them at each other with the geometrical patterns of cones leaving fuzzy trails as the arch whizzed by.

Again in the water the sun was drawn down, we walked in the water by tourists who apart from a tan of rouge on them looked like they had just stepped out of their hotel rooms in their holiday clothes. Even the fisherman was fashionably attired. They just stood and slowly moved their heads. I was thinking of how I would paint this picture — water with two in the currents and the rest of the people cut out of a catalogue with a red tint to their faces. Steve moved from behind me and stepped into my visions field of peregrinations.

Outside of Regina I was picked up by a hippie in a ' 57 Dodge, with a two other hitchhikers in the back. The driver had an E Harmonica; the same as mine so we jammed as the sun went down over the prairies. Julie, the one 16 year old in the back, was famous among the hitchhikers, because her" parents back in Ottawa had rented billboards across the country hoping to have her daughter reunited. I heard that she had met heroin users who had gotten her high, who took her out to show her the sign, which she had not yet seen. She was quite shocked to see her picture and the caption "Julie come home; we love you!" I met her later in Vancouver during the Gasstown riot on August 7, 1971; a “Smoke-in” that some radicals had staged. They had gathered at one intersection and had carried a huge paper roach Joint above the crowd, passed out smoke them. The riot act was read when things got out of hand; so I told Julie that it was time to leave, when we looked back we could see the mounted horsemen, about fifty of them plus carloads of riot police were taking care of things. The next day, at Stanley Park, a mounted police officer looked at me with a knowing smile because I had long hair, and I realized at that time how easy it would be to have resentment towards the establishment.

On the west coast of Vancouver Island there was a placed called Wrecked Beach; where derelict hippies lived in a nudist commune of squatter huts made of driftwood and plastic. I didn't get there, but did stay overnight in White Beach, which was just a few miles away. The hut I happened to find was only big enough to lie down in, and I spent one night there, before returning to Vancouver. At Vancouver I went to Wrecked Bay, another beach famous for its dedicated sunbather's and borrowed someone’s violin, and taught myself “You are my Sunshine” before actually getting a good tan.

How I learned how to play violin on Wrecked Beach

It was a short walk down to Wrecked Beach near UBC to get to where the nudes were. On the way I explored some abandoned WW2 bunkers with peace graffiti in them, broken wine and pop bottles and evidence of all sorts of antiestablishment behavior. Through the bunkers' opening people were playing Frisbee on the beach; I threw a few shots with them. I had at this time not yet perfected my toss, and went on with my life such as it was.

There were nudes and squatters on the beach, and one had a bright red painted violin. I asked if I could play it; it being a long time since I had played my green nickel guitar. I sat in the sand and taught myself You Are My Sunshine. People passed by as I struggled over and over to get the notes. As soon as I completed the song correctly one time I went to the beach and sat down.

Some people smiled at me, having heard me struggle through it. I came to some people I recognized from the hostel, and dropped my garments in the sand. A man named George with red hair and extremely fair skin was doing calisthenics with his mouth and tongue because he wanted to be a disk jockey. As the day progressed under the pure blue sky Mr. Chameleon — that's how I remember him — turned bright red. He was totally red, except for his tongue. I found a shiny quarter in the sand and put in my pocket.

Rumors of jobs fighting forest fires were spreading around, so I headed back in search of one. I found a job in Golden British Columbia, where a two-week-old fire was just dying down, making the job an easy one. Most of the firefighters were hitchhikers and hippies so it was an unusual experience. The tent that I stayed in was converted into a T.P, with a fire in the middle. One day I worked as a swamper, roaming around with a Timberjack driver in search of spot fires. Timber jacks are huge tractors with huge wheels, able to climb mountainous terrains. There was a tank on the back and a pump to hose down fires; my job was to blast away at the fires.

At night we’d all go to the Big Bend hotel in Golden 20 or '30 of us to drink beer, sometimes from our helmets. One night, when several firefighters did acid a number of them traveled back on Volkswagen, with me on front hood. We were up most the night sitting around the fire. When I searched for firewood the ground was all snakes, but soon enough I had an armful of kindling. The next morning we were carried halfway way up a mountain on the back of a bulldozer, the dust caking on the beards of two young hippies, till they looked as old and worn out.

One night about thirty of us young fire fighters went into Golden to the Big Bend Hotel. We all got a ride in a big army truck to the edge of town along the Trans Canada Highway. We feigned hitchhiking, but no car would stop because we were' all wearing helmets. When we got to the Hotel, we would fill our helmets with beer and drink out of them.

I got really drunk; behind the hotel I threw a big aluminum milk can into the river. A man was selling acid for two dollars a hit. I offered him a dollar twenty-five and an old key that might work for him some day if he happened on the right door, I got the hit and the three of us went off in a car. We bought some Wintergreen Certs to sparkle in the dark. I bought about three packages of Certs and we went back in a Volkswagen hug. As we approached the camp there were several firefighters along the way, so we picked up as many as we could, piling them all in. Three firefighters were hanging on the back, and I was sitting on the front hood.

We met Pierre by the dining area, which was a canopy sort of affair with bare light bulbs strung over long rows of picnic tables. We met Pierre and told him we were stoned. We huddled in a circle, all four of us and jumped up and down. Pierre was disappointed because he wouldn't be able to keep up with us. HB said to come back to the T.P. and make a fire.

By the kitchen area the cook was taunting McComber,
knowing that he too was high. He picked up a slice of tomato that had fallen into the dirt, picked it up with much flourish and devoured it with mock enthusiasm. At that moment I was getting off and the footprints in the dirt took on a magical quality.]


There was one Jewish guy at the camp who talked of going to Europe, who managed to stay long enough to travel there. I met him a year later in Italy, and wanted to play him a song I'd written called "Talking Forest Fighting Blues but he wasn't interested. My favorite line from the song went: "The lunches were unbearable, as a matter at fact, the bears would steal them and then bring them back."

After a couple weeks I went to Jasper, and hiked the Skyline trail. The night before I had slept under a pile of logs thinking I’d be safe from the bears, I may I save been tired but I didn't sleep like a log. I left Jasper and hopped freight to Edmonton; thought I might end up in the Yukon. On a flatcar through the night past freight elevators with floodlights in search of stowaways. After a couple days I was home.

It was September, and school had already started, I decided not to go to grade 13, to qualify for university as many of my classmates did, I visited George Taft, (who was with Bruce arid I at an early age shooting cap pirate pistols) and some friends at high school, and played "On the Side of the Road," a song inspired by my travels. That was my last of High school. I found work in a fan factory to save up money for Europe. With the fire fighting money I bought a guitar. I moved to Oakville and lived in a basement room that a German family rented. The mother, who would cook my meals, once made me an omelet with a rubber band in it. That was he worst thing I have ever tasted.

Before I traveled to Europe I toured around Eastern Canada.

In the town of Digby I met a family doing my laundry. They fed me blueberries and milk and made me feel guilty about not calling home. When I did call home mom said 'what's wrong... why not take the next train home, I'll have a pot of tea waiting for you.'

Right after that I got on a ferry and ran into the Van sickle family. Susan's father was the one who drove me name the night I got stuck and the mountain and had to be rescued with the fire ladder. Susan was in some of my classes at High School. I asked her if she wanted to see my backpack, but she wasn't interested.]

In Saint Anthony Newfoundland, in the summer of '72, a man named Sherlock gave me a ride and took me to his parents' home. He was about my age and talked in a flaky voice. I told him that my ambition was to become a famous songwriter, He listened to a cassette of my songs and said, "You're ambition is just a pipe dream"

I tried to dissuade him with fanatical persistence and said, "Listen to this one song, It's called One Son."

"I dare say I like it," Sherlock said at last.

I hitch hiked back to the cove. Before I arrived there I looked at the remains of the Viking settlements. Standing on the shores in an area that had been unchanged for centuries. I looked out at the bay just as it would have been when the Vikings first landed. I felt the experience was timeless.

As I walked amid the houses at Flower's Cove I noticed they seemed to have sprung up at random like wild flowers. But actually each house faced the center of the bay. Beneath the gray evening sky the cove in the distance turned a thin sliver of silver. Calm pockets of water were strewn about from a recent storm. My guitar in my green canvas trapper Nelson backpack was sticking above my head like the dragon on the prow of a Viking ship. My instrument was inside the impromptu case, which I had constructed from an old raincoat. I had taken one sleeve off a raincoat and attached it where a neck would be and used the other arm for a handle.

A group of about a half dozen kids gathered around and asked me where I was from. I said that I was from Toronto, and that I was traveling around the world. I told each, and every child their age, exactly, to the half year.

I made my way to Harold's house. I had stayed there a few days before and he told me to stop in on the way back. Harold gave me a taste of hard tack, and warned me that I wouldn't like it. He was right. Then I helped Harold carry a large piece of plywood across a windy field to a shed. We passed a derelict car along the way, with parts strewn about. Often I passed abandoned automobiles and felt they were making a junkyard out of heaven. After twenty-five years the cars and the rust seemed to blend with the soil. I was sitting talking to Harold my friend John Franklin knocked on the door. He had found the message that I had left at the Viking ruins. The next morning we took the ferry to Labrador. That evening the rusty jalopy of the sun drove into the junkyard of the horizon, somewhere beyond the Straights of Belle Isle.

When we walked around the out port, people would watch us from window to window, like fishes in a goldfish bowl. Many of the cottages were quaint; one was shaped like an Octagon. A family took us home for dinner and kept telling me to play another ditty. We went to the tavern and drank some Brador. I talked to a Lady beside the jukebox; she became the inspiration for the song Lady of Labrador. There was a small white frame church, and John and I sat and I played some harmonica, which made a little dog howl. John and I hitchhiked along the forty miles of road, the road that connected the few towns that weren't outports. Along the way we would run into strangers who knew who we were, for the word had spread quickly that two boys from Toronto were traveling around. "All Labrador knows you are here."
One night we ended up in the middle of a forest, and made a shelter out of branches, pulled our sleeping bags over our heads, but still got eaten alive by the mosquitoes. Just down the road there was an empty loggers cabin that we could have slept in. We finally got a ride to the end of the road, and the people took us in for tea. Every house that we went to had pictures of John F Kennedy on the wall. When we got to the end of the road it disappeared into someone's back yard. There was a dock, and below the dock shining on the bottom were dozens of shiny fish heads. John walked about twenty yards into the fog and disappeared. He would walk forwards and backwards playing around with disappearance in the fog. And then we turned around and went back to where we had come from.

NEW CHAPTER

The only souvenirs I brought back from Norway are a pair of 'hospital socks', a few scars, a black and white photograph of Anita, who looked like Liv Ullman but with a million freckles. I also have a postcard from Lucy.

Hospital socks are what they put on you when they intend to operate. They were flat like Christmas stockings with two words on them: 'Gjovic' and then a long word starting with the letter P. This second word had lots of 'O's ' and 'A's ' with strokes and double dots over them. Gjovic was the name of the town I was in, about 69 kilometers north of Oslo; the second word probably meant 'hospital.'

I was traveling with Lucy and friends in her brand new, orange pop-top camper-equipped Volkswagen van. Lucy was a millionaire's daughter from California; a stocky girl with long blonde hair who thought erroneously that she was homely looking. She complained that boys used to walk her home from school just so they could see her beautiful sister.

Lucy would sing me novelty songs as she drove along and would do rusty Joni Mitchell songs every time we stumbled on a piano. She taught me how to play Last Thing on my Mind as we drove along. She was in love with Dominique.
The first thing that Dominique would say when he met a woman was, 'I am Dominique; from France...' He would then flash a bracelet with his name on it. He was in his mid twenties, had curly dark hair and usually wore a scarf around his neck. 'There is only one word to describe me,' he'd say, 'that's— Liberty — with a capital 'L'. One part goes to the horizon and the other to the zenith.' Dominique was not in love with Lucy, but was stringing her along. Whenever Dominique danced, he proved just what a popinjay he really was.

There were two other travelers with us, I only mention them to show that it was crowded sleeping in the van. I had met them all in Helsinki; had seen Dominique and Lucy before at the student cafeteria when they were planning a trip to Leningrad. They found it too expensive and made other plans. We all had buttermilk at the cafeteria, served by a girl wearing black lipstick. They were planning to travel through the north of Finland and come down around the coast of Norway. I had just landed in Helsinki at the time, after traveling for three months in eastern Canada.

One night, after finding temporary lodging at a nurses' residence Lucy and company showed up with the van. At first Lucy didn't want to take me along, she thought I was too sarcastic, but the rest convinced her because I had a guitar and could entertain them.

Our basic routine was to drive two hundred miles a day, eat occasionally in cafeterias and cook in the van. Lucy was a vegetarian and into Buddhism. We stopped at every art gallery, tourist sites and discotheques. In the mornings when we brushed our teeth we had roadside 'toothpaste parties,' where we tried to squirt each other with sprays of paste. Lucy made reference to the toothpaste parties on her postcard.

On the trip north we were always ahead of the weather so there were endless scenes of tranquil lakes reflecting forests of orange and emerald. By the time we passed the Arctic Circle and went down the coast of Norway it was getting cold, but it was still warm enough to sleep in the van.
It was a sunny morning, the last Sunday of September when I was lying in the front cot that straddled the two front seats. I had to curve my body to fit into the mummy sleeping bag. That particular morning I twisted my legs somehow and cut off the circulation to my testicles. Lucy and Dominique were arguing and the others were making breakfast. After taking a short walk, I realized something was very wrong and inched my way back toward the van, and asked to be taken to a hospital.

At the hospital a doctor took me aside, looked at me, and said he would have to perform a 'delicate operation'. I asked for a second opinion and he called in a janitor or an intern — I'm not sure which. This person nodded his head and the next thing I knew there was an ugly old nurse giving me a shave with no cream. They wheeled me away, past seven beautiful nurses.

When I awoke later that afternoon I was in a room with six men, all Norwegians. My friends came in and Lucy gave me a kiss on the cheek. 'Taking advantage of poor helpless man' I said. They gave me a card and a hairbrush. Lucy gave me some books to read, Siddhartha and Damian by Herman Hesse. With dramatic feebleness I lifted the covers to observe myself. I was still intact, but there was a huge bandage. Everyone chuckled at my grimace. Leaving for Oslo, they took my remaining clothes and guitar with them and said they'd return on Wednesday.

The man in the next bed would hold out a piece of meat on his knife so that I could walk over very carefully, pop it into my mouth and smile ecstatically. That was when I was restricted to Jell-O. I walked up and down the corridors, very slowly, wearing my housecoat and the hospital socks. The socks were tied by a cord at the top and would slowly fall, so that by the time I was at the end of the hall they would be in a heap around my ankles.

Whenever the doctors and nurses came on their rounds I was always introduced as a følksinger which they pronounced, følksånger'. It had two dots over the 'a' to give it a nasal twang.

On Wednesday they took the stitches out and I got ready to leave town. I asked a hypothetical question; they said 'Two weeks.' I waited for Lucy and the van but they didn't show up. The next day they had still not returned so I took off, leaving a scribbled note with the receptionist. The note said, 'Meet me noon Saturday at the Canadian Embassy in Oslo.' While I was walking through the little town I saw an attractive girl with long thick raspberry hair and a million freckles.

I hitchhiked into Oslo, moving very carefully, getting several rides and arriving when it was dark. As I climbed into my bunk an Englishman noticed my discomfort and asked what had happened. I had a very succinct line, the kind you might hear in a locker room. At least I could joke about it, especially after being to the Embassy where everyone had thought, from the information my friends had left, that I would be in hospital for a long time. Finally I met Lucy and we continued on our tour.

That Saturday evening we returned to Gjovic because Dominique had a party to attend. We went to a bar and there I met Anita, the beautiful girl I had seen in the park. She sang me a Norwegian funeral march and it was love at first sight. While I danced with her I knew I would write a song about meeting her. Some people from the hospital were amazed that I was able to dance in my weakened condition.

Anita and I returned to the van and sang That's What You Get For Loving Me. I was slightly embarrassed by the jacket she wore. It was like a white version of my hospital socks, only larger. She said later that it had been her father's when he was in the Norwegian Ski Patrol during World War II. The jacket was pure white and in the sunlight with 77her red hair, Anita looked marvelous. She would say, 'yes' in a really charming way.

After seeing her for a couple days I asked if I should stay a while. She said 'no,' in a charming way. We exchanged addresses. I went back to the van and said, 'Let's get out of here.'

As we headed for Oslo I began writing the song, The Tree and the Wind. On the night I finished the song, October 22nd, I wrote a letter to Anita. I always put the date I first completed a song, and enclosed the lyrics with the letter.
The van broke down in Copenhagen and one morning we woke up on a hoist in the garage. It was a awkward for Dominique and I to leave Lucy that morning. We should at least have waited for the van to be let down from the hoist.

Dominique and I went to Hamburg for a week, then to the Netherlands where we split up. He went to the ski resorts and I began singing Tree and the Wind all the way through Germany to Salzburg, Vienna and Prague where I saw Romeo and Juliet for 22 cents. At the opera house some people noticed my buddy's team Canada T-shirt and one looked at me through his binoculars. When I made a face at him he handed the binoculars to his friend who looked too. By that time I was straight faced again but when the first man looked again I made another funny face at him. But that's a digression.
I traveled with two Canadian guys from Toronto from Vienna to Prague and went to a ballet production of Romeo and Juliet for 32 cents. The next 'seat’ from us was an old lady, who brought her own lunch. During the intermission, some students on the other side looked at us with opera glasses and I made a funny face. When he gave them to his buddies and pointed to us, I had a straight face until the original one looked at me. These students befriended us at the intermission, and the girls among them spent the next three days giving us a guided tour of the city.

When I left for Yugoslavia from Budapest the people at the station did not know if Trieste was in Yugoslavia or Italy. The locomotive was huge, with a big red star on the front. On the train I played a song on my guitar “By Rivers of the sun by Slivers of the Moon.” I had to wait for a connection in Zagreb and looked around town with two travelers from Mexico, a brother and sister who bragged of stealing library books. When I finally arrived in Trieste, I had to take another train, because I didn't want to travel in Italy yet. After buying the ticket I met a skinny dustman from England. He was tall and wore what were once white overalls with a leather jacket and a tiny backpack en his back. The pack had a bicycle horn on it, the kind with the bulb and the horn. His pack was tiny compared to mine, which had the guitar in it. We sat together on the train and fell asleep. We went past Dubrovnik, our destination, and were woken up by the conductor, who wanted additional fare from us. We had to pay. We got off the train to get on the train going on the other track going the opposite direction. It was drizzling outside in the night, and we followed a long line of people over a passenger trestle above the tracks to get to the other side. Each person was wearing a black coat and had a black umbrella. It looked like a trail of human penguins.

Romeo And Juliet For Thirty-Two Cents.

When I arrived in Athens and played my song in a cafe the woman at the next table had already heard it.

Went down to the American Express office in Athens and received a letter from Anita. There was a person in the café who had heard me sing “The Tree and the Wind” in Salzburg. That morning I was happy for the letter was in a large envelope with a big “yes” sticker on the front. There was a black and white 8 x 10 headshot in with the letter.

We went to Piraeus and had dinner there the next night. The octopus was cold and I couldn’t eat it. My friends were entertained by my excruciating expressions. I carried with me some Halva and would share it with people, calling it “camel shit.” The group wanted to smoke up but I declined, not wanting to be arrested in a foreign country. (The next year when I saw them at Mariposa and smoked up with them, they were surprised.)

The next morning in front of the American express office I met two guys from Burlington, which was 10 miles from my home town, who were looking for someone to share gas on a trip to Switzerland, I agreed to go with them, as well as a twenty nine year old Jewish man named Ralf. So I got my backpack from the hostel, bought three souvlakis at four drachmas each. I had to sit in the back of the van with Ralf the whole trip. We started out slow because it snowed.

We arrived at the port to take the ferry to Italy. I went shopping with Ralf and bought a lot of delicacies. The sun colored the sky as it went down like red liquor. We all drank lots of Ouzo, and I played my guitar, as several young Greek men joined along. There were people on balconies that watched us. I sang “So Long Marianne,” throwing a lot of curse words and putting a naughty emphasis on the words, “so long.” We had a wild night, and had to go through customs around five in the morning. When my pack was emptied I lost my tiny razor and was about to blame the two from Burlington, but they reminded me of the state I had been in. There were some abandoned cars by the port, and the two from Burlington were about to take a windshield wiper blade from a car when the customs official asked them if they would like to stay in Greece another two years. As we left on the ferry I sat by the stern and watched the sun come up over the mountains and the sea, while figuring out how to play Mr. Bo jangles.

I was playing Mr. Bo jangles as we slipped into Corfu. I stopped playing to watch a young lady board the ferry. She waved goodbye to her friends with the back of her hand, the Greek way. She was wearing a green dress and had thick lipstick on. I started talking to her as the boat pulled away, and she pointed out the house where she lived. There were people on the deck sitting with their shirts off, heads back, taking in the sun. I told her about Anita, and the purpose of my journey and sang some songs on my guitar. I played “By Slivers of the Sun, by Rivers of the Moon.” She liked the song and asked me to sing it again. (Doug Bar later told me that was one of the few songs of mine that he liked.) She had some lunch with some Norwegians; I joined them and learned a few phases that might be useful. It was incredible to look at the barren shores of Albania. Ralf joined me, and I showed him the picture of Anita. He said she was very beautiful and could understand why I was traveling all the way past Oslo to see her. He said, “I’d for the same thing.” When we reached the port and traveled on two from Burlington made some disparaging comments about Eleanor. Ralf said the two had no class at all.

As we drove through the southern part of Italy we stopped by the road and bought some Hazel nuts. To crack them Ralf and I would smash them with a hammer, trying to use just the right force not to crush it completely. So we were traveling through Italy with nuts flying all over the place.
We came to the town with the Leaning Tower of Pizza, and Ralf and I had to convince the two from Burlington to go give miles out of their way to see it. As we approached Rome we saw a number of bonfires and the Burlington boys said that it was a red-light district. It was right by the hostel. I wasn’t feeling well so Ralf used his hostel pass to get me a good nights rest, instead of sleeping outside. The innkeeper wondered why Ralf was in the hall reading, and I got kicked out. I had to sleep outside beside the van, kicking away the many condoms in the street to spread my groundsheet. All night long tiny cars would pull up in the parking lot for five minutes at a time.

We stopped the next night at a hostel that was open to anyone; it was half the way up the coast of Italy. I was standing by the front desk when someone who looked familiar approached me in a dirty ski jacket. It was David from the forest fighting camp in Golden. He had been traveling in Europe since leaving the fire. I tried to sing him “Talking Forest Fire Fighting Blues,” but he bolted off halfway through the song, being distracted by some one on the other side of the room.

The next day as we were getting close to Switzerland we went through a series of long tunnels, and came across a van with two girls traveling in it. They were going to France and said we could travel with them, so right there we took our gear from one van and stashed it in another.

That evening we drove through Switzerland listening to a cassette tape of Joni Mitchell’s Blue album. We stopped in Luzerne, the next day and I bought a Swiss Army knife and a Toblerone chocolate bar. I told them I would be traveling on and Ralf took a few pictures of me hamming it up. I had made a bunch of signs and held them up with exaggerated expressions.)


TREE AND THE WIND

"A forest of people
Swayed 'round in a dance,"
"And some were inclined to romance."
"Mine was the wind
Dancing 'round an oak tree,
So strong And so free."
"The tree is free
Cause its stable and sound,
To be stable I must be able
Able to move around.

But other winds
Might make you sway."
"It's only with you I would stay..."
"I want you too
And for that you must go
That is the reason
The wind doesn't blow."
"The win's not free
Cause it's unsound—"
"You are free
Cause you are bound."

"Well I have my roots
But my leaves must soon go..."
"They can"t if the wind doesn't blow
They just get wrinkled
And fall to the ground."
The tree must stand"
And this wind must blow
"I cannot stay"
"And you cannot go."

Anita's answer to my letter was waiting for me at the post office in Athens. I made immediate plans to return to Norway. I wanted to spend Christmas with her and arranged to travel with two men from Burlington, which is near my home town. We got very drunk on ouzo on our last night in Greece and I was singing So Long Marianne with risqué lyrics. At that time it was one of my favorite songs and there were all sorts of Greek men standing on balconies humming along.
I sat on the back deck of the ferry and learned to play Mr. Bojangles watching the sunrise over the mountains as we passed Albania. Halfway through Italy I encountered my long lost forest fire-fighting buddy, David at a youth hostel. I'd met him two summers before in Golden, BC He was on his way to Africa after having been in Europe since fire fighting. I tried to sing Talking Forest to him but he wouldn't listen. He did laugh at the line "The lunches were unbearable as a matter of fact, the bears would steal them and then bring them back." I had spent a day with him in Golden when a dragonfly lighted on my shirt and stayed there longer than his attention span.

I stopped briefly in Switzerland to buy a Swiss army knife, a Toblerone chocolate bar, and had a few pictures taken of me holding up the signs I had made to get me to Oslo. Traveling nonstop after that, each day my enthusiasm and strength diminished and I began to feel that by the time I rolled into Gjovic I would be ready for another delicate operation. It was a few days before Christmas when I arrived and a hospitable family let me stay with them. They helped me find Anita.

When I saw her house I realized why she hadn't let me see it. It was a mansion built on the mountainside overlooking the town. That evening her parents gave me an interviewed. Her father was a millionaire. I remember mostly the ripostes I had to fight myself not to use against questions designed to make me look like a bum.

“Does it get cold in Canada?” they asked.

“Yes,” I told them.

“How cold?” they insisted.

“Canada's a big country,” I answered cryptically.
Anita's mother asked haughtily, “Do you have fireplaces in Canada?”

“No, they'd melt the igloos,” I cracked. I played a few songs on my guitar and Anita sang along, but we sounded terrible. I told her parents that I was from a town called Acorn, which they looked for in an atlas but couldn't find it.

Anita's mother drove me to a youth hostel; I had the feeling something was wrong. When I called the next day Anita said she couldn't see me but we arranged to meet in the street to exchange Christmas gifts. I met her early that morning; we simply handed each other our gifts and walked away from one another.

Her father had told me Anita was sixteen, her mother said fifteen, her friends seventeen, she herself eighteen and I had guessed between nineteen and twenty. Sometimes when I sing The Tree and the Wind I say that she was thirteen... but I was eleven at the time...

On the ferry to Copenhagen, on my way to the plane that would fly me home, I tore Anita's letter into a thousand pieces and tossed them into the sea.



The first thing Fern said when I walked in the door, having flown in from Copenhagen was: "Room and board will be $25.00 a week. You can have the first week free. How much money do you have?" I told him. "If you still have a hundred dollars you should have stayed in Europe another month... Go in the living room and say hello to Kim, he's on the couch. He's been in a bad accident." I had been excited to come home that morning, December 23, 1972, walking down Mary Street with my green canvas trapper Nelson backpack—but to see Kim like that was a shock. I walked past the Christmas tree; all lit up, and saw my brother looking frail and weak.

A wheelchair was stationed beside the bed, but Kim didn't use it much. He told me about the accident in a weak voice. "There were seven things that could have killed me..." His teeth were all knocked out, his hip dislocated, a plate had been put in his leg, among other things. He had been a passenger with two others driven by a friend. The convertible spun out of control and rolled over top of him. The driver was unhurt.

About a week or so after my homecoming, Kim was able to walk with crutches. When he was in the wheelchair he would do wheelers, balancing it on the two wheels. "Now that I've survived through my accident I'm invincible," Kim boasted, "Nothing can kill me now..."
Kim would impose his will on Danny, intimidating him with his crutches. One time Kim stood at the top of the stairs and threw his crutch at Danny like a spear, just missing him. It left a dent in that cheap plywood paneling that would have broken Fern's heart, had not Kim strategically covered it up with a family portrait. I would not tolerate spear throwing of any sort, and encouraged Kim to put aside his Barbarian ways, and take a stab at being civilized.

Late one night Danny came home with a considerable amount of nefarious stuff in a clear plastic bag. When he arrived, Fern was still awake, so Danny hid it in the doghouse. In the morning when Fern let the dog out of the shed Lester ran straight for the doghouse and brought the bag to Fern's attention. Fern hid it under his bed. Danny woke up; went to doghouse, but it wasn't there. Danny searched the backyard for an hour before Fern came out and said he'd hid it where no one could find it. Off the cuff I said, "What makes you so sure that under your bed is such a good hiding spot?" It turned out to be the exact place Fern had put it.

When Kim was well enough I played him Ballad of a Smart Alec Kid. He liked it so much that he would have me sing it to his clones. 'The Clones' were three friends who dressed the same; who would do anything Kim asked. All of them had waist length hair and sported identical blue Jean jackets and jeans. They would gather around to do nefarious stuff, throwing the household into chaos. Kim liked to tell the story of how he had spun the car into a snow bank one wintry night, so that the car was totally covered in snow. Since the light could be seen glowing through, The Smart Alec Kid had everyone convinced that they had died and were in heaven. The incredible thing was that they all believed him. Whenever I played the song they would snap their fingers in a manner that wryly mocked the moves of long departed Beatniks. It never occurred to me that while I was recuperating from my delicate operation in Norway; writing Ballad of a Smart Alec Kid, that the protagonist of the song was in agony at the time, on the verge of death.
Kim wanted his parents to think that the police were out to get him. So when the budding mechanic towed the remains of his first Lincoln Continental into our driveway and told mother that Diamond Ray, the illustrious Acorn Police Chief had 'shot up his windshield,' she believed him. I figured the holes had been punctured with a screwdriver, because bullets holes are usually round, not rectangular. Ma didn't believe me when I told her that Kim was so mad that his engine blew that he jumped up and down on the roof and stabbed the windshield with a screwdriver. To get ma to grasp my point of view, I had Kim reenact his frenzy. 'Show me how you punctured the holes,' I said, handing him a screwdriver. He obliged as ma looked out the window.

Being relentlessly mischievous, Kim rigged up the horn of his Continental carcass with a cord to his bedroom, where he could sound it at will. He sounded the horn a few times and told Fern that the police kept driving by honking their horn. Then he called the Acorn Police and said: 'Some idiot keeps driving by my house sounding their horn.' The Illustrious One drove by investigating, as my dad sat on the front verandah. Each time he passed Kim would sound the horn, thereby causing my father to think that the police were in fact driving by the house honking their horn. Fern became so angry, that he went into his car, a dark green 1969 Chevy Malibu, and honked his own horn."

With hair down to the middle of his back, Kim usually wears a jean jacket to match his blue jeans. He would have three of his friends dressed identically, sitting in the front seat of the Continental. Each would take turns putting their feet on the dashboard pretending to be asleep. Finally Kim would say 'My cruise control it is engaged,' put his feet up on the dash and pretend to nod off, causing his pack of protégés to panic."

Sister Sue was living in a basement apartment across from the beloved Mill Pond, and introduced me to the young student next door, a photographer who went by the name PB. PB was in the midst of a photographic essay on The Effects of Sanity on a Lumberjack Commune and would fix me a beer in a frosted mug, and share his meals, mostly beans and eggs, omelets or tuna casserole, whenever I visited. Many eight by ten black and white prints were scattered about the apartment, from a string on the ceiling where they were hung to dry, to the floor where they had fallen. We would talk about world affairs and PB would back up what he said with quotes from radical books. Being five years older, PB became a makeshift mentor to me, and encouraged me to pursue music. People around town disliked PB; they found his style of photojournalism to be confrontational, but I saw only his good side, which was sincere, intelligent and embracing.

At the Acorn Inn, where third-rate country and western singers performed with asinine drum machines, PB slaved as a bartender. Some of the singers were real characters; some were quite pathetic. Some were real pathetic characters. I wrote a few songs at the time, including Sugar Heart, and Expressway. I had not yet reached a level of professionalism to play in public, but aspired of course for something loftier than the legions of dirty rags being aired on the radio.

On the 24th of May I allegedly started working at a small company doing manual labor, sifting raw asbestos, that is, putting the finer parts into drums. I moved into an apartment across from the fair grounds with PB. Each day I would come home, gray with asbestos dust. I would take a leisurely bath, drinking a medicinal Guinness in the process.

The bathroom doubled as a darkroom in the evening. While PB was printing pictures I'd be in the front playing guitar. Often I would hear a loud, "You're flat," emanating from behind closed doors. It took a long time for me to learn to sing on key, so I would flat-pick the tunes and would follow the melody on the guitar.

PB and I shared that apartment across the street from the fairgrounds until Labor Day, when we had an unpleasant dinner party, just as the Annual Steam Show was sputtering out. PB dominated the discussion, making it difficult to talk to the girl I had invited. The next day PB met me walking down Thomas Street, and invited me for a beer. Walking along BP attempted to look at my latest song and reached for my notebook. Usually I would be more than eager for someone to see my work, but when I held back, he knew that my feelings had been trampled. So he apologized. Our friendship was somewhat restored, but I wanted to go on to other things.

With my grandfather's old green canvas suitcase and my guitar I left for Toronto. Right away, I found a place to live in a rooming house on Brunswick Avenue near the By the Way Cafe. The second day I found work at the T. Eaton Company pasting brown paper on the back of frames in the dingy picture frame department overlooking College Street. A frail old woman who had a frail old dog ran the rooming house. The house was ostensibly for students, and she would cook for us. I lasted a couple months in that tiny second floor room that overlooked the tree lined street.

It was depressing, not knowing anyone, working in a dingy warehouse and living on my own. The old lady discouraged me from playing guitar because it disturbed her students. One evening I went to Oakville and visited my brother Rick who was coaching a game of football. I spent the evening as a lineman and returned to Toronto on the Go Train.

After a couple of months I moved to another boarding house, which was even worse. There I lived in a tiny attic room with only enough room for me to sit on a chair and play my guitar. At dinner, the fifteen or so young men would gather around a table and would gulp down the slop prepared by the charming Czechoslovakian landlady. Typical rooming house signs were strategically posted everywhere. "Don't spit on the ceiling;" "Please do not put feet on the coffee table if you have spurs on;" "No Yodeling in the Shower." If we had to make a call, the landlady would dial the number and hand us the receiver through a hole in the wall. It was like the Adam's Family without the ghoul.

By December I lost my alleged job as a picture framer, seeing that I wasn't cut out for the position. I found a place to live in a theatrical commune on Draper Street, in the growing shadow of the CN Tower, which was under construction. Each member of the commune worked at the Tarragon Theater; which was well represented—from the upper echelons of a lighting technician and head seamstress; to the pits; the handyman and his helper.
Dawn, a high school friend, came to visit me at Draper Street one time; I visited her a couple times at the farm. But she was rude to me as we sat in her basement working in clay when a centipede crawled under my ankle and I flinched. I left the farm that cold windy day vowing never to return. I talked about it to Sam and Mary when we went to city hall skating as we sat on the sidelines tightening our laces.

On my birthday, Dawn came by, again and took me to a screening of a Street Car Named Desire. She had a crush on me in high school, when she came to my locker and gave me some beads she had strung together. Black and white beads. I became interested in her too late, and tried to see her through the prior summer to no avail. A year later I went with her to the 99 Cent Roxy to see Yellow Submarine. In a smoky crowd reminiscent of the rock festivals the two of us delved into a huge homemade bag of popcorn we smuggled in.

I was wondering when I'd see you next by chance upon the street
Outside the times we planned by phone for rendezvous to meet
The first time was the night after — the third time we split for good
Next you were happy to see me was there something you misunderstood

We were so close to being close
Just a faint image of myself
Looking in the window from the outside
Sometimes the world seems small
When it closes in on you and you've got no place to hide

I remember the times I'd wait with you for the school bus so long ago
And how your pony once got loose and we caught it with a handful of snow
You loved me for that crazy spirit — rebelling from our hometown
Something wilder than the geese flying in the fall but even they're shot down

We were so close to being close
Just a faint image of myself
Looking in the window from the outside
Sometimes the world seems small
When it closes in on you and you've got no place to hide

Then I saw you in a subway car sitting right across the aisle
We were just strangers ignoring each other as we whiled away the while
I'm wondering why I wrote this — perhaps it sounds absurd
But I just met someone who meant so much to me and didn't even say a word

We were so close to being close
Just a faint image of myself on the floor
When the windows been shattered
And all you can say as I pick up the pieces
Is that it never really mattered

Not long after we were introduced, Dawn W came to my locker and gave me a beaded ring she had made. After school, a few days later, I ran into her on Williams Avenue and walked with her, because she was going to catch her bus from downtown. Dawn must have been about fourteen at the time, was short and skinny; had long blonde hair and braces. She was wearing a shirt that resembled thermal underwear, had several books on her arm, and was on her way to the library. I could see by the books that she was very precocious. One was a biography of Billie Holiday and the other was on the life of Malcolm X.

In grade eleven; I had just gotten my license and was in the midst of stripping the ignition of my father's brand new 1971 Dodge Dart. It was at the school parking lot overlooking the football field. Dawn was sitting beside me, and my father had slipped somehow and actually let me use his car. I turned the key, but couldn't get the car to start; it kept making loud noises when I messed with the ignition. Wayne Drew was nearby, so I asked him to start it. Wayne said it was already started, that I was stripping the ignition. I drove home with Dawn.

My father was asleep, and the only one in the house — so I took Dawn upstairs. I played a couple songs on my guitar, but Dawn was not impressed; my singing was flat. I'm not sure what was racing through my head at the time, as I proceeded to serenade her; this was before I had become really interested in her. I thought I was doing a favor introducing her to the world of folk music. Later, when I performed for the first time in public, wearing a thick white beaded robe at the Folk Club's "God Bless the Grass" Festival, Dawn sat in the front row.

Around May of 1973, I learned from a friend that Dawn was leaving for Europe. I also heard that Dawn was looking for a passport pouch like the one I had brought back from my travels abroad. So I had my father drive me the five or so miles out to her farm. Dawn had gone out for the evening, but her brother suggested I wait, and we watched a Kung Fu Movie on TV. At last, Dawn came home and was surprised that I was there. She had been out with her mother saying farewell to some friends, and couldn't wait to go to the Kibbutz in Israel. She was happy that I gave her the pouch. A little while later, when her mother had gone to bed, we had orange tea in the living room, and I felt a tenderness that hadn't been before. But it was late by then, so I called home to get a ride; said goodbye and waited outside on the steps to get picked up.

About three months later, when she returned home, I planned to have Dawn come over for a dinner party at the apartment PB the photographer and I shared on Thomas Street. When Dawn's mother dropped her off, it was still early in the afternoon. Dawn was wearing a flower print dress that showed her bare shoulders and her blonde hair looked cute cut short. She walked across the street, by the Fair Grounds, picked some flowers and put them in a cup. In the few months she had been away Dawn had blossomed into a beautiful woman. We ended up in the living room, which doubled as my bedroom, listening to James Taylor and some jazzy stuff.


It was not long after the dinner party that I moved to Toronto to pursue music, and visited Dawn two or three weekends in the fall. On one occasion Dawn's mother took us to an Antique Auction sale at an old mill in Brampton. Dawn talked about how she had found a number of rusty bolts and tractor parts in a barn that she was planning to incorporate into her macramé. She said her experience in the barn was so nice, she could have spent the whole day there. Dawn put the emphasis on "so" with a smile that was endearing, especially with her braces. Sometimes when I said something that amused her she would nudge her head against me in an approving way. We walked to where the waterwheel once stood above the waterfall, and headed to the car. While we waited I played a bit of harmonica and told her a story that didn't impress her. At the time I was writing atrocious poetry, so my stories were probably not that much better. This was the first time she had voiced disapproval at something I had said. "So tell me about your job…" Dawn interjected, changing the subject. I told her about my job at the T Eaton Company pasting brown paper on the back of pictures in the framing department at the dingy back of a store overlooking College Street in downtown Toronto. Just then her mother met us carrying a wooden bowl, and we headed back to the farm.

On a Friday night, on a weekend visit that fall, I called Dawn, but didn't reach her until the next day. She said I was welcome to come out to the farm if I had a ride back to my parent's place. [My mother's journal stated that she drove me to the farm on October 27, 1973] I didn't have a ride, but came anyway, with my laundry in my green canvas Trapper Nelson pack, and my dulcimer. (Whenever I went home for the weekend I would take my laundry for my mother to wash.)

We were in the basement; Dawn had a box of rusty nuts and bolts to make macramé crafts as I played some songs on the harmonica. Sometimes she reminded me of a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple. While we sat in the basement a big spider approached me, and in an exaggerated manner I moved out of the way. "Stefan, you're not afraid of a spider. Jesus!" That knocked the naivety out of me and left me speechless. Upstairs, I put my stuff together to leave immediately. I told her I didn't need to wait for a ride, that I could walk to the highway. She said, "It's too cold, and you have no gloves." It was miserable out, and drizzling. "Let's go for a walk." So we walked down the lane of the farm.


This was the lane we had walked down four weeks earlier, when the leaves were beginning to turn. She was wearing her overalls then as I played "Were You Ever in Quebec" on harmonica. There was a time a couple years prior when Pumpkin, her pony, had gotten loose and we spent the afternoon in the field chasing it in a pick up truck. I held out a handful of snow and tricked it, and grabbed the halter. I was the hero that day, but this evening I felt like a zero. Dawn said she would come into the city to see me so that I stayed a while longer. But she didn't. It was the second time we split for good. In all we split three times, but then, we were never really going out with each other.

There were three or four times after that when we got together. One was on my birthday, Saturday February 9, 1974, when she visited me at the house on Draper Street that I shared with theater people. Next, she took me to a theatrical screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with a humongous bag of popcorn. In between these times we both agreed that it wouldn't work out, that it was best that we didn't see each other. After these "split-ups" we would run across each other from time to time in the street or on the subway. It was after sitting across from her and not speaking a word that I wrote the song So Close to Being Close, on February 12, 1975.


The last time I saw Dawn was on Friday, May 9, 1978, when she and her boyfriend came to a farewell party I had at my apartment above the grocery store on Bloor Street, before my three-week excursion to England and Spain.

It was somewhat exciting to live with theater people, because I would get comps to the opening nights and could go to the celebration afterwards. The actors would sit in the living room, and the friends of the crew would gather by the punch bowl and the spread. At one of the parties a mannequin of a monkey dressed in Toronto Maple Leaf hockey tunic sat on a swing above the punch bowl. The situation in the house was unusual though, with everyone pursuing his or her own careers.

I was able to write songs and practice, collecting unemployment insurance and all, having a lot of free time. I wrote Talkin' CN Tower Blues, and So Close to Being, which ultimately became Leading Man Gets Lost. I would sit at the dining table with song sheets, guitar picks, and harmonicas all spread out in a mess. This bothered some in the household. I spent a good deal of time cooking elaborate dinners and gourmet hot-dogs. There were six people in the house, with six separate personal supplies of food, with each person cooking their own food. Every night I would take my guitar, my Martin D 35, and would sing in coffeehouses. There were many places with open mics where følksingers would gather to sing.

As spring approached in 1994 and my unemployment benefits were about to run out I found temporary work with the Royal Canadian Yacht Club as a gardener. Each day I would sail across the harbor to Toronto Islands, in the Kwasind. My duties entailed raking leaves, putting a pipe under a channel, cleaning out a building, and removing hay from a swimming pool. It was a picturesque place to work. One day we made several trips across the harbor to pick up trays of pansies. That day I read most of Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima sitting by the porthole by the front of the small hull wearing my poetry coat. When the spring rush was over, however, I was laid off. So I traveled across the country with PB.

When PB and I returned from our trip out west in September, we decided to rent a place together again. We agreed to share an apartment from September till May when he finished his last term at Ryerson. The apartment we found had a kitchen, a bedroom and a living room, with access to the second floor back door up an iron fire escape.

I had a birthday party at the apartment attended by a number of følksingin' friends. Sam came by with a bottle of Sake and Mary. Many of the følkies were pretty rambunctious — one who imitated Neil Young all the time waltzed on my spool bed in his cowboy boots and busted it again. It had just been repaired from being broken my previous birthday.

We had no idea of the mess we had moved into — the rooming house was run by a pusher named Pilgrim. Many strange people were living in the house. The person who inhabited the apartment before us had written bizarre things in his journal; I sometimes wondered if I was to be doomed to follow in his footsteps. On the top floor a junky played wacky sitar. The people across the hall attempted to inflict bodily harm on me because they didn't like my voice lessons. Finally the owner of the building had them all evicted.

PB pushed me to make a demo tape of my songs, so I did, the time I played my first gig at the Bavarian in Acorn. That weekend I set out from Long and McQuade, and proceeded by taxi with a sound system, and all my equipment. The bus dropped me off during a blizzard in January, and Marnie and Ron, two friends from my High School daze helped me the last bit of the way with their Jeep. It was at this performance that my dad danced a jig in front of me while I performed Ooze Been Eatin Da Tootpaste, a song about the effects of sanity on a slumbering lumberjack commune. Marnie and Ron drove me the following afternoon to a recording session at Sheridan College in Oakville. Marnie collaborated on a song with me — it was called Soft Winds. My fingers seemed on fire that weekend, from playing almost constantly. Nothing happened with my tape, though, for I had no idea who to send it to. I wasn't ready to promote myself at this time. Only one song has survived from that session, How Do You Picture Yourself.

His only motive was to be a good host, and in doing so had usurped my nefarious intentions. I got fed up with him. After going to the green bridge to vent my frustrations I went to my parents house quite depressed. My mother asked me what was wrong. I said my radio broke. 'Well can't you fix it?'

'The knob broke off'

'Well can't you get a replacement?'

'No, it was a special knob.'

'Why don't you buy a new one?'

'I'm saving up for a parachute.'

Anyhow, right after that I moved into Toronto. A year later PB and I happened to share an apartment, which unbeknownst to me was being managed by a drug pusher; so there were all sorts of problems and cops traipsing through the place with their noisy shoes; you see PB would let the cops in after midnight, and ultimately our friendship frazzled and we went our separate ways. But that's another story. My latest story is about how the two of us took a 1965 Chevrolet 'Shove it' across Canada for a drive away service, and it kept falling apart.

THE LONESOME DEMISE OF A LITTLE BLUE CHEVETTE

The first day of our trip, Aug 1, 1974 we visited Mr. Rogers, who looked at PB's photographic essay and said, "It had a lot of balls." Mr. Rogers had been my brother's father in law at one time; he made his living near Sauble Beach painting rural watercolors. The first time I met Mr. Rogers was on February 13, 1967, when he came over to visit our house, just after Rick and his daughter announced their engagement. I had just bought a plastic model of a Fokker Tri-plane and had a run in with Kim on the verandah, by the side door. We almost smashed into Mr. Rogers. Ma wrote about it in her logbook. Mr. Rogers took one look at the tiny convertible; which we dubbed the 'Shove it', and said it would never make it out west.

PB had arranged with a drive away service to deliver the car to British Columbia, where it could be sold for more money. We would just have to pay for gas, and would be reimbursed for any mechanical expenses.

In Sudbury we stopped at the President's Lounge, where I did a guest set for some friends I knew, and played The Battlefield of My Body. I know I sang that song, because PB and I were singing it just beyond the barren terrain of Sudbury when the car started knocking, and eventually sputtered out.

That night we slept in an orange pup tent beside the road. We got an estimate; the car needed new bearings, and we were told that the owner would wire the money to Vancouver. So we had it fixed.

As we set off again PB told me of the time he and Louise were up by Sauble Beach, at four in the morning and ran out of gas. 'We knocked on a man's house said it was an emergency and we were out of gas. He wouldn't help us and threatened to call the police, At that time, I felt what it would be to be one of the have nots. I felt like smashing his face in.' PB used to read me quotes from Saul Alinski's Rules for Radicals.

The next night we were driving along, and the car suddenly stopped. So we slept in the orange pup tent beside the road again. The car started in the morning, but we had to hot-wire it with a knife. We were told it would need a starter motor, but decided just to keep hot-wiring it.

We made it to Wawa, after stopping to look at the Lake Superior. PB said 'It's important to travel and see what the country is like, because in twenty years from now this will it be all built up.' At Wawa, we had a new steering rod put on because the front wheel was starting to shake. After that, it was a miserable drizzly day, so we stopped at the hostel to hear a few travelers tell stories of their perpetual pursuits. One man, who looked like Mickey Rooney went out to the river, which was next the staff's geodesic dome and skinny-dipped. It was cool and overcast; the water must have been chilly. I remembered the geodesic dome cause I made one out of toothpicks for my grade 10 Science project.

Every time we passed a massive effigy of the wild, say the huge goose over the Wawa Inn, or perhaps a thirty-foot moose, or a whale of a trout PB would stop and take a picture, and say that the people who put them up were 'real idiots.'

We'd take turns at the wheel, and PB lost his patience with my inexperienced driving. I would slow up to let a car pass, and he would say 'Forget the people behind you.'

By the time we reached Winnipeg, the car was breaking down even more. We not only had to start the car by opening the hood, but to put the top up, I had to stand on the back seats and heave it up and over manually. And one of the taillights had to be fastened with duct tape.
Though the prairies — if we drove in the cooler evenings at a constant speed the car would keep going. One night, after washing ourselves in a lavatory in a police station, I parked the car in the middle of a field, with a drive in movie Last Tango in Paris, in the distance. I told PB we would have some entertainment.

We drove along a highway that was off the Trans Canada, and stopped in a bar where old farmers at every table, one to a table conversed with the whole room. They talked about the depression, how one year the wheat was a rust color, and even the eggs the chicken laid were rust colored. PB thought that was quite funny having grown up on a farm and all.

And then something came on the TV about Nixon facing impeachment, and PB got all excited. I was apolitical at the time. I just remember it because it’s like when Kennedy got shot; you always remember what you're doing when you hear the news. Except with Nixon it went on and on. We could have spent the whole summer getting the car to Vancouver; we could have seen Nixon on TV every night, at a different dingy bar.

At the next village, we stopped inside a church, and then went to a combination general store and restaurant, which was run out of a ladies house. There was a door half open to a bedroom and PB asked to take a few pictures of it, and she let him. This particular room had a lot of religious pictures on the wall. We ordered tuna sandwiches, which were reasonably priced.

The lady served the lunch on an old Coca Cola tray. While we were eating, an Indian boy of 12 wandered into the other part of the store, wearing a dime store headdress of orange and purple feathers. "After he left, the lady told us, that the boy walked ten miles with seventeen cents to buy a twenty cent pop. 'You have to watch him like a hawk because he steals things.'

We stopped at another village, and had dinner there. PB kept teasing me, saying there we were two teenyboppers on the table behind us and one of them 'can't take her eyes off you, she keeps looking at her girlfriend and snickering.' I wouldn't turn around to look at them, although PB tried his best to have me fall for it.

PB read a letter to me that he'd been working on, a letter to his girlfriend Louise. It talked of the constant wind, and the monotony, broken only by a handful of crows flying off the fencepost. When I was about 12 and used to hitchhike to Kelso, there were about six of us one time, and I was the designated hitchhiker, as the rest hid in the bushes. When a lady pulled up, Mrs. McCutchen, from across the street, all the boys ran out, and she sped off. Whenever I think of those crows taking off by the side of the road I think of Mrs. McCutchen.

With the sparse mountain traffic we were running smoothly. A hundred miles from Vancouver, I was asleep on the back seat when I awoke, hearing a crash. I got out of the car and PB was looking at the engine. It was pushed back a half a foot. PB slammed his fist on the car roof and cursed: "There was a bleeding rock slide in the middle of the road.” A truck coming the other way and the mountain on the other side, so I couldn't avoid it.'

"How big was it?”

"About as big as a bread box” his hands said in mime. I ran back to where the rocks about a quarter mile back and picked them up and threw them off to the side. There were a few other rocks too and I cleared up most of the big ones. Some one pulled the car to a garage down the way, and helped us push the car into a parking place. There were other cars that had run into rockslides.

At seven, the proprietor opened up, ignoring us. This seamed to have a perturbing effect of immense proportions upon PB. 'I hate it when people ignore me like that,' he said. The man attended other customers, eluding us, till finally he said if we left the car on his lot, we'd have to pay a months' rent. What I learned from this was that it could be incredibly disturbing to be deliberately ignored by someone.

We began to hitch hike. A burgundy colored 1967 Buick Riviera, fully loaded, pulled over rather abruptly; an Indian got out, opened the trunk, and we plunked in our stuff. After we'd driven off we realized they were extremely inebriated. There were two in the front, and a lady in the back sitting between us. They were all Indians. Driving over a hundred and ten, taking reckless chances. Cars were careening into the gravel honking their horns as we blasted by in the passing lane. Three tractor trailers with two car lengths between them and we passed them. The lady in the back had her nails digging in into my legs. PB was white in the face. This went on for about fifteen miles. The lady tried to persuade him to hand her the wheel. It was stuck to the post. The pedal was stuck to the floor. Finally I asked very politely: 'Could you let us out here now.' The driver said 'at the next garage.' I said, 'We just want to be let out right here so we can have a picnic.' He pulled the car and we got out.

PB and I took the train from Prince Rupert to Prince George after a long sight seeing cruise from Vancouver. As we rolled past the fish cannery, the house trailers, the children standing beside the clotheslines with their mother's hair in curlers he took pictures through the club car window. We stood in the open space between the cars drinking a bottle of wine and pissed it all to the wind. It was exhilarating. In the club car, I wrote a huge postcard to each member of my family, bar none. When I purchased the card, I had clowned around with the cashier.

The end of the line for us was a whistle stop in the mountains. PB planned to steel the signal light at the back of the train. He unhitched the light and hid it in the yard and stood off to the side to see if the brakeman realized it was missing. The brakeman looked around the yard and found it. PB wanted to give the light to his friend who lived in the hills.

We went to the bus depot, and took a bus leaving a few hours later. It was a terrible ride, and the driver dropped us off in the middle of the night at a 'tripod marker.' It was close to dawn, and we walked down the lane, PB picked up a stick, to fend off the dogs in the darkness, saying 'you can't trust a dog in the night.' The mountain man friend named Bill came out in his pajamas, and the dogs were huge. He had a girl named Marg. living with him in the log house. After some talk we slept in the loft, with the cool mountain air blowing in the window.

Next day Bill drove us up the road about ten miles upstream with the canoe on the back of his red 53 GMC and put us in the stream so we could float back down. The river flowed very close to the cabin. It was a bright sunny day, and we each had a paddle. We had fun at first, I found a fish line snagged on a branch and used it to catch an Arctic Grayling. It ended up stinking up my green canvas Trapper Nelson backpack.

As we were paddling along, PB would give commands to “Paddle!” every time we came to some rapids. I was paddling as hard as I could and was not experienced at boating ('except for one time when in a rented boat with Mary and Rick at Kelso when Mary got freaked out cause I was in the water and some snot was in my nose.) After about fifteen 'paddles' came barking from the rear, I took my oar out of the water and in a voice that scraped the bottom, said nothing. I just stared ahead.

“What's wrong,” PB said, in a conciliatory tone, so I turned.

"'I can't stand it when you constantly order me around.'

“This has been going on for months' PB said, 'I do things you don't like and then finally hear about it when its too late. How am I to know if something is bothering you if you never speak out about it? You store things up for months, you should deal with it sooner.'

Well right then and there I told him to get lost.

BOSTON CREAM PIE

Out side of Calgary I stood for the whole night outside a truck stop trying to hitch a ride. Had an irresistible urge to return home. I went inside and asked the waitress what kind of pie they had. The waitress said. "We have coconut cream, Boston cream, lemon meringue, pumpkin, blueberry, cherry, raison and apple."

"What do you recommend?"

"Coconut cream."
"I'll have a coffee — and Boston cream pie." Went outside and hitchhiked some more. No rides. Went back into the restaurant and sat at the same stool at the counter. Alcatrash came over. "What kind of pie do you have?”

"We have coconut cream, Boston cream, lemon meringue, pumpkin blueberry cherry raison and apple."

"What do you recommend?"

"I told you already."

"Well I don't like coconut cream pie."

"Why don't you try the Boston cream pie?"

"I'll have a coffee—and Boston cream pie." I would have returned and gone over the routine again, but I got a ride in a Volkswagen to a small town. I ended up sleeping in the ditch. After a long ride in a red van with three hippies I stood about forty miles outside of Kenora until about eight o'clock.

I saw a bus coming in the distance and was about to flag it down, when a passenger van pulled over. There were eight people in the van, six of them hitchhikers with backpacks. "We pick up everyone," they said. They played bluegrass music all night, and stopped for gas at a weird tourist like general store.

We were just on the other side of Sault Saint Marie, when it was beginning to dawn. We pulled over to the shoulder and the van got stuck. It was foggy. There was heavy dew on the thick foliage. I walked down a lane of two car tracks and came to an abandoned farmhouse. The windows were all gone, and the rooms were empty. From inside the house the pink dawn seemed like a series of paintings that told a beautiful sad story. Through one window the barn was half fallen down. Through another weeds overtook a rusty tractor and the plow. Through yet another window the remains of a maroon 1950 Dodge could be seen. Beyond the front windows you could see weeds growing on the unused lane to the superhighway. I walked back to the van just as it was being freed, and drove with them through the night. Outside, the moon was bright on a river, and I started writing a short story in my mind, called the flight of the last eagle. When I got home I found out my mother was in the hospital, after having a stroke.


I wrote many good songs through this period living at the house with the blue porch light, being in a suffering position. I was a bit depressed, because my mother was in a poor condition, having just recovered from a stroke, and I wasn't getting along with PB. PB pushed me to get counseling, so I saw a Doctor one time. I talked about my family. At one point something came back that I had been suppressing. "One time I was sitting in the kitchen while my mother was making one of her puzzles. My father left for work; and my mother left the room. I had not noticed anything wrong until they got into a furious argument..." I couldn't envision my mother doing anything wrong. I had to deal with my life my own way. It was up to me to decide to be happy; to do whatever it took to be content with my life.

In my mind, the only thing wrong was that I continued to live with PB. He was domineering and meddling too much in my affairs. He meant well though, but being confronted with his strictness I withdrew. I continued to live with him was because I had promised to stay until his term finished. When his term finished I moved back to my parents house.

I befriended Paul around the beginning of 1975. At the time I was living with PB the photographer and was at the tail end of a depression. Actually that winter I had been a bit down because things weren't working out with the shared accommodations. I wrote about a dozen good songs that winter, including Hearts in Harmony, Yellow Caterpillars and Golden Children. I took Paul some apple butter a week or so after we had that conversation at Mars Restaurant. When I first met Paul he had just started a folk group called Bottles and Butts with a guy on the Autoharp, and Mary who sang the lead vocals. Many times when I went to visit him he would be practicing.

All around the Bungalow somewhere in Scarborough on Queen Victoria Day in 1957 several neighborhood children raced around with hundreds of firecrackers. I took refuge in the derelict Nash in the back driveway. The day after firecracker day, the lawn was pink with the exploded mess.
There were other memories — a tin toy revved up and flung across linoleum, with sparks shining in the red plastic window; caps exploding on the sidewalk, hit by rocks or shot from pistols; the red brick wall of the school, and the swings, where a child walked into someone swinging high, and the blood and tears. Some one doing cartwheels. I played sailor with the children a few houses away, and would salute the captain. We’d walk to the forest behind the school and dip a stick in the waterfall to see how deep it was, and saw a toad on the way back, on a clump of dirt, and it took so long for me to see it. There were caterpillars, huge heavy caterpillars moving all the land, with the drivers waving sometimes, and we wondered how many men it would take to lift one. It would be light as a feather with a hundred men. I could climb up the adjustable clothesline into my sister Sue’s room. My first Halloween I dressed as Santa Clause. Every Saturday, I would go with my older brothers and sisters to the golden Mile to the Matinee, and I saw a movie where Nazi soldiers shot the lock on a church door with machine guns killing a nun inside. Sometimes on the way back I would hitch hike, and some one gave us black cough drops and I had to go through the milk-box to open the door.

One evening the sky was filled with planes and Terry sat on the steps and traded comic books and powder horns. A tin jeep with a searchlight on the back lit the ceiling with stripes one Christmas.

Some children dammed up the storm sewer, and the gutter flooded, and my eldest brother bob and mother interrogated me, the same time they did when there was a bar of sample soap missing from the mailbox. We would use a rake to snag rhubarb over the fence of our neighbor, and then we would walk along the street, with white sugar in a glass dipping it.

That summer, we moved to acorn, forty miles away to a two-story frame house on Mary Street. It was Acorn’s Centennial year. Kim, my brother two years younger and I stood on the sidewalk, eating crackers and watching a train at the end of the street slowly going by, that is something we both remembered through the years.
Bob, Rick. Terry and Sue all helped my father tear down the barn in the back yard.

It was that summer on June 15th, 1975, having freed myself from the intensity of the big city, that I took the typewriter and went into the backyard of my youth and started writing…

"Firecrackers and kids are out of control, it is dusk, Victoria Day 1957; and the artist as a young boy seeks refuge in a rusty Nash behind the yellow brick bungalow." So begins my life story, which I began documenting on June 15, 1975: "Ten minutes ago; struck with the sudden urge to write an epic novel, I dashed with typewriter into the sunny backyard of my youth, only to stare at this blank paper radiating with white gold."

The fireworks were in Scarborough, where I lived with a nuclear family before the breadwinner of our unit had a near fatal accident at Goodyear, when a tow motor load of tires toppled upon him. I had just been written up for my own near death endeavor in the Toronto Star as the "Toddling Astronaut." The headlines: "Boy, Two, Survives Brush With Death As Goldfish Bowl Gets Stuck On Head," did little to propel Canada into the space race.

With a wolf at every window, our beloved nuclear family was forced to move to Acorn; and we abandoned that bungalow that radiated in my eyes with yellow bricks. So we tied the chairs, the television, the beds and what have you, to the top of our lemon, an amber and green 1957 Dodge and forged our way West. Just forty miles, mind you, in a westerly direction, towards that old escarpment affectionately referred to as "the mountain," in my formative years. Indeed, it was in the shadow of an Imaginary Mountain that I endured the perplexities of my youth.

The first page entertained mundane atrocities. Mundane if you consider white washing the dilapidated frame house, naming our dappled cat Sputnik, and tearing down the outhouse. Mundane until we discovered too late that a full-fledged hive of bees congregated in that proverbial house out back.
Standing beside the verandah I watched Fern, my French Canadian father in a fedora ascend the ladder, sporadically muttering "Sacre blue." My dad was known for painting with furious speed just as Picasso was known for painting bulls with flaming light before cameras in the dark. If you are not aware of Picasso painting with light — at least try to fathom my predilection to make light of painting.

On Sunday, Aug. 31 1975, I wrote a description of my room: It is now 3:50 on the white digital clock radio atop the chest of drawers beside my single bed. The carpet is red. The lamp above desk is burgundy and the lamp above my bed is reddish orange with a pink floral design. There is a crappy florescent desk lamp on an old white desk. The room is painted beige. The side of the room with the bed has a slant to it, being on the second floor below the roof. There is a large closet in the corner. Between the closet and the bed is an antique bureau with mirror and four drawers. The door opens to the hall opposite my mother's room. Above the desk beside the door is a framed scene of a still river and sunset with tall green trees. Below this are a 1975 Steam Era Poster and four postcards of the Steam Era. On the closet wall facing the bed are a red felt bag from Lapland; a passport pouch and a God's Eye of wool, a Trapper Nelson backpack with the flying horse painted on it. Beside that is the green suitcase that belonging to my maternal grandfather [this suitcase was stolen from the storage place is Dallas in 1984.] There are two guitar cases leaning against the wall. A Gibson, CF100E serial number V750B-27. Also there is a music stand of silver metal and two Japanese prints hanging in the middle of the long wall. Two framed song-sheets: A Little Gypsy Tearoom, and Moonlight on the Colorado are above the bed. On the pine desk is a toy horse that Danny bought me in England. On the last wall there is the window, which faces the Credit Union, where the tennis courts used to be. In the backyard there is a catalpa tree and small poplar trees bordering the fence. There are bushes and rhubarb and a small tomato patch. It is now 4.43 on the digital clock radio.
On Wednesday I will move into Toronto again, that is where I lived for the last two years. My hope is to get established musically. I hope that this will be the last time that I have to stay at 49 Mary Street. This summer has clarified and brought out to myself many disturbing thoughts about my childhood. They manifested into a lot of poetry that I wrote this spring. These days have been calm and easy going, less tense than the shattered days of late Spring when I had a falling out with PB the photographer. Nearly every day I have felt hurt and bitterness towards him. Many times I run across a term or word that describes one of his traits that I was ignorant of, and determine to fortify myself from phony people like him. This is only a miner black spot, a tiny problem in my life at this time. I weigh 140 pounds right now; I have gained weight. I shaved off my beard; the one I started on May 25 when I played at Harbourfront. That was the night I had my penultimate words with PB the photographer.

The second time I played at Harborfront I witnesses my friends getting in a shoving match. As I was singing Alcatrash, Alcatrash was standing in the hall waiting for Sam to come. Sam came, with Daphne on his arm, and Alcatrash took a lunge at him. Paul Nash interceded. Much of the ruckus distracted me from my singing. Paul was pissed off with Alcatrash, who was pissed off with him for holding him back, but kept his cool. Donna asked what happened but no one would tell her. Talked to Sam, who hadn't anticipated Alcatrash being violent. Alcatrash came by me as I was talking to Sam to say goodbye. As Alcatrash was talking to me there was a cop talking to him and Sam and Daphne. Alcatrash was upset that 'The authorities have my name.' I walked Sam and Daphne to the exit.

In the back room I played a few songs for Theresa Merritt from my high school class in Milton. Theresa read about my cliffhanger experience in my poetry book (Symphony in Flat Tire.) We talked about that night, and the fact that Susan Vansicle telephoned the cops because Trevor Roberts and his ilk were throwing beer bottles at me. Theresa and her two friends gave me a lift to Pizza Patio


It was Groundhog's Day, 1976, the day I started working at the Crazy Alarm Company. Paul Nash told me they had an opening, and suggested I apply for a job. He had worked there when he first came to Canada escaping the draft, but went on to become a guard at the Royal Ontario Museum. Paul said, "It's the ideal place to write your book. Or you could leave one of your guitars there and practice all night." Both Paul and I worked steady midnights, so we would get into a lot of long telephone calls while we were "working.

The Crazy Alarm Company overlooked an MG sports car lot, just north of Yonge and Bloor right beside the subway tracks. It was on the second floor, through double doors, the inner one having a semi impregnable metal latch and an aqua colored peephole. The only way to get inside was to be "buzzed in" after being "visually identified. "The sooty Venetian blinds were always closed, for "security reasons." Below the east window, passing subway trains would rattle the tin pot on the hot plate, which rested on a midget refrigerator next to the solitary latrine, which was lit by a bare light bulb. Florescent lamps flickered constantly and were usually in the "off mode," whenever I happened to be on duty. (I maintained that it was easier to visually recognize an alarm's bleeping light from a condition of less luminescence. Therefore I often had my eyes fully closed.) A large oak desk dominated the office, the kind teachers used to have at school. While on duty, I was inclined to have my feet on the desk, straddling the typewriter, with my back leaning as far as the spineless retractable-wheeled office chair would go. My right foot would be by the red phone, the left by the black phone. It was possible to answer the phone without getting up by slipping my toes under the receiver and lifting up my leg so the phone could be transferred to my hands. If an alarm sounded I would often propel myself to the board without having to stand up.

In the center of the office on a pillar between the windows there was a "Wake-up Machine." The Wake-up Machine emitted ear-splitting blasts every fifteen minutes throughout the midnight shift. The device was a foot square box with an aluminum plate in front, with a shrill siren inside. When it sounded, my imperative was to silence it by pushing the little red button. If I neglected to silence it, an alarm would go off in a far off city, prompting another Midnight Shift operator in a sister company to call. Assuming of course the Designated Other Agent (DOA) was awake. If the Wake Up Machine was not properly silenced the Police would be summoned. The Wake Up Machine had the same tonal pitch as the alarm indicator sirens, so that when it was sounding simultaneously with an actual alarm, I may not have known if it was a real cause for alarm. There were two ways to silence the Wake Up Machine. The first was to place clear adhesive tape over the little red button to project the false illusion that everything was functioning according to procedure. The second was to have a yardstick at hand, and whack the button as hard as possible. The latter was my method of madness. Numerous whacks of the yardstick left a hideous dent on the face of the diabolical apparatus.

Most evenings I would arrive fifteen minutes before midnight. Often I would be at a coffeehouse performing, at a movie, or out with friends and would stop on the way at a convenience store or restaurant for take-out food for my "lunch." The Central Station monitor I relieved was supposed to give me a report of what was going on, this Alfredo usually did, and then we would toss a Frisbee around as fast as we could from a distance of fifteen feet. Alfredo would cover for me if I were running late. The first thing I would do is put the 600 or so cards into the slots that corresponded to the vaults, and test the alarms. Testing the alarms would send a signal to the banks and cause a buzzer to sound, so that I would have fifty or sixty alarms ringing at once. Then I’d mop the floor, read the newspaper and make a journal entry. Apart from the occasional alarm and testing the alarms through the night I would have four or five hours of free time.

So that I would never forget the Crazy Alarm Company, one night I drew a self-portrait in my journal, sitting at the oak desk, beside the Wake Up Machine. On the night that I wasted my time doing that I failed to notice a sign on the board that said. "Alarm out of order, ask for police surveillance." The head technician asked me when he came in if I had followed those instructions, and I had to admit that I hadn’t noticed the sign.

If I were to forget to put a card in its proper place this would be the ensuing conversation: "You missed putting a card in this slot."

"I must have forgot."

"How could you forget, you had the whole night to do it."

"I try to do my best."

"If it happens again we'll have to do something about it."

"Like what?"

"Nothing."

Judy, the Morning Shift Operator would come on at seven. She was tall and statuesque and was strikingly beautiful in appearance, but considered herself to be as she put it— "ugly.” walked into the mess that I had left and said, "Boy, you better get your act together." She was probably referring to the floor not being mopped. I usually mopped the floor listening to Paul McCartney’s Silly Love Song, or Someone's Knocking on the Door. But on this evening there had been thunderstorms and several alarms went off, the police had to be called, bank representatives had to be woken up and drive to the bank to check if everything was secure, then report back to me. I was responsible to write all the details in the logbook. Many of my entries were written with green ink with a fountain pen in a mock flowery cursive, to drive the management nuts. (I also put green food coloring in my private stash of milk to prevent the technicians from pilfering it, but they probably drank it right out of the carton and never noticed.) So I had written up at least six alarms and had several people on the at one time, while additional alarms were going off. I didn’t need someone walking in and dumping on me first thing. I told the woman to "Get Lost” in no uncertain terms.

She asked, "What did you say?"

"You heard me."

"I’m going to tell Jay Gurakski."

"Go ahead." I said. She moped at a desk for an hour reading her Harlequin Romance novel and totally ignored me for an hour. She never called me "boy" again.

Between seven and eight in the morning the alarms would start to go off as businesses opened their doors and bank vaults were open. Then, until nine fifteen it was crazy with several alarms going off at once. Each "opening" had to be date stamped, and had to give us a clear signal, or we would treat it as a hold-up. Sometimes they would open late and would have telephone us. The openings were quite busy and needed for or five people, so I was slated to work until nine thirty.

As soon as I got back from my Bicentennial Tour, they started hassling me. I had persuad0ed them into letting me take a three-week vacation after only working there two months. My supervisor would browbeat me about picayune things — he would hit me with those cards that you're not supposed to mutilate or fold. I wrote a letter to the management. The 'ultimatum' stated that after two weeks I would no longer work beyond eight hours a day. It further stated that working nine and a half hours a night was detrimental to my well-being. Gurakski looked at the ultimatum and said, 'There have been complaints about you in the office, you told one of the girls to Get Lost.' I thought his eyes would pop out. He said it's hard to get someone to do the openings, and that when I took the job I knew what the hours were. I was tempted to tell him that the other morning while walking home I ran smack into a telephone pole.

Gurakski used to read about robberies in the paper and would ask if they were our alarm systems. He'd get paranoid if you stood by the window, afraid that you could get shot. Once he called from a nearby office, when I was standing by the window, and said, 'I've got a gun pointed at your head,' and hung up. He believed unemployment was good for business, because it made crime, and the demand for alarm systems, go up. A cop once called in the middle of the night and said, 'I'm standing beside an open vault full of money, what are going to do about it,' and the midnight operator said, 'Hang on, I'm coming down for my share.'

I was in Nashville, and had a dream about the Crazy Alarm Company. It was at the Ross Hotel. I dreamed that lobotomized goldfish were being used to monitor alarms. I was handing a goldfish on some tweezers to Gurakski, who was dressed in a white lab coat when the maid came in. Another dream was about some gangsters pulling into the lot in a tan 1964 Lincoln Continental. I pushed the holdup button, but the police were too late arriving. Five minutes later a huddle of detectives advanced using the tiny MG's for cover. I yelled out the window, 'It's too late, I'm dead.'"

I have a dream that's like a cartoon. I'm looking across the desk to where my harmonica catches the light of a bare bulb. It's standing with the holes up and it reminds me of a silver streamliner. When I hear the song City of New Orleans by Steve Goodman, I picture a bright red toy train bouncing like a ball to the notes of the music. When I was in Yugoslavia, I rode in a train pulled by a locomotive with a big red star on it. It made me think of the old seventy eights my brother Rick used to have, he had those little tinsel stars stuck on them. He had a 1952 Chevrolet with 'Midnight Special' written on the back fender. In the recurring dream I wake up at the same time every night to recall waking up the same time the night before and it's like the earth has returned to the same spot like a skipping record, and the listener has fallen asleep. The repetitious riff is repeating endlessly and cuts a deeper groove in the record so that it alters the melody line. It's as if memory is being remolded by constant repetition. A couple years ago when I was living in that house on Palmerston, the one with the blue porch light, I almost got beat up by the drug dealers who were living across the hall. I ran down the back fire escape and escaped. They didn't like my voice lessons. That was a strange place. Someone strung out on heroin was always playing sitar in the attic, and the police would come through our apartment in the middle of the night on sting operations. PB the photographer, my roommate, would let them in and forget to tell me about it, and it was weird to wake up with them traipsing by on tiptoe. I dreamed that PB let in a girl from my high school, Dawn Walker; and she came over to the bed where I was sleeping and tossed an old black and white photograph of me tanned and golden and holding the telescope. In the dream she said, 'This is what you threw away — The golden child.'

My mother says that when I was young I was as 'good as gold.' I used to sit in the sand box and listen to the radio. We had an old antique upright radio, and I used to love hearing Wake Up Little Suzie on it because that was my sister’s name. I used to listen to Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers in a blue armchair and would conduct an imaginary orchestra with my feet.
Across the street where the creek wound its way though an empty lot there was an apple tree. A few neighborhood kids would sit in the tree because it was so easy to climb. I found a branch that fitted me like a perfect seat. I could sit with no hands. It was at that time that I realized what it was to be, to be in harmony with nature.

I discovered that Bruce was teaching classical guitar at a music store in Kitchener. After an evening of talking and sharing songs I crashed out in the guest room and awoke to hear his parent's talking. It was as if nothing had changed since I was a child; I had a peaceful feeling when I woke up.

We had not seen each other since the two of us had joined Steve Copperfield, in the summer of '66 when he smashed every window of Homes' barn. Bruce and I both admitted to throwing only one stone, but were considered 'just as guilty.' At the candy counter of Kelly's gas station Mrs. Holmes told me the replacement windows would cost $9.32. I can still see her ominous reflection in the glass of the candy concession as she approached me from behind. For some reason I recall buying a box of 'Smarties.'

There is a dream in one of my poems entitled, Oaken Hush. Which started out as a silverfish crawling across my bed sheet when my mother was showing my room to her friend Grace Bell. I ended up smashing it with my sneaker, and it left a dusty footprint on the wall. That was around the time when my brother Rick came back from being an encyclopedia salesman from California. He brought home what I thought were 'Silverneers.' He had a Corvette pinup pasted on the wall. I read an article about bedbugs in our medical encyclopedia and couldn't sleep for months. Fern would look up weird ailments in an archaic medical encyclopedia and wonder aloud if he had them. Then he'd say 'I go to the Doctors and tell him what's wrong with me.'


GOLDEN CHILDREN

Golden Children are climbing
In the branches of an apple tree
The boughs are so embracing
They fit so naturally

And any child who ever sat amid
The blossoms of an apple tree
Would know that being golden
Is the best way to be

Too soon the blossoms disappear
As little apples start to grow
Who can hold unto their youth
When its time for youth to go

And any child who ever sat amid

Golden Children are drawing
Yellow suns with happy grins
See the sunspots on the apple
The apples have a star within

And any child who ever sat amid...

Golden Children are running
Through the strings of rain
Much like fingers strumming
The notes of an endless refrain

And any child who ever sat amid...

The sun makes a cameo appearance
Its beam is a magic wand
May your youth be a magical vehicle
That you may always travel on

And any child who ever sat amid...

I went to camp when I was in grade five, and was about to be recognized as camper of the week when I did something out of line and missed winning the prize of a big chocolate bar. I was so upset I walked seven miles home. I threw a handful of grass at the councilor. She was actually going out with my brother Rick at the time, and this was before I smashed the windows of her parent's barn. We were coloring in those pictures where you put black over the primary colors and scrape out a design. That's where I got the inspiration for "Like a Tiny Million Ants of Thought." The first verse about the primary colors was when Dot Holmes, filled my shirt with grass after wrestling me down. It was sort of like the feeling I got in grade five with Mr. Powder, my teacher with the brush cut who used to go to a coffee house and would sing for us sometimes Froggie Went a Courting'. Anyhow, Powder used to strap all the boys in the class except for Bruce and I. Once I was playing with a ladybug sitting in the front row, directly in front of his big oak desk. To remind me that I should be paying attention he simply placed the dirty, pink, pimpled strap on the desk. The color of the strap was twilight mauve, the same color of the carnation that I had plucked off the trellis by our verandah. I could never figure out how my parents found out I had picked one measly obsequious petal. There is another scene in my mind about the house in Scarborough when my mother was interrogating me because someone had removed the sewer cover and there was a bar of soap missing from the mailbox. When I was young I used to steal rhubarb from the backyard of our next-door neighbor by putting a rake over the picket fence and yanking it up. We used to walk around the neighborhood eating it with a small glass of sugar to dip it in. My brother Terry had a jeep with a spotlight on the back that put zebra stripes on the ceiling, and the dream with the unicorn in captivity in it, surrounded by the picket fence.

From Mother’s Logbook: Saturday Feb 7, 1976

Police woke Fern up at 6 am wanting Danny. Someone broke into Trafalgar Motors and took a car, they took Danny’s boots and said they followed his footprints home. I don’t know, it was all very upsetting. The police came with a detective and a warrant to get Danny and search the house, they searched Danny’s room and found Wintario tickets that had been stolen from Tony’s Barbershop in town, also a marijuana cigarette; they took some of his sheet music and his English diary, I don’t know what they want that for. They left at 9:20 am with Danny, Fern very upset, drank a whole 26 oz of rum, I guess he can’t cope with these kinds of situations, he went for a sleep. The detective phoned and said Danny was being released at 2 pm, but they picked up Leo and took them both to Georgetown and they were brought back to Milton at 10:30 pm and had not been given any meal or refreshments of any kind. Terry and Donna here at 3:30, Terry went over police station, then to Georgetown to pick Danny up, but they wouldn’t release him there, Kim and Cindy and baby Dylan here at 9:45 pm they were going to go with Danny to Stefan’s birthday party in Toronto, but didn’t go on account of Danny not being here. Danny home at 11:30 pm, he was tired, scared and very hungry, he had some fish and chips we left for him then played a few games of cards to take our minds off the days events. Danny went to bed about 1:45 am, Kim and Cindy left at 2 pm, and then Fern and I went to bed at 3 am. I’m beat.

Sunday Feb. 8, 1976

Got up at about l:00 pm, Don Makowski called and said he would drop by in the evening. Listened to Billy Holiday on the radio. Terry phoned at 3:00 while I was eating some canned spaghetti and told me the reason that Kim Cindy and Danny didn't come to the party the other night was because Danny was picked up in Georgetown for three accounts of Breaking and entering, Police had a search warrant; the house was searched and they found three Wintario tickets in Danny's room. The three tickets had been stolen from a Barbershop. Leo, Danny's friend was involved too. Terry said that they didn't tell me about Danny because it might spoil the party.

Don Makowski, from my High School, came by in the evening. He told me that he almost got shot the other night when a dope deal went sour at his dormitory room, trading mescaline for marijuana. The man came back the next day with two others and a 38-pistol saying that the dope was Javex. So rather than getting his head blown off he gave them his camera worth $500.00. Don dropped his courses because of this and is leaving the dorms. We had dinner of spinach, spaghetti, bacon eggs and V8 juice. (Don later died in the bathtub, at the age of twenty-five.) Don played a bit of flute, and then walked to the Elbow Room coffeehouse


NEW CHAPTER

I'll start with my first Firecracker Day, Victoria Day, sometime in the upper mid 'Fifties on a warm May evening. I was a frightened child, probably three, scared and hiding in an old Nash behind our Scarborough bungalow. The next day I saw the scads of exploded litter in the gutter and on the lawn... We used to pilfer rhubarb from our neighbors using a rake over the fence; I used to eat it by dipping it into a glass of white sugar... Sometimes I played "Sailors" with the kids across the street, but someone else was always the captain... Big Yellow Caterpillars scraped away the meadows behind the school playground where we measured a brook with a stick. Beside a tiny waterfall a toad was almost invisible on the brown dirt.




In grade seven I painted my first sunset, it was a purple wash with a solitary silhouette of a naked tree. My teacher, Mr. Bossman made a display of it on the back bulletin board at the old limestone Bruce Street School. The sunset motif reached its zenith for me in grade eight, when I painted orange skies exclusively in art class. My teacher would say, 'Do something different for a change,' and I'd say, 'I did; this one's a sunrise.'

I recall playing on the edge of a sandy beach with a big, red plastic racing car. It was an Indy racer with yellow plastic wheels. If held up to the sun, it would glow. My grandparents were sitting along the beach with the rest of our family in deck chairs. On the water, older children were diving from a raft. As the sun set, the water became pinkish-orange and their suntanned skin glistened a warm brown. The setting sun was a racing car that sped around the corner out of sight, to make one more lap. The last filaments of the sun went up like hands and the racing car crashed. On the way to the car leaving the beach, a fire truck screamed past, a burnt red color with dome light flashing, the huge circles of light like a huge heart spinning. All eyes turned in the dusk to the light and knew that an eight-year-old girl had drowned. The light pulsed on people, like the magnification of their own hearts.

Another vivid memory occurred at sunrise on my way to a day’s cherry picking with Rick. I was five at the time. It was early in the morning in an amber school bus full of cherry pickers driving through fields drenched with dew. Passing a farmhouse I saw a rooster standing on the spillway of a pond and yelled out, 'Hey, look at the eagle.' Everyone laughed. On the way home I noticed Rick surreptitiously tweak the white satin like blouse of a woman friend he had brought along.

As a kid I had looked up to Rick when he was head of the Spartan Car Club. I'd run upstairs to get his red satin car club jacket and would help him wash his bronze Fifty six Chevy with the custom taillights and moon hubcaps. Rick used to make everyone take off their shoes before they sat in his car. Ma had a picture of Rick in his dump truck, wearing his corduroy hat and his dark sun glasses sporting a mustache like Confucius, the esteemed Chinese philosopher.

The only time I could recall Rick ever being upset was when he dropped his car keys into Lake Ontario while fiddling with them. He had to call up Fern to come and tow him home. Recently Rick had driven his huge yellow tandem dump truck up into ma's driveway while I was visiting. He was on his coffee break while doing a job in Acorn. I could smell his pipe and came downstairs. Rick was just finishing off the last piece of upside-down peach cake ma had saved for him and began to talk about driving his truck into a pack of running dogs at the quarry. 'I ran straight into them; you should have seen them disperse.' Rick paused for a second and regarded me with a displeased look. 'You're giving me a sanctimonious look,' he said. 'Well, those dogs can attack children when they're running wild like that.' Once, Rick had stopped by to take a few shots with Kim who where playing street hockey. Mary, Rick's fiancée was standing nearby and Rick almost threw Kim into the creek for swearing while a lady was present.

Rick seemed to be concerned about the image I was projecting, and the fact that I wrote incessantly in my journals on Apr0il 18, 1976: As I'm writing this I'm in the back of Rick's GMC Jimmy with the top down, wearing a white sports coat and a cowboy hat. The truck is parked at the hospital; Rick and my mother have taken baby Dylan to the emergency room. As an apricot sunset blends into gray, the headlight of a southbound train appears in the distance. The sound of crickets and a flagpole rope pinging are lost as the train approaches. Train fades and they're coming back.

"Who's the dude in the back," Ma said.

"That's just a dude dressed up in cowboy clothes," Rick said.

"Dylan has an ear infection," Ma said.

Saturday, November 13, 1976, I went skiing with Rick and Danny and broke my glasses. Hadn't seen Rick since the spring when he had driven us to see Danny in reform school. While we sat drinking hot chocolate in the lodge, Rick asked me what I was writing. "My journal," I said.

"You know," Rick said, tapping the dottle from his pipe, "I'd like to move up north; ski all winter and come the summer I'd write a book. It would be something like a Henry Miller book, as far as the content goes—I'd call it 'Lines of Longitude.'"

The day Rick drove Kim me and ma to see Danny in reform school, was a crucial time since ma was still recovering from her stroke. That Danny had gone to reform school for breaking into a barbershop hadn't helped matters. When Kim had been jailed for stealing cars and for a whole list of other crimes ma had cried for a week. It made it difficult for her job as a correctional officer, but as her superior put it, "Having three out of seven go in, ain't that bad."

Whenever someone was suffering, ma was always able to empathize and could usually tell exactly what the problem was. When Kim's baby son, Dylan, was crying she said, "He doesn't know what it is." Many people might not have understood that 'not knowing' was also a factor.

Sister Sue, who had just returned from Calgary with her two children, had called me and talked of how Danny's problems had upset ma. "Fern stayed off work so that he could make sure mother didn't have a relapse the day Danny went away. You know that's a possibility. Fern won't let her drive her car because, he says, 'A bee might come in through the window and the shock might make her have a relapse.' And mom keeps saying that she'll get a patch for her eye so that she can go out. She says she'll paint a false eye on the patch. She's able to move her eye a little now. The doctors said that she wouldn't be able to it, but she did. She says that it was just one of her everyday miracles. Anyhow, Fern decided to take the day off work, so that he could watch mother, right. So he spent the day in bed and your mother went for a walk to the bank by herself. She was just walking by the back fence and started to have a relapse and was hanging onto the fence. The dog started to bark and finally woke Dad, who had been so gallant in taking a day off work to watch her. It's a lucky thing we have a dog. So Dad took her to the doctor and he wanted to take her to the hospital. But, oh, no, she won't let him. All he could do was to give her more drugs."

As Sue talked I couldn't help but think of our visit to mother when she was in hospital. I'd just returned from out West, having found a strong urge to come back while in Fort St. John, British Columbia. I had a ticket to fly to Whitehorse, but came straight home instead. Kim had driven Danny and I to the hospital and I could scarcely recognize her. The people at the next bedside were crying. It was hard to believe that Kim and Danny had been acting flippantly just minutes before on the way to the hospital.


While Rick and ma stopped in the lobby of the reform school, I looked over the painting on the wall. It was an autumn scene with a pond around sunrise or sunset, painted in ugly mauve and oranges. Ducks were rising where a blind would logically have been placed, but there were no hunters in the picture. All the violent elements had been omitted. The only dangerous thing about the painting was that it had been painted on compressed chipboard. The picture reminded me of the calendar in Marg's Restaurant around the time Kim and I had been going to Sunday school in Acorn. The calendar was an advertisement for a Local car dealership and every year they used a different sportsman's scene. Kim and I would stop into Marg's Restaurant every Sunday to have toast with Bonny, Kim's Sunday school teacher. Kim and I would have our hair slicked up and they would be wearing our blue blazers, feeling proud sitting in the restaurant with the grownups. If Kim didn't get to sit beside Bonny in Sunday school class, he would pout and sit underneath the table. Once when another girl said she was going with Bob, Kim had kicked her in the shins, called her a liar and spit at her.

Everyone was in the waiting room, waiting for Danny. The art in this room was even more depressing. There were plaques with sailboats made of nails and their sails were threads strung on more nails. "There's Danny wearing a big smile," said ma. Danny sat down and the chat began. Danny talked about his attractive English teacher. He said he was saving his muffin for her. All the boys gave her their muffins and Danny was waiting until his was really stale, and of course hard to boot.

"Remember when you came to visit me, and I stole all those sweaters?" Kim said. Fern had taken Ma Danny and me to visit Kim at his Reform School. Walking across the park to the car we were all chuckling cause ma said, 'Look at his hair.' Fern had died his hair with some of ma's auburn hair color and the roots were showing. Kim showed me that he was wearing seven prison sweaters, and said, 'I'm gonna steal a half dozen of these.'

Danny and Rick talked about skiing. They would hot-dog down the slopes, during the winter, and when they passed woman, they would ski backwards making crude faces as they passed. Rick gave me a look as I wrote in my black book. "This is no time to be writing a song," he said.

"I'm not writing a song," I said.

"Then what are you writing?" Rick asked.

"My journal."

"Oh, the diary of Stefan Frank."

"Do you have a bad memory?" Kim asked.

"No," I said, "A lot of writers keep a journal."

"You better watch it,” warned Rick, "Or you'll wind up with your face flat in a mud puddle, for keeping a diary." On the way back to the truck Rick added, "We'll have to talk to the warden to arrange your imprisonment for keeping a diary."

Ma sat beside Rick on the way home and talked about the families first home. "Remember that house we had in Long Branch," said Rick.

"Remember that dump," said ma, changing the subject.

"There was a huge pond," said Rick, "And they were filling it up, so trucks used to come down all the time, dumping things in. Once they dumped a parade float so we used it as our Good Ship Lollipop. They dumped a whole shipment of Wrigley's gum, so we had that on our little ship. And then, another time, they dumped a whole truckload of fireworks."

"Remember all those boots catching fire?"

"They dumped a whole load of left footed boots, so Fern had them all up in the attic," explained Rick. "Fern fixed up a couple kids with them, but then there was the fire, just after Hurricane Hazel and the whole attic was pouring out with black smoke."

"The fire Marshall really gave us hell for that."

"But our lawyer got us a lot of money for the insurance so we could move to Scarborough."

"I remember one time when I rode in a rowboat to the island," said Rick.
"You mean you rode a rowboat out to Center Island?" I asked.

"You're so stupid," said Rick. "I just rowed it to the other side of the lagoon."

Rick dropped off everyone at Kim's house. I was sitting in the front room, watching television when ma came in. "You seem to be quiet," she said, meaning, "What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing," I said. I walked out to the front drive to see Kelly and Shelly, my nephew and niece. Kelly was trying to blow my head off with a cap gun while Shelly tried to run him over with her bike. And they were both wearing blue cowboy sweaters like the ones Kim and I wore when we went to Kindergarten and fought over a cap gun. Finally I said to ma, "So that's where all the firecrackers came from."


NEW CHAPTER

Monday Jan. 19, 1976


I got on bus platform 13 at the Elizabeth station to catch the 1:15 pm bus to arrive at 3 pm. I got on and sat beside an attractive girl. I asked if she was going to Kitchener. She said yes. Do you live there? Yes. That was all she said. I helped her put her back on the rack and took it down.

The Kitchener bus terminal was a big room with benches. On one side there was a counter with stools, I called information and got the number of Barbara Woods, who went to high school with me. There was no number for Cummins, so I went to the post office across the street and was told they couldn’t give out that information. I finally located the car dealership that Bruce’s father owned and got in touch with him.

Called Bruce at a music store. Took bus to Albert Street, and saw a number of 13 year old girls telling dirty jokes with their rosy red cheeks and the freezing wind and snow:

“Brown's girl, Brown's girl
Swish your Bushy Tail,
Grab a little peanut in your toes
Hold it up to your crinkly nose...”

So I made it to Louise’s at about 5:30. We had supper together, trout and wine. After dinner I played a couple of hours, then called Bruce, and gave him directions to pick me up. Louise and I were talking about the lechery of PB the photographer for a while. She was pumping me and I had no aversion to telling. One shocking thing for me was when she told me that she once had a night of designs on me. I didn’t realize that she still had designs. Bruce arrived at about 11, sat on the couch for 10 minutes until Louise bid us goodbye.

We drove to Bruce's place in his Renault. Bruce was wearing an Afghan coat and a beard. He had changed greatly and there were a few of his gestures, which I remembered. He was really surprised when I phoned him and was really happy to see me. We had so much in common; he was studying classical guitar. We played, or rather I played till about 4 a.m. then we had some smoked salmon sandwiches. Bruce said that he drove through Milton once but couldn't remember where I lived. He reminded me of Major, the Dalmatian that Powell had given him. Once Mr. Powel strapped him for no reason. I had a bit of a headache and a bloody nose.

I woke at 7, hearing his parents, I went to their bedroom door to say hello and talked for five minutes. Bruce and I had brunch together. His mother cooked for us, and then went out. Bruce and I went to a shop near the University and had coffee, and then he dropped me off at the campus center.

Barbara Wood met me at 3:45; we went to the campus pub. I talked to the custodian there about doing a gig, and arranged for an audition on Feb. 24, at 2:00 pm. Barb left for class, and Nancy McPhail and two others sat down. Took bus downtown to head back to Toronto, Bruce made arrangements to see me two Wednesdays from tomorrow.

While the bus stopped at Guelph Kirk Brush got on the bus. He didn't see me at first because his glasses were fogged up, and I wasn't sure that it was he. We both got off the bus in Toronto, and chatted on the subway to Spadina. I hadn't seen him since for years when he asked me to play guitar at his wedding with Celeste Scoffield, whose mother was my grade two teacher. I never sang at his wedding. We traded addresses.

I called Sam G about my adventures and came home about 8.20. I have ten dollars and five cents to my name. My thirty dollars from Harborfront’s Bohemian Embassy gig should be coming in soon. Went to Paul’s at 11 pm.

Wednesday, January 21, 1976


Letter to Molly in Switzerland
January 20, 1976
160 Borden Street, Torontoa

Dear Molly,

I have just returned from an incredible journey; you haven’t written me for so long, but I’ll tell you about it. Ok. I sent a letter to my old roommate’s girlfriend and arranged to see her sometime. While I was in Milton I ran across George Taft, a schoolmate, and talked about old acquaintances. I asked if he knew where Bruce was. He said that he saw Bruce a few years back, and that Bruce’s father had a car dealership in Kitchener. I had also ran across an old schoolmate on Yonge Street who went to the University of Waterloo so I told Louise that I would be in at 6 pm on Monday. We had dinner together and wine and songs flowed after. Prior to that I had phoned Bruce’s Father, being lucky that the man at the post office opposite the bus stop knew the correct spelling of Cummins; I got his home number and his mother told me I could reach him at Dressler’s Music. So I phoned him up. He was surprised to hear from me, because I had not seen him since 1967. He was my best friend from 1961 to 1966; so he came over to Louise’s at 11 pm and drove me to his place. It turns out that Bruce studies classical guitar and saxophone, (I used to play sax) and we had a lot to talk about, till 4 in the morning. We were both happy to see each other and reminisced. Of all the people from Milton I was ever associated with he meant the most to me. So the next day I left with each of us making arrangements to keep in touch. I then visited Barbara Wood, a girl studying graphic design. We sat in the student pub. She used to be in my grade 8 class. I talked to the guy managing the place and set up an audition. As Barbara left another classmate sat down at our table from grade nine, Nancy McPhail. We spoke briefly and I left. I got on the bus to come to Toronto and when the bus stopped in Guelph another classmate got on. We were in grade one together and were friends. I didn’t realize he was Kirk Brush because when he got on the bus his glasses were fogged up, but I recognized him when we got off in Toronto. He’s been living in Toronto for two years. So I came home quite pleased with my trip.

Alcatrash is going back to England soon. Lately he has been unreasonable because Sam Greenbaumn is now going out with Daphne. I did a gig at Harbourfront and while I was there Paul Nash had to hold back Alcatrash from getting at Sam when he showed up with Daphne. This I witnessed from the stage while singing. Mary went down to Florida to visit a guy. Things are ok between Alcatrash and Sam. Mary is back.

I worked two weeks as a security guard at Christmas at the post office by Union Station, and have been living in Toronto since Dec 10. Have a room now by myself, it costs 70 a month, and has fridge stove and sink and shared bathroom. Should be getting $700 UIC when it comes from being laid off at Halloween. I traded my 12-string for a tape machine plus $175; I got a good deal. Things are looking up for me, please write me, looking forward to seeing you; I’ll l write more after you write me. (If you are not too busy, by for now (love) Stefan


Thursday, January 29, 1976

Bud Rose, Paul Nash and I walked into Harvey's and ordered four hot dogs. I was a bit drunk and Alcatrash I bought for Paul Nash and Bud. I sat down beside Bud and when Paul Nash. I unbuttoned my coat revealing the small frying pan hanging around my neck- I said to Bud that we should have our 'talk.' He said I had no manners and was masochistic. I said something contrary to that effect as Paul Nash started laughing uncontrollably cause of Bud flipping out over the frying pan. Bud left having taken one bite of the hot dog.



They were the best of følksingers, they were the worst of følksingers, and they passed though Fat Albert's on their way to fame or the nearest pool hall. Evidence of the few that made it remained in a hand-lettered marquee among the scores of artists who left their names on the wall. Few made it to the top — to the bright lights — to the Ivory Towers of success. Quite a few though, waited their turn to bask in the Ebony Dungeons' dusky limelight.

Wednesday evenings it was "Fat Albert’s in the church basement" at 300 Bloor Street. Numbers were put in a hat and those who did not draw an 'ex' performed. Sometimes twenty or so people signed up to sing, but only half made it to the stage. Regulars were given features and would plaster the Annex with posters. The audience sat around tables made of large wooden spools. Artists would gather in the halls and tune up room, or the main stage area waiting for their fifteen minutes of fame.

It was at Fatal Bert's on the Wednesday of June 23, 1976 that I first encountered Melissa Sternwood, the daughter of Rosedale socialites. She had just finished a set of poetry, and came over to the spool table where I was sitting. Melissa wrote her number in my journal and suggested I come to an upcoming poetry workshop at Cinema Lumiere. But first she put her hands on her hips and said, "You were laughing at my poem."

"You meant it to be funny didn't you?"

"Well not that funny."


Ran into Sam, Mary and her friend Nora, at the square dance at Mariposa Folk Festival and was photographed by a Toronto Star reporter. The photo showed the back of me off to the side with Nora facing the camera. Mariposa was perhaps where I first became interested in being a singer. P Foster took me to my first Mariposa in 1969 where we saw Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. When P Foster said, "This was a place for an unknown to get discovered," I became interested in pursuing songwriting. One of my fondest memories was seeing Pete Seeger sing a Hard Rain's Gonna Fall to people huddled under umbrellas during a sudden shower. One person made a remark about my T-shirt: 'I bought some gas in Frog City.' It was only because of the Frog City T-shirt that I could be identified from the rear in the square dancing photograph.

The day was kind of cloudy; it looked like rain most of the time. Spent some time with Mary, Sam and Paul Nash who were blowing bubbles. When it started to pour we went to the Free Sing area and took shelter under a tent. A few regulars from Fatal Bert’s got up and played. Someone put up a pole to keep the tent from sagging from so much water. The festival was declared over for the day. The rain let up for a minute so the four of us set out for the ferry. The sidewalk was one huge puddle; I ran through it sending up fountains from my feet to greet the rain. In the line for the ferry we all sang songs. I sat in the upper deck and wrote in my journal while as it poured down.

Friday, June 25, 1976

Went to Mariposa Folk Festival, on Toronto Islands.

Sitting on a blue sleeping bag with Nora listening to Marg Chrystl, who was my vocal instructor. Bought a ticket for $20. Met Nora, who is one of Mary’s actress friends and square danced. After the square dance; as I was listening to a Newfoundland workshop a young man approached me and said, “Didn’t I see you in Quebec a few summers ago?”

“Ya, the summer of 1972.” We talked of Leonard Cohen, probably because I wandered around Quebec City singing “So Long Marianne” with a few friends. The first night I met him we met the tall guy from Oklahoma, Gary Lemons.” We played Frisbee in front of the chateau Frontenac. He said he has a picture of Gary and I in the hostel, of the Bastille with some bars in the background. That was when I met Francine and her two friends from St. Åntoinne Abbey.

The day was kind of cloudy, it looked like rain, but it didn’t and a few pale skinned people got a little bit sun burned. Most of my time I spent with Nora who blew bubbles. I was supposed to meet Nora at area 7 but after circling there several times I took the ferry back to the city. I went to bed at 8 after calling my mother and telling her that I had a Sunday ticket to give to Danny.

On Sunday morning I met Danny at Union Station; gave him my ticket to Mariposa and let him borrow my white cowboy hat. That was the last I saw of the hat. Danny told me there was a picture of me square dancing in the Toronto Star, but that it was only my back. He had his dulcimer and handed me the paper with my picture in it. Then I took the Subway to the poetry workshop at Cinema Lumiere.

I entered Cinema Lumiere and sat beside Melissa. With her orange striped blouse a reddish glow, her short parted hair falling occasionally into her eyes, I felt my new friend looked familiar. As we sat in the lobby with the Mirror Tree Poets, Melissa told me about the man who was distracting everyone with a mime routine — Bud Rose.

Bud Rose was an entrepreneur with motley brown hair and a beard, who won scholarships as a child to study piano. He had the technique, but not the passion. Bud eventually gave it up, and made a living as a photographer. Bud Rose could be charming as a friend, if you could get beyond his constantly miming a climb up an invisible rope. Bud also booked folksingers at his poetry venues; he was quite the Renaissance. Man.

I was tired at the reading, after spending two days at the Mariposa Folk Festival, and from disrupting my sleeping pattern. I showed the poets a newspaper clipping from the Toronto Star — a photograph of the festival featuring me square dancing with my back to the camera. Melissa looked at it and said; "If you turn the page over maybe you can see your face." Everyone laughed. I was out of sorts at the reading, as Melissa noted. I read a passage called Stream of Thought.

After the poetry reading, and dinner at Mars, Melissa suggested we go to Philosopher's Walk. I stopped at 160 Borden to pick up my guitar. The two of us sat on the grass against the wall overlooking Philosopher's Walk, as I played some songs. We exchanged poetry. After her Tulip Peace I told her about the girl I met in Split, Yugoslavia who could recite Daffodils faster than a falling star. I showed her a passage from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the book being a little soggy from the Mariposa rain out

Melissa read a poem about a girl with Leukemia. Her poetry was moving. After a while it became apparent by her gentle poking pen where our whims would take us. We closed our notebooks. At last she asked me to look at the sunset; but even I, arch lover of sunsets was only interested in the dusky freckles that were growing scarce as stars speckled the sky. It was at that moment that I was faced with the poetic challenge of suggesting that freckles that disappeared in the dusk were to become stars. I read two Yodeling Frog Stories:

The Persistent Little Batrachian and Yodeling Frog

Once upon a time a frog named Phobos decided he would become the greatest yodeler the world had ever seen. He bought a fluorescent green nickel guitar and practiced day and night. The constant twang drove everyone in his house nuts.

While Phobos was sleeping his dastardly brother Deimos sawed the green nickel guitar in half. Phobos was a persistent little frog. He glued it back together and kept on playing. Deimos teased him when his finger got stuck in the glue.

While strumming 'Fire and Rain' at a High School toga party an unruly heckler tossed a bucket of water on Phobos. But frogs are hard to drown out. Phobos traveled west and fought forest fires to make enough money to buy a real guitar. The only number the fire fighters would listen to was 'Talking Forest Fire Fighting Blues.' That was the only song with no Yodeling in it.

With a new guitar in one hand and a soapbox in the other Phobos set off for 42 Smashville to seek his fame and fortune. As he walked out the door dastardly Deimos yelled, 'You'll never make it with a voice like yours.'

In a vain attempt to improve his chops Phobos practiced the same shrill voice lesson every day. The sound was so ear-piercing that some piranhas jumped out of their aquarium and chased him down the fire escape, all the while nipping at his heels.
Phobos got a gig in his hometown. He rented huge amplifiers, microphones and loaded everything into a bus during a blizzard. The whole town came out to hear him. In the middle of a song dastardly Deimos put a pickle in his mouth and snickered, “This will make you sound better.”

When Phobos turned up at his parents doorstep with empty pockets his father took him to the tire factory to get a job. The foreman looked at his matching blue jean jacket, his long riding boots, red bandanna, dark glasses and long hair. He slowly shook his head to the left and right and then back to the left. Finally Phobos found work with a construction company operating a jackhammer and learned how to Yodel in staccato.

Phobos went on a World Tour — as a tourist. At first he packed all his clothes inside his guitar, which caused his clothes to wrinkle and his guitar to go out of tune. He opened his act with the flourish of a magician pulling a rabbet out of a hat. People thought he was great — until he opened his mouth to sing.

While traveling Phobos got a ride in a bronze colored '65 Thunderbird. He put his own homemade tape in the cassette deck and fell asleep after one song. The driver was about to fall asleep too, when a police officer pulled him over for driving too slow. The police officer heard the songs coming out of the car window and fell asleep on his motorbike. Soon the whole freeway fell asleep.
Phobos toured Norway, became ill and had a delicate operation. After the operation the nurses would come on their rounds proclaiming, "He's a great Canadian Følksånger." The hospital was spared his singing during his recovery. Traveling on to Switzerland Phobos broke into song and heard what he thought was thunderous applause. But it was just an avalanche that he set off. When the commotion died down the crowd was still booing and jeering. With the stub of his tail between his legs Phobos shrunk on home and became a recluse. To save his face he'd make up excuses, such as "Yodeling is for humans, not us guys..."

Phobos got a job catching flies with his brother Deimos' exterminating company. By this time Deimos was only dastardly towards termites and the like, and was kind to his own kind. Eventually Phobos lost interest in singing got married, and had a whole mess of polliwogs. Every one of those little tadpoles took music lessons with an opera queen and in due time the Mill Pond resounded with a melodious chorus.

And so it happened, that upon the eve of Halloween in 1975, on the picturesque shores of the Mill Pond in Acorn Ontario, that Phobos, the ill-fated Yodeling Frog, sat on a Limestone Centennial monolith dangling his skinny green legs. He was in the midst of a long blue Yodel, a yodel that personified the perplexities of his being. He knew that inside his green slimy exterior there was a human being — but how on earth had he become a frog.

"You see all this is too much stuff," Melissa said, in her soft poetic voice as she leaned back on the cold gray stone of the Ontario Museum. "Just skip all the stuff and get to the point..."

If that wasn't bizarre enough Phobos wondered why he had just lost his groundbreaking job as a jackhammer operator. To hold on unto an alleged job was one thing; but to hold up a jackhammer was a feat for a frog. Phobos had elevated the jackhammer, at least in his mind, to an unappreciated art form. And now he had just received his hopping orders.

Didn't they realize that he was an artist? While brandishing his jackhammer, Phobos had oft eased up on the throttle, so that he was just holding the jackhammer silently, until an unsuspecting pedestrian happened by. Then he would squeeze the trigger and pretend said jackhammer was a machine gun.

Indeed, it was an imposing figure Phobos cut, as dust encrusted him, turning his slimy green skin to gray. The status of the much-maligned frog had risen with every minute speck dust. But now, with an uncertain future plaguing his pea sized brain Phobos hopped home. When he jumped in through the hole in the screen door, the door of that two story white frame house with the pink shutters and the big verandah, Phobos said, “Guess what happened at work today?”

"You got fired,” his beer-guzzling father said.

"No,” said Phobos, “I was laid off.”

A few minutes into dinner Phobos' English tea drinking monarchist of a mother said, “You needn't be so sullen. It's not your fault that you were laid off.”

Phobos' ears were still ringing from the jackhammer, as he took solace in the front room and watched Get Smart on television. The young frog could hear his parents arguing in the kitchen. “You never give me anything,” his mother said.

“What about this bowl of chocolates?”

“They're to give the kids who come trick or treating.”

“Well you're free to have a couple.” Over the years Phobos had heard untold variations of that argument, so he went back to the limestone monolith overlooking the Mill Pond to dangle his legs in solitude.

It had been two years since the phantom batrachian had left his beloved parents and tried to make it in Smashville. But interest in the lofty craft of Yodeling had dwindled veritably into nothingness and had emerged from a hole on the other side of the universe long before Phobos had taken up his valiant quest. There were still underground cadres of dedicated balladeers, who venerated the art of oral tradition, but they were viewed with same curious eyes that saw cave drawings in their original light, that is, with flaming torches.

And speaking of flaming torches, Phobos had worked odd jobs to support his lofty craft, such as picture frame maker at the T Eaton Company, and landscapers' assistant at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. Jobs fell through on Phobos like a rock thrown through a lily pad. Our budding batrachian had to leave his so-called friends and return to his boyhood home with the stub of his tail between his legs dwindling into nothingness.

Sitting on that limestone monolith Phobos stared to where the water beneath the willow trees funneled into the channel beyond the rusty vortex of a railway trestle, which hung in the evening like a distant black hole. The sun was setting, upon his event horizon, making five rays, which slanted up from beyond the willows like an ethereal majestic hand. Then one golden reddish beam reached out to Phobos like a follow spot. It was as if the proverbial unicorn had dipped its horn in the stream to rid it of its poison.

It was often said in a round about way, that this was the impetus that spurred our dear little frog to contemplate something drastic...* In a whimsical and impulsive way, Phobos the Yodeling frog tore himself from the Mill Pond and headed down that long lonely highway of forgotten metaphors, once again to Smashville to take another stab at literary life.

Wednesday, July 1, 1976

Now, as I am scribbling this entry, I’m at a table for two, of red-checkered tablecloth. The PA plays Suzanne, by someone I don’t know. I’m at Basin Street waiting for Melissa. She had called me at 2:30 or so and asked me out to this place. I was kind of tired and went back to sleep. Wackenhut Alarms checked one of the vault doors at ‘33K’ last night, and reported a vault door was insecure. Some one forgot to spin the comps. Had dinner with Paul at Mars. I had baked macaroni, pork chop, applesauce and potato pancake. Sitting here now at Wellesley and Yonge in front of a CIBC waiting for Melissa. A horrible trombone player just blew a few notes. She arrived and we listened to the first set and a little bit of the last set, and then walked up Yonge. I stopped at the mini mart to buy lunch. Then we embraced goodbye and I went to work at the Crazy Alarm Company.

At work, when the morning crew came in, I told Gurakski that I was sick. At the end of the openings with five minutes left I stamped my card to leave. Charlie said that I had to stay until all the cards were put away. I walked into Gurakski’s office and said, “Can I go, I’m sick?” He said yes.

The secretary said, “Why not, it’s nine-thirty.”

So I walked out the door; Charlie was hot at my heels. He said, “If you don’t put the cards away, I’ll dock one half hour of your pay.” As usual, on my way home I bought an ice cream cone.

So I slept; and Melissa called at 5:15 pm. We arranged to meet at Yonge and Wellesley. [She took the subway down from Rosedale.] We went to see “Silent Movie.” On the way I ate at Mars; had the deep fried scallops, beets and mashed potatoes. Afterwards, I called Paul in a fake Bob Dylan voice, then went to his place and watched Star Trek an episode where Captain Kirk goes into a time machine, falls in love with a beautiful social worker echo who saves humanity by getting run over by a truck. Paul played his latest song and gave me the chords to “Lying Eyes.” Paul stopped by my place to pick up his copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Paul then went to Sam and Mary’s and I had a shave.

When Melissa arrived we walked up to the Mill Wheel and had cappuccino coffee, then we walked very close together to the cinema. The two shorts that preceded the main feature were more interesting than the feature, one was “The Dove” a parody of Ingmar Bergman with fake Swedish dialog, where a dove shits in Death’s face to win a game of badminton, and “Putting on the Ritz.”

As we walked south, close together I asked her if she would like to come back to my place, and she seemed perplexed by that; so I reassured her that it made no difference to me. We went to the restaurant at the Westbury and I had a burger and fries. We talked about our families and I told her that when I was four my0 parents used to drop us off at the Golden Mile in Scarborough to see the Saturday matinee and we would hitchhike home. I would go in through the milk box and unlock the door. She told me that her younger sister wanted a cherry tree and a kitten for her 13th birthday; so far the cherry tree has produced only one cherry.

We ended up at the park in front of the Rosedale Subway, in fond embrace, when a police officer came by with his lights flashing. I saw her to her train, and then took the Bloor bus across, stopping in at the Arcade.

Sunday afternoon I woke up at 1:30 and went to Grange Park, by the Gallery to listen to George Miller read poetry. Melissa and I went to the cafeteria where I had a hot dog, salad, custard pudding and coffee; then we met up with the other Bohemian Embassy Poets.

Close to six I walked to the Tel Aviv to meet up with Melissa, and we were arm and arm with both of us walking our bikes. We ended up at the museum, where Paul was on duty. I had seen the glass exhibit in Chicago, and signed my name in the guest book as the “Yodeling Frog, July 4, 1976.” After that Melissa invited me to her place, but we went to mine instead. She said that she hadn’t invited me over before because at the end of summer she would go back to Carlton in Ottawa, where she had a boyfriend, and she didn’t want me to be hurt. While at my place strumming my guitar I busted my necklace, a Coptic cross. Afterwards I talked to her about my plight with PB the Photographer, and the troubles I had at work with my officious supervisor. Also I told her that when I was a child I wouldn’t let anyone touch me. She left while there was still light, because she had to ride her bike.

The following Wednesday I went to Fatal Bert’s and ran into Nora who gave me a piece of her chocolate bar. (Throughout my life I have always remembered people who shared their sweets with me.) She said she arrived at the area where she was supposed to meet me at Mariposa, an hour late and blew bubbles to attract my attention. I had left by then. I asked her if she wanted to go to Yuk Yuk’s, and she left with me. Walking down Bloor Street I recited the “Sody Sallyratus” story, because she was interested in story telling. We listened to a few people, till it closed at 11, I walked with her a while, then someone she knew from the office walked with us, and I left her to go to work.

The following day I went to Mars Restaurant and had chicken potpie, potato pancakes, rye toast and a coffee. Then I went to a phone booth and called Melissa, who had just arrived from the blood-donor clinic in Peterborough. She said there was a disco there where everybody went to pick up everybody else. She asked me how my talk went at work; I said it went all right. She was going out the door, so I told her I was busy until her poetry reading on Sunday.

So I called Paul after that; he told me that Mary was there practicing. I arrived and jiggled the string of bells that hung from his door on the fourth floor. Paul showed me the words to some Tammy Wynette and played her record. Paul and I walked to a leather shop on Harboard, where Paul had his belt fixed. Then we walked up to the phone booth where Paul tried to call Kay the Union rep and I called Nora. Nora said she was sorting out her possessions for a garage sale and invited me over. We parted, with Paul going somewhere to eat, and me going home for a bath. I put my stuff together, took some New York Times book reviews, put on my black cord pants, my white cotton shirt with the black embroidered cowboy yoke. As I walked along Bloor I saw Paul again, he opened the door to his phone booth and showed me a column in the Star advertising Bud Rose playing at the fingerboard this Saturday. I went to Nora’s place.

Nora was sorting through some belongings, and handed me a box of books to look at, one was an interesting illustrated version of Wuthering Heights. She came across two eggbeaters with a crank on them and I said they would make interesting weapons. Nora pretended to use them as weapons. And said she “Stole some invisible tape from work…”

She laughed when I said; “They probably won’t miss it if it is invisible.”

I played a number of songs on my guitar, and the music ended in sweet resolution. Nora lit a candle, which glowed red, and the shadow from a plant ran up from the mouth of a man in the Children of Paradise movie poster. She mentioned a fantasy about a man with weird eyes she saw on Bloor Street and thought he was her animus. I pointed to the shadow and said, “That’s an animus.” The shadow. I said was shaped like a black bunny hopping; but Nora said it was a woman doing a swan dive. As I looked at it, it did indeed seem to be a lady doing a swan dive. I kept looking at the clock to leave at the very last minute, to make it to work by midnight. Left carrying a plant she gave, my guitar, and bought a submarine sandwich and a Globe and Mail.
Got off work at 8:20; bought a spumoni ice cream.
At 4:39 pm, while writing out the dream I had, Dawn called and said that she couldn’t make it to Fiddler’s Green because she had to go to work.

Paul called and arranged to meet at Mars for dinner, Mary was there, and I paid for her dinner. Walked to Nora’s, and we went to movie Dr. Strangelove, And Now for Something Completely Different. Nora didn’t mind my loud laugh. We went to her house and I wanted to fool around, but Nora wanted me to stop. I played some guitar, Golden children. Then Nora and I went walking through some religious alleyways and ended up at Fran’s Restaurant at College. There were nose bleeding type drunks all over the place. I had sausages and then we left, and then arm in arm she told me her sad story of an old lover at camp, from way back.

Saturday I woke up at about ten with Nora taking down stuff for her garage sale. I purchased a toaster, bookcase, wok, electric frying pan, cutlery container, glass bowl, and crunchy granola all for $9:45. Went home at 11:45 and slept till 6:00. Paul called to go to Mars but I don’t remember what I ate. Came back for my guitar to jam, and a tuxedo top for the party; we both went to the party in tails.

Nora was at the party, so sat with her; didn’t feel much like partying. Mary wiggled her bottom in an exotic dance. I played a jazzed up version of Harvest Moon on the back steps and Brian way said he liked the arrangement. Paul stuck an empty glass down my shirt. Drank three beers, and walked with Nora to her place in the rain passing though the University of Toronto campus. When I woke up the next morning I went to the poetry reading at the grange.



Melissa Sternwood coasted up on her Raleigh bicycle and stopped under the Mars Food sign. "Take a good look at that sign, and tell me what's wrong," The sign had a circular yellow
neon rim and a pink ring like Saturn's, with 'Just out of this world' enclosed in yellow. The upper half had 'MARS' and the lower half had 'FOOD,' in green neon. Just Out of this World. On a background of powder blue lines of longitude and latitude clashed with the overall theme.

"I just punched Bud Rose in the mouth," she said, ignoring my question. "Two woman witnessed it, so I don't know what they thought." Melissa hooked her bike, and we went inside. Over cheese blintzes she talked of how she was once the head of the Progressive Conservative Youth Party. "Men like to have a cute fifteen year old girl pin a button to their lapel," she said.

We went to Paul's apartment on Bloor Street for a short visit. A string of bells hung on the door, with bizarre pictures. One was a nude lady running towards an open window. Inside, reproductions of the Impressionists were forced to occupy the same space as pin ups. On the window stood a wire figurine with a fedora, the icon in my short-lived song: The Man With All the Answers. Paul was raised in Chicago, and went to a parochial school named after Bart, a Saint who was flayed alive and crucified upside down. One of his teachers looked like Clark Kent in the TV series Superman, and would often make mock dashes out of the room after something jarred his attention. Paul offered us Heineken as we sat on the couch.

While Melissa phoned her mother Paul showed me my astrological chart, which was about 30 handwritten pages long. The lines that pertained to me were underlined in red. "I won't be coming home for dinner because a nice man has taken me out to eat, and we're going to the movies… All The Presidents Men… Yes mother, at Cinema Lumiere." When she hung up Melissa quoted her mother's admonition: "'Cross your legs and take three breaths.' She's a high ranking member of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and doesn't want her daughter to besmirch her outstanding reputation."

We left telling Paul we would drop by Fatal Bert’s after the movie, it being an early showing and the coffeehouse tending to go on forever. As we walked down the steps past the Oriental Palace, Melissa said, "Paul has a nice smile."

After the movie Melissa and I went to the coffeehouse where Mary greeted me with a hug, setting off a chain reaction. Molly walked in and hugged Mary. In the end, I was hugged by Alcatrash, who was just making a bold, but unrequited statement. When I told Mary that she could get a job interview at the Crazy Alarm Company she said, "You should quit that job before you get sick again. Come the revolution, the first to go will be the employers of the world."

I showed Melissa the pills I had just been prescribed, Elival Plus, because she had looked at me when Mary mentioned 'get sick again,' Melissa said, "Oh I've had to take those pills sometimes."

All this and much more was going on while the performers were performing. Sometimes the circus in the stands is more of a circus than the circus in the arena. On some occasions poets performed, the most notable being Peter Paul Van Camp, who ultimately sent me a post card from Coshocton Ohio. But waves of lesser poets made incursions into the følksingers turf, and their performance was often the cause for rampant socialization in the audience.

A few singers sang then Melissa went on stage to read her poetry. Paul said, "She really is a 'really good poet,'" in a voice that said. 'I told you so.' Everyone clapped after each poem. Usually the audience waited for the end, or left the room when poets come on. Sometimes, they would snap their fingers Bohemian style. As soon as Melissa finished we went out to the courtyard.

After putting our heads together to come up with a better way to say goodnight I went back inside to the tune up room where a sizable sing along was in progress and said good-bye to everyone. Went outside to the trees where my bicycle was shackled, and Melissa was still there. I fumbled with the combination. "You know if you weren't going back to Ottawa at the end of summer I could almost fall in...." And just then, Paul appeared from behind the skinny little tree and interrupted us.

Melissa and I made it to Yonge and were about to part for the evening. As I headed to work she said, "You almost said a word back there that you might have regretted saying. It’s a good thing you didn't."

Someday I'm going to write a song entitled: Love Was Always on the Tip of My Tongue.

Friday, July 22, 1976

I am at Melissa’s place drinking tea listening to an album with seagulls on it. She is reading Symphony in A Flat Tire, (the Epic Poem.) I met her at the Laura Secord at the Eglington subway and went to two movies at the Capital Theatre: “Seven Beauties” and “Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in a Blue Sea of August,” both by Lina Wertmüller. It was a chilly evening; we had on summer clothes and went back to her place.

Wednesday, July 28, 1976

At work 28 units went out of sync, that is, they all looked like they were in alarm, so I had to put surveillance on them with the police department, grouping them by division. Told management my Doctors orders and they said that starting next week I could have two weeks off, but I would have to come in Thursday and Friday.

Melissa called me at 5:30 saying that she would be at Fatal Bert’s. Wearing white pants and green striped shirt I rode to Mars, had breaded sole, tarter sauce and kernel corn. Hugged Mary as I came in to Fatal Bert’s. She said she would be interested in taking the job at Amplitrol doing the openings. I called work from a payphone with Mary and Charlie told her to come in tomorrow at 11.

Melissa walked over and we hugged in the hall, I showed her the pills the doctor gave me. She was wearing a thick white cotton top with jeans and had on a necklace. I talked to Molly, who said she thought she was pregnant in Europe, about my book. Talked to Mrs. Greenbaumn at the coffee percolator. Bottles and Buts came on, and I told Melissa which lines of “Just like Real Life” applied to me, lines about “the incessant scribe.” I talked to Paul Nash in the hall, Sam and Mary that I was planning a Mill Pond Picnic next Wednesday.

After the set Melissa and I went out to the courtyard.




Saturday, Aug 21, 1976

It was 3 or 4 am when I got home; it took a long time to get to sleep because of the hot humid weather. I called Melissa at 6, and she told me to come over to her house at 9:30. I had a bath after going to the LCBO, which unfortunately was closed. Went to Paul’s; Mary arrived and they started to practice “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”

Took my guitar to Melissa’s. She took me upstairs to her room, where she was sorting out her books. She said her father used to bring all sorts of books home for her. Every spring her father would bring home a hyacinth and they would wait for it to bloom. We went to the kitchen where she was preparing some chicken, and potato salad. Her brother was in the dining room reading Red Lights on the Prairies by James H. Gray and started talking about prostitutes. Melissa asked if I’d ever been to one and I told her the story of the Grade 12 Class trip to NYC and how I was with John Mac encountered two black hookers not knowing who or what they were. They had taken us to a fleabag before realizing they wanted to be paid. We didn’t want to pay, so one of them took a heavy glass ashtray and ‘convinced’ John that he should pay for their cab fare back to their spot because he had wasted their time.

I played Melissa a number of songs she’d never heard, even some I had deleted from my repertoire. As I was playing she would come over and hug me; kiss my neck, and I was still able to play the first position. I told her there was a song titled “The Girl Was Kissing The Boy While He Was Playing the Guitar.”
She told me that her friend Julia didn’t like me, but was willing to change her opinion, because she thought my relationships with other people were shallow. She had said that at Fat Albert’s’ I would stand in the doorway, and flit from person to person. Melissa said I didn’t have to defend myself, I told her that I had a fear of friends just up and leaving me with no notice like Drew had done in grade ten. Anyhow, at 12 pm Melissa was tired and kicked me out, and asked me to call her first thing in the morning.

Paul and Bud were present at the frying pan incident. Four of us had just settled in a bright orange booth at Harvey's Hot-dogs late one wintry night, Alcatrash, Paul Nash, Bud Rose and yours truly. Everyone had taken off their coats except for me; I had on a long bulky beige coat with toggles in the front. I had been arguing with Bud earlier that evening about Gordon Lightfoot. Bud thought Lightfoot was one of the Great Canadian Følksingers, and I argued that he wasn't technically a følksinger. This made Bud very upset, because he could sense I was being ornery. When I continued where we left off Bud blurted, "You're not serious."

"I am so..." I said, unbuttoning my coat to reveal a seven inch frying pan hanging from my neck by a shoelace. Bud took one look at the frying pan and almost choked on his hot dog. Everyone laughed as Bud ran out of the joint clutching his unfinished dog.

I was at Paul's one time with Bud and had brought over some Wilf Carter records. Half way through How My Yodeling Days Began Alcatrash commented on the local music scene. "Følksingers do not have the same mystique as us rock and roll singers, which of course is why I became one. Følk guitars have a fat body with a stubby neck of fourteen frets, whereas an electric guitar is more masculine, practically phallic with a sleek compact body — a longer neck with eighteen frets. Plus they are much louder."

"Ah, but the Martin guitar case is the most phallic of all," I said. "It is virtually indestructible. Just the other day some one asked me if they could sit on my 'phallic symbol.' I said 'How would you like it if some one sat on your pathetic fallacy.'"

"I read an article in People Magazine the other day about a frog being cloned," Paul said. Alcatrash and I were playing a game of table hockey, one of those games with the rods underneath the players that simulate Canada's favorite pastime.

"I can imagine," Alcatrash said, "Fifty million little phantom frogs all convening on Fat Albert's to yodel the same song."

"On that note," Paul said, "I'll have to kick you both out. I have to get up early tomorrow."

The night before the Mill Pond Picnic, I tried to call Alcatrash from a phone booth to invite him along. The image of my own pupils reflected in the glass of the telephone booth were still revolving in my mind as I hung up and headed for the busking spot. On the way, I passed a homeless man with a swollen face bumming a dime beneath the yellow logo of the Hudson Bay Company. I put a dime in his hand and watched the Bluenose sink into his grimy flesh.

At that moment Sirens Wailed from where the Bay and Commerce bank straddled Yonge Street and three fire trucks appeared. They ripped south to where Yonge disappeared before Lake Ontario. On the sidewalks masses of people stopped — and every head followed the fire trucks. Even the busty massage ladies hanging out of their second floor parlor windows peered out. The sirens subsided and I went to Busker's Paradise but could not find Paul in the pit.

The stairwell was a perfect place for buskers when the stores were closed, because a good crowd gathered around the railings, and it made a loud echo chamber. There was plenty of room for rock and roll theatrics. But another musician was wailing away so I headed to Yorkville, Paul's second choice.

At Yorkville, Paul had garnered a small crowd and was singing Happiness is a Warm Gun. A popcorn vender stopped in front of the crowd and caused the Tempestuous One to become angry at the popcorn vender's distracting whistle. Paul held his guitar as if it was a cross, and the vender was a vampire. So the popcorn vender danced like Zobra the Greek. The crowd ate it up. Paul played Hey Bungalow Bill and brandished his guitar as a gun at the line, 'Zap him right between the eyes.' This escalated ad nauseam. The bigger the crowd, the more popcorn was sold, the more people threw money in the guitar case.

I was sitting there writing it all down in my black book when Paul finished. "This is artistic symbiosis," Paul said, "It has been going on for Centuries. The popcorn vender is like the bird on the crocodiles' back waiting for the crock to open up so that he can extract a few morsels from the teeth."

THE MILL POND PICNIC

The rendezvous for the Mill Pond Picnic was at Union Station. Sam, Mary, Paul and Molly all came along. The first time I met Molly was in the spring of '74. Sam and Mary were on their way to see Harold and Maude and Molly invited herself along. Molly was a real movie freak, and was constantly after Sam. Mary was with hoping Molly would take an interest in me. Her interest proved to be short lived. I laughed outrageously through the flick. Molly said, 'I thought my laugh was outrageous till I heard yours.' My father, wearing an orange Hawaiian shirt, met the Go Train at the Bronte Station in his Dodge Dart and drove us to Acorn.

After tea with my parents we embarked on a walking tour, starting with our backyard. "This is a very historical place," I said, "On June 15, a year ago, I carried a typewriter out to this very spot, and took a stab at my life story — a passage about being four years old in an old derelict Nash hiding from the firecrackers.

Sam interrupted with a fake yawn. "Just think, someday there will be a plaque here that reads 'This is the house where the author of Dying Cow Blues spent his childhood.' Sam could say the most sarcastic things in an affable way. "We'll be able to bring our kids here and pay homage."

"When they make a movie of Sunset Metaphors, I want to play the part of the English tea drinking monarchist," Mary said. "Of course, that is, if there are any tea drinking monarchists left after the revolution." It never occurred to Mary that there would be no Hollywood after the Revolution; that the sign on the hill would be riddled with machine gun fire.

"When we first moved here in the summer of 1957," I continued, "We tore down the barn that was adjacent to what was then the tennis courts. This house used to be on the outskirts of town; it was an old farmhouse where a wandering blacksmith lived." We walked to Main Street, past the corner gas station and the Co-op. I told them how the perimeter of the gas station was once lined with pastel painted tires. "Over there in the side of a small hill, I built an underground fort with the trappers' son. Laurence and I used to use broken hockey sticks to spear at beavers on our way to school, and his father used to entertain us by springing a bear trap."

We went beyond the tracks, passing beneath the trestle with CN 1962 on it. "This raised trestle was built with Yellow Caterpillars that scraped the meadows by the abandoned brickyard. We built forts in the uprooted boughs. Beyond the railroad, is farmland. In that barn over there, my friend Bruce and I made a secret maze out of bales of hay. At the end of Given Road, there's a farm with a big pond. My friend Jimmy lived there, and we used to swing on a rope in his barn, and jump into the feed."

Before stopping back to my house, we paused to look at the remains of our tree house. "The foundation for the tree house in that Chestnut tree was virtually indestructible. Kim must have driven a hundred or so six inch spikes through several 2 x 4's." The nails projected through the floor like a wicked medieval defense system. "And this is where the checkerboard sign was, the sign that I was sitting on when Kim poked me with a stick, and I fell when trying to throw a football at him, thus breaking my arm."

Up the street I showed them old Campbell's house, and the metal ring in the sidewalk for hitching horses. It was across the Street from the cenotaph, the limestone statue of the World War I soldier. "Our neighbor, Frank Shannon used to be the parade Marshall at the Remembrance Day parades. Those big limestone buildings were the county courthouses and the Brown Street Jail. That's where my mother started working as a correctional officer. As you may know, I refer to the jail in the song Sugar Heart. This is the arena where I was forced to play hockey. They're gonna tear it down and make a post office. Kim and I were Rink Rats here; this is where I made my fortune in flat pick money. They paid us twenty-five cents each time we scraped the ice. Kim and I used to hang out here, shooting hockey cards in the halls beneath the bleachers."

"This corner is where the Acorn Inn used to be, where I listened to the solo country singers with their drum machines. It burnt to the ground. Across the street beside the church is where I used to get my bundle for my paper route. One day I caused a big sensation with the paper carriers when I put the words 'flower power' on my white T- shirt with a magic marker.

"To my right is the Doctors house with the infamous pear tree. Once I threw a pear at the Janitor's 1953 GMC pick up truck. The truck screeched to a halt and I made my famous run — through the Rotary Park, along the 16 mile creek, past PL Robertson's and the old train station, which has been relocated and serves as a visitors center on the other side of town.

"This is the site of another plaque, stating 'This is where Stefan tossed a pear,' and here is a map of his getaway route," Sam said.

"Until recently there was a blacksmith that worked out of this shop. You can see the sign 'Waldies, since 1865.' When I was a kid I'd walk past here with my towel on my way to swim at the Rotary Park, and would see him sparking away at his anvil.

We headed back to Main Street and walked to the center of town. "At this post office, during the harvest season a school bus used to pick up cherry pickers to take them to the escarpment." Across the street Mary and Molly went into Ledwith's supermarket, while Sam, Paul and I got some Kentucky Fried Chicken. Standing beside the stoplight at Martin and Main I took a photograph of Sam with his head inside the Kentucky Fried Chicken bag Paul was holding.

On Marten Street we stopped to view the Mill Pond. In front of the Limestone monolith Paul looked at the Centennial commemoration and said, "Hey, Stef, they left you're name off this plaque." A row of willows flanked the pond, which was on the right, while on the left ran the Sixteen Mile Creek, which was named for its length. Beyond it you could see the Rotary Park, with the tennis courts, the swimming pool and the baseball diamonds. We walked along the path towards the forested area. "This is where I wrote the name inside a Heart of Snow. Through these willow string curtains I watched the figure skater. At the end of the pond there is a spillway and a frozen waterfall. The boys used to rush to the spillway and slam on the brakes inches before the waterfall."

As I continued on the Tour de Farce Sam and Paul talked about baseball. I couldn't hear what Mary and Princess Molly were talking about. At the end of the path we reached the whirlpool forest. The guitar case was used as a coffee table, and sported a few puddles of wine. Little beetles walked over the case. When Sam finished a piece of chicken he flung the bone to the forest.

"This bone looks like the Starship Enterprise." It disappeared at Warp Speed. My mother's instamatic was passed around and we yucked it up taking pictures of each other. None of them turned out.

"We should have a contest to see who can take the worst picture." Mary said. We played some baseball with an old rotten branch and an abandoned tennis ball, and then headed back.

Back at my parents house I gave some Phantom Frog debut photographs to my friends. "Can you autograph mine," Sam said.

For a blissful moment everyone listened as I talked about: “The World Premier of the Yodeling Frog at Fatal Bert’s — Ladies and Gentlemen." Sam had begun the introduction wearing a Century Old Tuxedo. "We are gathered here at Fat Albert's eternal coughing house on the l7th of March in the year of our comprehension, l976, to witness (dare I say) one of the most (dare I say) wonderful (dare I say) spectacles of the (dare I say) twentieth century. For what does this cosmic big top of the universe have up its sleeve ready to dash into the limelight? What is tucked beneath a Tuxedo of Luck? What will enter from the mystic curtain of sacred shamrock snafu on this rare occasion of leap year's St. Patrick's Eve? With no further peregrinations I will tell you. It is my supreme imperial pleasure to present intimately and entirely from Acorn, Ontario and Mars, this World's Premiere of that Amplified Amphibian, The Fabulous Yodeling Frog."

The introduction was muffled behind the secret door of the janitor's closet amid the mops and rags and old washing machines with their dead wringers. It was hardly the room one would expect a star to emerge from. Someone knocked the signal on the janitor's door and I entered with Mary dressed in her rare form and walked through the crowd. I was dressed in a frog costume of green velvet tuxedo, striped green and gold vest, green matching britches, white gloves, shirt and long socks, and wore golden spats on my feet. On my head was a huge frog head. (The costume, incidentally, had cost $31.90 for rental, and the gig paid $32.00 so I made one measly dime on my world's premier.) Mary led me to the stage where my music stand was set up and my indispensable gasmask bag with my black books was hung. I looked through the yellow mesh screen into the huge silver insect eye of the microphone as the flash bulbs began to flash, and blurted, "I suppose you were expecting a leprechaun. But what is a leprechaun but yesterday's laughter; we are all Leprechauns, so long as we don't look behind us." Just as I announced I will now reveal my true identity," Mary in her magnificent role of a magician's assistant, kissed me on the head—and helped me remove the frog mask revealing my clown's face. Then I proceeded to sing every frog song I knew...

Ma served a traditional dinner of Roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and upside down peach cake. There was not enough room for all at the table so Molly ate on a tray in the living room with my brother Danny and watched Get Smart on television. After dinner ma poured some proverbial tea in her bone china cups. "Why don't you tell us how you came to Canada," Mary said.

"I left England in March of 1944. Fern was stationed at an air force base; he was loading bombs on planes. I didn't know when I'd be sailing because of the secrecy involved in the ship's movements... Fern was discharged and joined me up there. He started working the mines in Timmins but then moved to Toronto after the twins were born. Fern started working at Goodyear just after Stefan was born." Ma didn't tell them that after working for Goodyear for 20 years, all they offered in recognition was a dinner that Fern refused to attend, because the wives weren't included. He did get a commemorative pewter dish. He had been off work for a year because of back trouble and didn't even get a get well card from the company.

"Did I tell you about my brother Kim's homemade burglar alarm? There were holes in the floors from the old wood stove, so Kim connected a string to his bedroom door, and put a big plastic tarantula at the end of the string. We'd be sitting at the dinner table when a rubber Tarantula would drop down and dangle. Kim would run upstairs to confront Danny."


Kim pulled up in his big stake truck and honked his horn. He had come to drive us into Toronto having a green speckled couch to deliver to Terry's on the way. So he offered us all a lift. As we piled unto the back seat of the truck, Kim hoisted his dumper a bit threatening to dump us out. As my mother and father waved good-bye Sam yelled out "Next time we come do we have to bring Stefan?"


NEW CHAPTER

"This would make an interesting picture of you," Melissa said, "Sitting here strumming your guitar with the sunset out the window." She giggled as I played A Little Red Bug. "I think you use the guitar sometimes as a defense." Earlier that day, August 6th, 1976, to be precise, I had met Melissa at the Blood Donor Clinic, where she worked as an assistant. We stopped to eat at a vegetarian restaurant. Although I was technically on another two-week sick leave, somehow I mustered the power to pick up my pay at the Crazy Alarm Company.
In Mr. Gateways we shopped for Sam's birthday gift. Melissa giggled when the clerk winced at my, "Have you The Profit by Kellogg All Bran." She knew people who had read from The Prophet at their weddings, and thought it a disgusting practice. But they didn't have the parody, so I purchased a Fokker tri-plane, the same small plastic model my brother Kim had so rudely demolished in Canada's Centennial year. Rounding Queen's Park, Melissa remarked, "Did you know that you're duck-footed?"

"No but if you hum a few bars..."

We splurged on some ice cream on the way to my place. Before discussing frog lore I read a passage from a book entitled, The Sex Life of the Animals. A passage describing the rituals of frogs procreating had Melissa in stitches. Molly called to ask what she should get for Sam, interrupting Melissa's laughter. I suggested a Swiss Army knife. Then Mary called asking me come over to ready the surprise, so we rode to her place at the end of Howland Street.

The first to arrive at Sam's surprise party was Molly, then a girl dressed in an old curtain. They sat on the living room floor while Melissa and I sat on the couch, having a private conversation. "Molly has a nice giggle," Melissa whispered. I told her how Mary and Sam had introduced me to Molly.

"She does seem kind of young," said Melissa. Across the room, the girls were giggling as they lit a corncob pipe. "That's why I hated going to an all-girl Anglican school. Too much giggling... Her dress is made out of a curtain — she obviously didn't use a pattern. It depresses me to them smoke that pipe. It's just a defense. I see that so often in people."
"Well, we shouldn't be whispering these things," I said, as more people arrived.

Alcatrash was plugged in when Sam walked through the door and broke into, 'You Say It's Your Birthday.' At strategic points Alcatrash would toss the guitar in mid twang sustaining notes and levitating his instrument simultaneously.

Melissa had to leave at eleven o'clock and borrowed my bicycle light. I stayed a while longer. Someone placed tiger balm on my head; as I had developed a headache from the pills I was taking for my nervous stomach, the drinking, and the smoke in the air.

I did not see Melissa for eleven days as she went to a Blood Donor Clinic in Sault St. Marie. She sent me a postcard from the Empress Hotel. On the 13th of August she returned and called me from a phone booth in Yorkville. Melissa said that the 'Soo' was dreary; that the girl she shared the room with was ugly and insulted her incessantly. Finally she called the girl, 'A Macho; is that too many syllables for you?' She went on to say that Bud was coming to celebrate her birthday, that the 'Soo' was so full of sulfur that there were a dozen pimples on her face. "Call me tomorrow at supper time."

The next day I called Melissa from a phone booth at Spadina and College as it was drizzling. Melissa said that she wouldn't be able see me because Bud Rose was on his way. I told her the story of how Paul had been at The Crazy Alarm Company a few years before when the song I Like Little Baby Ducks came on the radio. Paul was just about to say that the song appealed to 'The emotional level of a thirteen year-old,' when the Manager said that it was his favorite song. Paul had to bite his hand to keep from laughing. Then Melissa sang the whole song over the phone. She knew the song because the rock station in Ottawa also played country music.

On Melissa's birthday I wrote Up to You. The final line: 'The impossible pile of rocks that I face, is just an old friend I forgot to embrace,' came to me while riding my bike to Yorkville, and almost got hit by a cab as I jotted down the line. Between the writing of the song, and not being able to sing it to her for a few days, I became anxious. When Melissa finally called me at work, she said she'd had a great birthday party at Noodle's where she had received two necklaces, one from her best friend, Julie, the platinum haired poet, the other from Bud Rose. She said that she would meet me at Fat Albert's. When she didn't show up and I called her in a 'tizzy,' she said 'sorry' seven times.

This was when the phone calls began. It was not unusual when I called the Sternwood's to hear Melissa's brother yelling in the background, 'Is that one of your poet friends?' or 'Stefan is a such a dilettante.' Finally I met Melissa at the Manulife Center. We picked up my guitar at work and walked west on Bloor Street. She guessed we headed to Philosopher's Walk. Seated with our backs against the walls of The Museum, I played the new song.

She did not look at me when I sang. "That's a marvelous song."

I took my guitar home; we rode our bikes to the Continental for Navy Bean Soup before going to Bourbon Street. On the way I lit a fart and Melissa laughed and told me about a fellow in summer camp who made blue flames by igniting his farts. We rode our bikes through the streets south of Bloor, where a lot of the gardens have cosmos, the purple, white, and pink flowers growing on nebulous filaments of long green stems. We stopped in to see her father's jazz band. When a fan at another table winked at me. Melissa said, "She thinks you're important, because you're with me."

On the long ride to Rosedale we sang songs as “My Analyst Told Me” by Joni Mitchell. Melissa tried to hold my hand as we raced along. She told me how Bud Rose could play pinball all afternoon on the same quarter. Then I told her the story behind Sugar Heart, just before she went in, and I rode my bike to work. We made plans to meet for a picnic the next day.

Throwing the Melissa in the Lake

After a wretched breakfast, only three hours sleep and a million sheep counted since seeing Melissa I walked into the bright sunshine with my guitar. I was to meet her on the southbound platform of the Yonge Bloor subway station. It was the 22nd of August 1976. With my Frog City T-shirt and Jean cutoffs, I thought it would be pleasant to have the first train pull up with Melissa standing in its doorway, and that's just what happened.

During the ferry ride to Toronto Islands I told her of the many ferry rides I'd been on, and the one I took every day while I worked at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. Melissa was surprised that I had worked there on the grounds. Walking a ways through grass still shiny with dew, she told me a story about how she had gone out with a guy who'd played in a band at the RCYC. And how no one had asked her to the formal. "I thought, 'I'm a good kid...why doesn't anyone take me.'"

We walked through the grass where tiny frogs were hopping along, came to the beach; and waded in the water. We passed a sand castle, spread a blanket and began our picnic. I played Maze of Metaphors and Forever for a Minute. I told her how Sam had backed me up at Fat Albert’s where we billed ourselves as St. Pierre and Michelon. Sam played bass on Charlie Rogers and his Tap Dancing Dog and Dying Cow Blues. That was the first and last time I played electric kazoo.

When I mentioned that I had not finished playing some of my songs the other night because her brother was in the other room listening, Melissa said, "That's what I thought." I had played some of my older songs, while her brother was engrossed in Red Lights On the Prairies. This led to a discussion about my grade twelve trip to New York. Melissa told me that Julie had said she had not liked me having seen me at a poetry reading standing right in the doorway, trying to pick up girls. I was about to explain when Melissa said, "You don't have to defend yourself."

It was difficult for me to digest the chicken as Melissa read two of Theodore Roethke's poems, I knew a Woman Lovely in her Bones and The Waking, which she said was close to her actual feelings. She gave me the Roethke book as well as Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn.

I peeled an orange in one piece and said, "This is a little trick I learned in the circus when I used to feed the lions Wintergreen Breath mints."

Melissa told me far too many times that I was, "Lion through my teeth."

"If you don't cease and desist I'll throw you in the lake."
"OK, throw me in the lake," she challenged. I hesitated and she said, "You're irresolute." Melissa walked barefoot to the edge. I picked her up and dropped her so that she would get her feet wet.
Melissa was wearing a light-colored shirt and kept sucking her finger, where it was blistered from sanding the pine chest her mother had given her. She had asked for a double bed but her mother bought her a single, hoping to keep her that way, at least for a while. Then Melissa talked about the twenty friends she had who used to drink on a yacht when she was fifteen because the police couldn't touch them as a yacht is classed as a residence. She talked about the man with the Mercedes she dated a year before, and how he tried to have his way with her. This inspired one of her famous poems. Then about how she had met Bud Rose after spending nights alone in her room in Ottawa, writing strange things. Bud Rose followed her home and wouldn't leave so she made a drink for him 'because that's a good thing to do when you want some to take their mind off things...'

Crossing the harbor Melissa talked about how she went sailing at her cottage by herself and their neighbors have a power boat and expect bathers to swim out of their way. She pointed out a lions-head necklace around a man's neck. As I looked into her eyes I saw a reflection of the harbor with tiny flecks of white boats sailing around.

We went to a poetry reading after at the Art Gallery, and arrived in time to hear the budding poet read his bloody poems. I told Melissa I'd like to see her as much as possible before she left for Ottawa as we stood beside Andy Warhol’s Elvis and said good-bye.

I woke up after a bad sleep and went to Paul's, knowing Mary would be there. They were practicing Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. When they stopped for a break I told Mary that Melissa was once a councilor at camp and presided over a nature club. Mary said, 'I think you're in...'

"Don't say it."


Sunday. October 30, 1976

Woke up at 8:20, at 49 Mary, had four pieces of toast and coffee. Went for a walk with binoculars and bird field guide out past the brickyard. All I saw were two blue jays, some warblers and a woodpecker. I was humming Starry Starry night, Vincent, not singing the words, I felt like the fields were incredible, not wanting to scare the birds away. Spent three hours writing a letter to Melissa but ripped it up. One line went: "I've painted myself into a corner of the sky that can only hold a sunset." It’s a good thing I ripped it up.

After bird watching I walked along the Mill Pond and ran into Jenny Duignan, who was carrying a Globe and Mail. She said there weren't too many birds to see this year, and hurried home with her paper.

Then I helped Fern put plastic on the windows. Called Kim and told him about it and he made a big fan fare about me helping my father. Kim said, "Here's something to write in your book... Once Voggan and some guys rented a truck to haul leaves, so we could dump them on a wooden bridge at the 4th line, and set fire to it hoping the police would chase them and run into it, but somebody called the fire department."

Went downtown and bought some stuff for my costume: a plastic helmet, big ears, orange tape, a toy machine gun and a bright orange yo-yo. Came home and painted my green rubber army surplus maxi coat with blotches of metallic paint, and when it dried I used the orange tape to write "Bird Watcher" on the back. Danny was not happy that I ruined my coat. I told Danny, "Could you imagine if I went to a bird-watching expedition with the Toronto Field Naturalist's Club wearing this coat?"

Sue came by with Shelly Hare who baby-sits for her. I made beans and was talkative. Went to Shannon's next door and Lippai's, two doors down.

After supper I went with Danny towards Don Makowskis' place. We stopped at George Taft's on the way; I met his fiancée and played a couple songs on Danny's Ovation. At Don's we sat in the living room with his parents and watched a bit of a movie... [Danny made the following entry: "We went downstairs and smoked a few joints and listened to some albums and Stefan and Don argued till twelve — what about I couldn't tell you, thank you, Dusty Dan…]

Well I told Don a bit about the Phantom Frog. He was pseudo intellectually abrasive, harmlessly dumb; and swell headed about being in the Oakville Symphony. "It's a prestigious position," he said.

I mentioned that we weren't communicating well. I told him "Even if we were the only two men on an island of beautiful maidens and were enslaved for the pleasure of the maidens, in spite of that pleasant predicament, we would probably have nothing nice to say to each other." Basically Don thought that I might be committed for continuing with the "Froglore Shtick.”

Anyhow; I was tired; and the aphrodisiac brought out the miserable self-destructive side of me. There are two things I will endeavor to avoid in the future. One is Don, two, Marijuana — for my own good. Mr. Makowski is not Mr. Einstein. Don did not like my costume.

Reflecting on this some thirty years later: Volume 13 was filled with references to Melissa that I had underlined in red. Some of them were quite distressing, others were dreams that I had of her, dreams that included Bud Rose as the rival for her affections. In editing my journal I have omitted them, as well as the notes that I made for my book and shoptalk about the alarm company. It is nauseating to read about me going around telling everyone that I was writing a book. I gave some of my friends, who I wrote about anthropomorphically forms and made notes of them. Mary was "True Love;" Sam was "The Red Unicorn;" Paul the wisest of my friends went along with "the Village Idiot," and even signed his name to that affect in my journal. Molly was a princess, and Bud Rose was pan. People who sat beside me on the train or met by chance in some cafe or bar were subjected to my diabolical plots. So maybe Don was unto something.]

Sunday, October 30, 1976

Anyway, it is now 5:30 and I'm waiting for the Go train to go. Had roast pork dinner, watched He-Haw with ma, after ma gave me some stuff to do my face up with. Ma said that she went to her ophthalmologist and showed him how she could now move her eye. He had thought that after her stroke that it would always be paralyzed, but she kept trying and finally got it to move. She said she was going to live another 25 years.

Couldn't catch the Go bus, so I hitch hiked on Ontario Street and got a ride with Michael Whinney who was driving his father’s car and dressed as a wizard. I talked about the bicycle trip we went on to Oakville in the summer of 1966 with two dozen of us kids. At that time Sam and I got in a scrap and I threatened him with the tiny monkey wrench that was attached to my bicycle seat. There were about thirty kids on bikes, riding to Oakville and pretending to be Hell’s Angels.
It is now Monday 6:30 am and Both Sides Now is playing on the radio. That song can bring tears to my eyes...

So I arrived at the party at the Sam’s house; and Mary, dressed as a hillbilly freckled girl; helped me don my clown face. Sam performed Lorraine wearing dark glasses, a newspaper hat and was draped in an American flag. He danced the Wind-up Monkey Dance. Someone offered five bucks to anyone who could bob an apple out of a tub of water without using their hands. I won by forcing the apple to the edge of the tub so I could get my teeth in it.

Saturday November 6, 1976

5:30 am Mars: Sausage and eggs. On the way to Leslie Street Spit on a bird watching expedition. King Eider; Heron; Horned Larks; Sanderling, Black ducks; great blue Heron; a huge flock of Snow buntings; Lapland Longspur; Loon; Goldeneye and Oldsquaw ducks.

Called Melissa at 8:18 and had a marvelous conversation. Went to Molly’s where her mother talked about patience and about an old man who was getting amputated. Molly and I went to the Old Folks Home, just south a few houses on Madison and sang. It was Molly’s first public appearance. We played from 8:10 to 10:10, then went back to Molly’s and watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Thursday, November 18, 1976

Called Charlie at the alarm company and said I was sick, I couldn’t come in. He said, “We’re going to have to do something about you. Gonna call Gurakski and have a talk with you tomorrow.” I said I would get a note from my doctor.

As I was sitting by the turnstiles at Yonge and Bloor waiting for Melissa Charlie walked by and saw me and had a big “I caught you” smile. 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.

Saturday, Nov. 20, 1976

I woke up and called Melissa, we were supposed 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 place where Melissa read 17 of her poems. Melissa said her legs were hurting her, and left to go to Mary’s shower.

At Mary’s shower I sat with Paul, and Mary; most of our friends were there. I talked to Mary about the picture I drew in Molly’s coloring book when I visited her in the hospital. Sam and Mary started opening gifts just as Melissa arrived, and sat behind me at first. Soon Melissa was beside me on my left and kept kissing me on the neck saying “got ya,” and “got ya 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.

A month later, on Friday December 24, I ran into Melissa again and wrote about it in my journal: “Well it’s 4:21 pm and I’m at a railroad restaurant at Union Station having just had a whirlwind talk with Melissa, who exited the Nutcracker Suite with her mother and Andrea. (Having Coffee and toast as I write this, waiting for my train.) They were first ones out; I walked to the corner with Melissa holding my hand and me greeting her by kissing her below the left eye. 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 the Golden Asse; she said she had not prepared mine. Said to call me when she got back that she was staying till January 5th.”

We had our gift giving Celebration Christmas eve. I took the Go Train to Bronte and walked towards Kim’s house and was picked up in Kim’s 74 Blue Lincoln Continental. Kim had on a light blue suit. Cindy was wearing a flashy tan-bronze velvet dress and Dylan had on a checkered suit. Kim took me downstairs to show me a chromium gun to set engines and an engine analyzer. Upstairs waiting for the kettle to boil we tap-danced a few steps for Dylan to imitate. Then with Kim and Cindy cursing at each other, we carried gifts to the car.

Well, we arrived; ma was dressed in a long elegant white dress, with her hair done up nice; and Fern was fixing the meal unnoticed in the background. I walked around and kissed all my brothers on the cheek for a laugh. I went up to Danny’s room and talked to Maureen on the phone. I told her the joke about how the angel got to the top of the tree. I goofed around a lot.

Bob thanked me for the letter I sent him. He said he understood it, so I asked him to elaborate. “Well you’re lost and I’m lost and we’re both trying to find ourselves.” Played guitar a bit, trying to make Dylan dance with Kelly and Shelly.

Rick told me he wanted to move up North so he could ski and then he’d write a book. He’d read all of Henry Miller’s books. He explained that he was more prolific than Miller sexually.

Dylan kept climbing over all the presents, and knocked over the jellybeans. After dinner the gifts were opened. Ma got me a pair of boots and said she ordered two books for me T S Elliot’s complete works and Aesop’s Fables. There was a barrage of gifts. Around nine we assembled by the banister for a family photo; one shot of everyone looking into the lens, and one everyone looking askew. Danny told me it was the best Christmas he had ever had. Fern was sedate and had managed the dinner well. I felt it was a miracle that we were all together. (Another miracle attributed to my mother.)

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 for me to form. I had never dealt with the loss of my grandpa, because my parents had not let me see him towards the end, and I didn’t go to the funeral. 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.

A TATTERDEMALION TRAIN

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 verandah 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 Granddad to do the 'Tatterdemalion Train.' Tatterdemalion means raggedy fellow. 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 my brother, Kim and me. 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, and 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 grandpa, or for seeing someone like Melissa, who was ultimately unattainable?

Sweeping the Fog Away, with its images of dandelions, brought the memories of grandpa 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. As grandpa would have wanted me to, to go on with the show.

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."

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 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 verandah, 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.

Christmas dinner

I was sitting at the kitchen table, writing in my journal when Fern walked into the room. Fern 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."






The following summer I had an almost fleeting romance. I was at a farmhouse that Sam’s band used for practicing. The sun came out as we were drinking wine and listening to records. Some one caught a baby barn swallow in the barn, and let it go in the house. For some reason I was quite perturbed by this. We walked barefoot half a mile through a freshly plowed field. It made me think of Sunflowers. I called Philipa Williams from the farmhouse, and she volunteered to come and pick me up. A week prior to that at a screening of Islands in the Stream I made the mistake of showing Philipa the copy of my letter to ma in England. She thought the contents were, "A bit much." We returned to my place where I played, Masterpiece of Heart, Golden Children and Yellow Caterpillars. Then we walked along Bloor Street and she told me that her father was a magistrate in India. We bumped into Princess Molly who mentioned one of my bogus postcards that I had Paul send from Chicago adding to her profound impression of me.

Philipa arrived at the farm and took me to her apartment in Forest Lanes near Shepherd. She cooked dinner. At the center of the table there were two peonies in a vase. We listened to some music. I read her poems. I suggested tacitly that we put our heads together and come up with some poetry. She was not interested in collaborating. So I went to Cinema Lumiere, by myself and saw The Passenger.

I went back to Philipa's place a couple days later for tea, and we drove to Bramalea to pick strawberries. As we both went up the row I told her about one of my favorite verses in the song I Once Loved a Lass. She said, "Why don't you sing it?" It was a traditional song.

The men from the forest they ask it of me
How many strawberries grow in the salt sea
I answer them all with a tear in me eye,
Aye, how many ships sail in the forest.

On the way back in her car, Philipa told me that she wanted to get a degree in Marine Biology. She got near her place and stopped by the Subway to let me out. "I just want to spend a quite evening washing my strawberries."

Went to Mary's with a box of strawberries and sat on the back porch in the sun to eat them. Mary had on her lemon yellow mohair sweater. I told her about picking them with Philipa and how she wanted to be just friends. "Just being friends sucks," she said.

I reached for one the bigger strawberries. "You shouldn't overlook the small strawberries," Mary said. "God only put just so much taste in each strawberry."


While walking East on Bloor late one day, three mischievous kids blatantly hid behind telephone poles, every time I turned around to look at them. When I entered the Ontario Museum, they were hiding behind the popcorn vendor. Paul Nash was on duty wearing a 'Ban the Bomb' button on the back of his tie. He revealed it with mock secrecy as he showed me an article about germ warfare from the Toronto Star. When I left to view the Chinese Calligraphy Exhibit, Paul opened the glass case enclosing the model of the museum's new renovations and inserted a purple toy dinosaur to nibble the trees in Philosopher's Walk. "I wanted to put a toy chicken on the Planetarium but I couldn't find one."

I waited for Paul to get off work, so we could go to Molly's party. We arrived just as Sam and Mary were leaving. We talked briefly while the baker sat on a crate taking a break by the donut factory. "I've had enough,” Sam said, “It's the same old følkies jamming on C, G and F."

Not long into the party I met Miriam who was sitting on the couch doing a reading with Tarot Cards. I went with her to the park past the Greenbaumn's place on Summerhill. She said she was in the Society of Creative Anachronisms. Speculative glances greeted us at the end of our four-hour walk.
The next evening I went to a Mid Summer's Eve party after seeing Blue Champagne at Theater in The Dell. The party was close to the CN tower, so that the full moon moved behind the observation deck of the tower, it created a halo. I was wearing my Frog City Tee Shirt, which I hadn't worn since the winter solstice of Sam and Mary's wedding. Paul was there wearing white pants, a blue denim jacket and white shirt. "Time," he said, "is only a fluctuation of the spectrum and has nothing to do with numbers."

Honey Bee Revue

In the early hours of Saturday, when the lights of the Oriental Palace still flooded the window above the grocery store, I'd sit at the little oak desk looking out at Bloor Street writing. The star on the window had long since faded, along with my hopes to see Melissa. The amber glow of the Oriental Palace would permeate the front room enhancing the painting of the Honey Bee Revue, which depicted the dancers from across the street. The Plexiglas sign had a red pagoda in the blue rectangle of neon and the huge red oriental palace on a yellow background. The sign would flicker randomly throughout the night, long past the departure of the final dancing girl.

Sometimes in those flickering moments I would walk the block east to the pinball arcade at the corner of Borden to look inside to see if anyone was there. Usually Paul Nash, Molly, and sometimes Alcatrash would be in the billiard parlor. It had taken me a while to get into playing pool again. I had bleak boyhood memories of shooting pool with my brother Kim. With Kim it was not winning the game it was how many balls you could knock off the table.

One night I was furious that an employee at the Crazy alarm Company had told the management that I had broken the wake-up machine. Paul was at the Pinball Arcade and advised me not to hate the guy because, as he put it, "There's a whole set of ideas that you're cutting off." Paul Nash played pool with a piece of aluminum in his back pocket. He had been protesting at a coffee house that had charged him admission when he performed. He had dropped it incessantly on the floor. No one took the game seriously. I knocked balls off the table, used my toes to cradle the cue, wore the triangle as a hat and put chalk on the long cue by holding it vertical while standing on a chair.

Paul started rambling between shots. "I just got the booking of my life. Bud Rose had me booked at the Palmerston Library for one and a half songs and up to ten dollars but told me he'd overdosed on Waterloo Sunset. I went down to the gig and the librarians told me it must be at the Parliament Street Library, so I went there and waited for my one and a half songs. But that was the wrong place too. Finally I heard from Bud — he had gone down to the OM to tell me about the cancellation and someone had kicked him down the stairs of the subway — the other day at the Eaton Center; every time I go near there he pops out from behind a tree. I think he must circle around that tree waiting to tell some unsuspecting artist he had another booking and then tell them the story of his life before disappearing behind a tree."

The following day I went to a screening of The Magic Flute with Miriam. The flags in the courtyard were whipped stiff by the wind, as we went underground. Afterwards we had Chinese food, then went to my place and made a deal: I'd write a song for her if she would buy me some cheap bathtub boats. She bought me a little red and a little green plastic tugboat. The song I came up with was called Leading Man Gets Lost. At the time she worked as a bank teller at the CNE

On Friday, August 29, Mary gave birth to a girl. She had quit working at the Crazy Alarm Company the month before. I went to see her with Mrs. Greenbaumn. While peering through the looking glass, another woman pointed to Mary's baby as if it were her own. Mary could have been angry had it not been additional proof that it was "A perfect bunny."

Later that day I was riding my bicycle towards Yonge and met Melissa by chance. She had just had her hair done in tight curls and was on her way to meet her mother. We talked for a few minutes as she bit her nails. Then I remembered the nasty letter I had sent after she stood me up at the zoo. So I apologized. We arranged to meet again the following day.

When I arrived at Trinity Square that Saturday afternoon, Melissa was running away from Bud Rose, yelling, "Death and destruction, death and destruction..." She calmed down and said, "Everyone is upset with me for leaving behind a trail of broken hearts. No one cares about mine." I sang a few bars of my parody of the Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze to prove how much I cared. Then we headed for Philosopher's Walk. All the way Melissa talked about how she'd been hanging around the singles bars.

When first entering Philosopher's Walk from Bloor, the south end the CN tower appeared to be at the end of the path, as Oz was at the end of the yellow brick road. I played Up to You; then read some stuff.

While I made dinner Melissa sat in the study and browsed through my books. Books had been an important to Melissa since her father started buying her volumes when she was a little girl. When we finished our rice, boiled sausage and corn on the cob, Melissa lit some matches. She showed me the matchbook she had picked up at Sherlock's. "Do you go to singles bars?" she asked. I nodded as she said, "Oh. I just wanted to see if they'd burn all the way down."

Melissa looked at the painting of The Honey Bee Revue and talked of the six dancing girls in different day-glow colors. The painting had a florescent glow about it, which was rare for an oil painting. "I like the green one with the blue on her breast." I told Melissa how the painting was financed; how my dad handed me the hundred-dollar bill and said, "Use this for a life preserver."

Just before leaving Melissa looked into the back room and saw the inflatable skeleton I had hanging in the closet. "I should have stayed in Ottawa," she said, "One of these days I'm going to write you a poem called, Dark Frog."

The one image that stuck with me the most from my time in Toronto was standing in front of the bay window during a party at my apartment above the grocery store. "Do you mind if I draw a star in the mist?" Mary asked, stepping into the light of the foggy window. The star she drew spiraled out like a spider's web. From across the street the amber glow of the huge Plexiglas sign of the Oriental Palace filled the room with artificial light. The amber light added a mysterious luster to the tiny dark flowers on Mary's red blouse. As the water dripped through the lines an eerie glow illuminated her brown hair with gold. Two candles burned behind us, in the center of the floor as the party droned on. There were two cards on the floor the magician left behind, as the star reached the edge of the window. I could have commented on the star, saying it was pure poetry, but I had to ask, "Have you heard from Melissa lately?" Mary just shook her head.


With one's back to the painting of the Honey Bee Revue in my living room, sitting on the green speckled couch, one would have a good vantage to see everything in the apartment. Flanking the bay window and the little oak desk were two framed pictures. The poster on the left above the steamer trunk was from the Canadian Opera; a lady with a white face with seashell ears, her rouge lips opening in song. This poster could be seen from the kitchen, all the way through the huge hall. To the left of the little oak desk a hardcover Webster's dictionary rested on a music stand. On the other side of the window hung a poster of The Europeans' Vision of America;' an Indian with a parrot on her shoulder. The wall opposite the couch showcased twelve antique song sheets, in cheap black Woolworth's frames. In front of the couch, on the coffee table there was an assortment of picks and harmonicas. On the wall facing the bay window was the ugly framed poster of Queen Victoria that cost sixty dollars. Hanging from the ceiling in front of the Queen was a spider plant, below it a terrarium with a plastic pig in it. Off the living room was a small room with French folding double doors, and the army cot I used for a bed. At night the room was lit by a tacky lamp, which twirled inside, making a lifelike image of Niagara Falls cast rippled light on the walls.

New Chapter

Arrived in Acorn on Mother's Day '78, after taking the evening Go Bus. Danny came downstairs, and we watched Get Smart on TV. I took wacky home movies of him outside. Terry dropped by 49 Mary with some porcelain squirrels, his Mother's Day gift. Danny, Terry and I played Water Ring Toss, a cheap toy with push buttons; then watched Spencer Tracy in Fly Boy. It was almost dawn when I got to sleep after reading some Sherlock Homes.

On the day of the flight I woke at three; Rick had been downstairs, but I didn't get down in time to see him. Fern made a quick dinner, has-beans, ham from yesterday and two eggs; then loaded the car and took us to the airport. Danny lent me his Ovation guitar; we insured it for seven bucks. Bought some stuff at the duty free shop. We all ran back to where Sue, Shelly and Kelly, Fern and ma were waiting. Danny waved in mock frenzy as ma and I boarded the plane.

At thirty six thousand feet above sea level, cruising at five hundred and fifty miles per hour over the Straits of Belle Aisle, ma opened the after dinner mints. I did a lot of writing at our window seat of the 747 with mother beside me, writing an Aerogramme. I was feeling kind of tired. Hadn't kept a journal since last August when Miriam flew off to Spain. From September until December 30th I wrote Maxwell's Wind-up Monkey Dance, and flew up to Ottawa to visit Carol when it was finished. Carol had been in and out of the apartment the whole time. I had been in limbo, still working at the Crazy Alarm Company and working on my songs. It was my circus song phase, climbing One Too Many Rungs. We survived the crossing on after dinner mints.

Before going to Acorn I had spent the morning packing and finishing cleaning up the apartment for Bud Rose, who would sublet it while I spent three weeks in England. Bud moved in Saturday while Carol was leaving. Ironically, when I first met Carol in July of '77 at a poetry reading, Bud brought her over. Late Saturday night and into Sunday Bud Rose was in and out as he unpacked his clothes and books. He suggested we indulge with some Jasmine tea. I told him that a lot of people knew him as "the shaggy poet who does mime." I opened a passage of the Dharma bums, about how they climbed mountains and drank tea. The book opened to the place I had envisioned.

Friday evening I had the going away party. It was a time when any excuse was good for a party. Apart from the usual characters there was Carol, offering After Dinner mints as a peace offering. Donna M who arrived to cook, Julie M, who helped in the kitchen, Robert P, Tony H, Godfrey, Sarah S, Sam and Gay, Phil Onius, Dean C, Lawrence M, Glen H, Mike R, Neil T, Sam Larkin, Danny my brother, Shawn with her boyfriend, and Helen H. Helen wasted no time in telling Robert that he looked "Like puke."

A number of people said the apartment looked very neat, probably because the last roommate was extremely messy. I played Dust on Your Dulcimer with Sam backing me up on bass. Then So Close To Being for Dawn, who leafed through my stack of antique song sheets. When the party was in its last throws Danny was in the kitchen playing backgammon with Pam G, and Donna M who had returned from her high school reunion. We finally went to Magic Donuts with Carol and Danny and I hammed it up.

We went home, stopping to pick up a discarded industrial size plastic bag full plastic flowers and transparent material. We dumped it all on the living room floor and Carol started wearing and flailing it gracefully in euphoric abandon. By this time it was dawn, Danny had swept up the last remnants.

I helped Carol move her stuff onto the back porch so that Irving, her boyfriend, wouldn't have to come in. For some reason Irving had taken a sudden aversion to me, possibly because it took so long for us to get around to opening the door for him. Carol informed me that the van had broken down and they had to move the stuff by the carload to Downsview. She ended up in tears saying that she had made a mess of everything. "I feel like the favorite pony on the merry go round."

My mother and I put the headphones on and watched Orca, the in flight movie. We went up to the front lounge behind the pilot's cockpit. The steward took us to meet Captain Ross in the cockpit; the sun was quite bright. It was five thirty English time, with two hours before touch down. Below, the clouds above the Atlantic were scattered in little clumps, each with a pink glow on the side towards the sunrise.

Ma told me about the first time that she went back to England in 1968 as we continued eating the After Dinner Mints. We flew over Ireland, Liverpool and then finally London where we saw the Post Office Tower and had a perfect view of the Houses of Parliament.

Going through customs was a breeze; we loaded the several pieces of luggage on a cart and hopped unto a double decker bus. We sat in the very front seat of the upper echelon going from Heathrow to Victoria Station. Then a cab to Liverpool Station passing by Buckingham Palace along the Mall. We met Uncle Albert and Aunt Else at Walthemstow Central; and Uncle Jack picked up ma and swung her around. When ma told them we went up to the flight deck Jack said, "Did you ask him to do loop de loop" They took us to Aunt Lal and Uncle Albert's place on Clivedon Road; a quaint street.

They told me about grandpa; how he was stationed in India and about his dancing boys. Looking at the photo albums Uncle Jack said that Albert almost joined the troop. After tea with sugared jelly donuts I walked with Jack and Albert to the corner pub. We had to walk slowly and stop a couple times for Jack to catch his breath. It was sunny for the first time in two weeks Jack said, pointing to a black bird, up in a tree. The mock cherries and the apple trees were in full blossom, with the wind lifting the occasional petal. We drank about three beers each. Jack complained about the foam on his Guinness.

Towards the evening I took a short walk into Epping Forest but it was muddy and I was too tired to explore. Before sleeping I looked into the dusky back yard and saw a white rabbit scampering around. Out the back window of my tiny bedroom at Clivedon Road, in London I woke to see the trees outlining Epping Forest. The birds were chirping wildly; it was not quite dawn. Beyond the garden, which had a birdhouse and a little green house, there was only one row of houses before the forest.

From Clivedon Road I would take the bus and the train to the sights; it was not unusual for me to see two musicals in a day. Got out at Piccadilly Circus, and bought a music sheet of Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs which I had seen in a music store window. The cover and title had impressed me. Walked by the Houses of Parliament, to Hyde Park and saw Shut Your Eyes and Think of England.

The following day I saw Annie at the Victoria Palace Theater and then Kismet. I went with mom and Else to High Street Market and had a long walk after seeing where mother used to live at 10 Mattlock Lane. This was not far from the library where ma had rocked the pram wildly. That was the first entry in her memoirs, which she had dedicated to me.

Finally I made contact with Miriam and met her a few times at Trafalgar Square. She had been living in England and Spain since the previous September, when she left Toronto. I had met her at a party at Donna M's place and kept in touch with her over the winter. At Hyde Park we sat in a gazebo and I played a few songs, songs I had written in her absence. We walked to South Kensington, stopping to look in the windows of Harrad's. Wrote out postcards sitting in the bar overlooking the Serpentine River. On the next table a clean-cut kid was writing a letter with blue ink and flowing cursive. Miriam and I went to Portabello Market; and lost track of each other, when she disappeared for about an hour in one place.

Miriam and I went to Barcelona and Sitges taking a 25-hour ride on the Magic Bus. The last leg of the trip was a train full of boisterous children with noise topped off with Jackhammers echoed in Barcelona's underground station yard. Completed several postcards after the Picasso Museum. Miriam shopped in the market for the picnic lunch in the park by the zoo. I bought a black beret and a bag, a pan flute and looked at the guitars and the parrots on the Ramblas. At the zoo we saw the Albino Orangutan and Miriam took my picture by the Griffin fountain. We then viewed the black Madonna, and the Barcelona Cathedral. In the Cathedral courtyard Miriam reached into the pocket of my Jacket and pulled out a "deep dark secret."

Went to a few discos In Sitges; in every disco there was someone dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Then we returned to the hostel. The optometrist who shared the room went out to watch a few trains go by. I treated Miriam to a paella dinner then we walked by the beach with her talking about her father visiting her at camp too often. Then we took the long bus back to London.

After seeing a pheasant run across the clearing by the Chinese pagoda in Kew Garden we saw Brown Sugar at the Royal Theater. While eating Cornish pastry with her at afternoon tea the idea struck me for a musical set in Kew Gardens. On a double decker bus I thought of a crystal carousel of haunted glass horses: Her Majesties' Magical Merry Go Round. After leaving Liverpool Street on the train I worked out parts of the melody.

At Walthemstow Central I whistled It's a Hard Luck Life, from the musical Annie. We went to Tower Hill and the Tate Gallery. Had a transportation nightmare taking the wrong train from South End, where I spent the day on the beach with Miriam.

My mother and I met Miriam at Green Park and went to the Mall to see the parade of the Trooping of the Colors. We had breakfast, went to Oxford Street shopping; took a taxi to see Chorus Line, then the Waldorf for afternoon tea. We finished off the day by seeing Madam Butterfly at the Royal Opera House. Ma took home movies of it all.

Uncle Jack, Aunt Else, ma and I went to Waltham Abbey. Just outside a pub where we sat out the rain somebody's donkey dropped dead. Went to a folk club at Springfield Tavern, it was in a bare room upstairs, I sang Favorite Pony and Masterpiece of Heart. On my last day with Miriam we went shopping at Oxford Street where she bought a burgundy velvet dress suit and I bought a Harris Tweed three-piece suit for 57.85 pounds. Then we had dinner and went to Vaudeville Theater to see Agatha Christie's Murder is Announced. Her flight was a few days after mine.

During my last couple days I made it up to the very top of Saint Paul's Cathedral carrying my guitar and bag. I was up there at the stroke of noon. Went to the British Museum and then to Regent's Park, where I bought a tiger poster for Molly. That evening I took a bus to Oxford from Victoria Station and roamed around in the evening looking for a bed and breakfast, but couldn't find one so I slept in the woods on the outskirts of town, sans sleeping bag. I saw the apparition of a young woman dressed in a white peasant dress, straight out of a Shakespearean play.

Woke up and took the bus to Reading. Took the train to Paddington and on to the National Gallery. I met someone at Waterloo station who went with me to see Plenty at the National Theater. At last I went to Saint James Park, sat in a deck chair and listened to a marching band play in a gazebo. In the evening I went to the Palladium and saw the Two Ronnies. Bought souvenirs for my friends. Finally I walked over the Thames in my two piece suit thinking up a song: It's My Last Night in London.

19

I left Love's Labor Lost at Stratford on July 14, 1979 with Bud Rose in his gold 1974 Comet. We were headed West; a trip we had been planning for about a month — since I told him at the By The Way Cafe that I had a strong urge to go to California. He said he was going that way too; that we should head out together.

Before leaving Toronto I stopped at Miriam's. Bud suggested the meeting because she wanted to see me off. With my green canvas trapper Nelson backpack and traveling guitar I smiled and she smiled back. Miriam handed me an envelope. "Aren't you going to look inside," she asked, as I pocketed it. The letter contained photos of our time in England. "I hope something comes of your songs."

"Take care," I said, and was off. Apart from having dinner with her the night before, we had not seen each other for a month. I finalized our break up by doing something crazy — standing on the hilltop where we had originally met, and asked for her hand. She said "If you must ask you must know the answer is no."

I quoted some of Rudyard Kipling: "If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run..." Then ran down the hill and disappeared. It must have looked weird to see me running down the hill in that trench coat.

Bud and I played a duet on 'A' harmonicas into the night, finally crashing out with both of us putting the front seats back. Sleeping in the car was so uncomfortable that we ended up outside in the ditch. I told Bud about the first time I had hitchhiked across Canada in 1971, when I got a ride with Julie, a young runaway who was traveling with a guy named Roger. That time we crossed the prairies jamming on 'E' harmonicas. Not long after we arrived in Vancouver there were demonstrations and I helped the two disperse when the riot act was read in Gas Town. I visited Roger in Ottawa just before flying to Europe and he told me that her parents had put up billboards all across Canada with a message to her to come home, 'we love you.' She walked out of a hostel one morning and saw her picture on a billboard. It freaked her out at first and ultimately brought her home. That was around the time I learned to play a song on violin:

How I learned how to play violin on Wrecked Beach

It was a short walk down to Wrecked Beach near UBC to get to where the nudes were. On the way I explored some abandoned WW2 bunkers with peace graffiti in them, broken wine and pop bottles and evidence of all sorts of antiestablishment behavior. Through the bunkers' opening people were playing Frisbee on the beach; I threw a few shots with them. I had at this time not yet perfected my toss, and went on with my life such as it was. There were nudes and squatters on the beach, and one had a bright red painted violin. I asked if I could play it, it being a long time since I had played my green nickel guitar. I sat in the sand and taught myself You Are My Sunshine. People passed by as I struggled over and over to get the notes. As soon as I completed the song correctly one time I went to the beach and sat down. Some people smiled at me, having heard me struggle through it. I came to some people I recognized from the hostel, and dropped my garments in the sand. A man named George with red hair and extremely fair skin was doing calisthenics with his mouth and tongue because he wanted to be a disk jockey. As the day progressed under the pure blue sky Mr. Chameleon — that's how I remember him — turned bright red. He was totally red, except for his tongue. I found a shiny quarter in the sand and put in my pocket.

Sunday morning we arrived in Sturgeon Falls, at my uncle Ron and aunt Armond's place, but my grandma was still at Mass. We had breakfast of tea with toast, eggs and tomatoes. Armond was crying because a recent flood had destroyed her house. She showed us pictures of the devastated village taken from the cross on the hill. Her house had been right across the road from the river and didn't have a chance. "Why is the Canadian Government doing so much for the boat people," she said, "When people are suffering here?"

I hadn't seen grandma since 1971 when I first backpacked to BC, with eight cans of beans and my long hair. (The beans lasted all the way to Regina; I could fit a can in each of the side pockets of my army surplus jacket.) As usual she said, "Oh, you're one of Fern's boys."

We passed Lake Luzon under a clear blue sky, with me playing guitar in the front seat and Bud jamming on harp. "Sault St. Marie had one of the best roads we ever encountered," Bud said, "Two miles of blissful potholes." At a picnic table at Pancake Park we ate curried vegetables.

A myriad of stars and a glow from the other side of Lake Superior could be seen from our campsite. We noticed the fleeting flickers of the Aurora Bore Alice mingling with the Milky Way. I awoke to Bud's mushroom soup and serenaded two girls from Sault St. Marie.

We walked to the beach and sat beside the two girls; they seemed to be out of an Ingmar Bergman film, called The Shores of Lake Superior. "Write down Bud has yet to take one photograph." So Bud went off to take a few pictures. He lugged his 8 x 10 camera about twenty feet from the car, set it up so that it was ten inches from the ground and photographed some moss. While he was shooting I learned Spoon River, which had been left taped on Paul's door just before I left. I lamented the loss of my capo. Before taking off I met with Paul and Alcatrash on Bloor Street, which was under construction, and sat on a bulldozer after an all-nighter. I played Soft Shoe.

Ate some lunch by a rock Bud photographed and played Blue Whale Blues. Playing guitar in the passenger's seat was rather uncomfortable. As we were leaving Pancake Park a middle-aged man stared at the griffin necklace I was wearing as if it were Satanic. He pointed to the cross around his neck and said, "This is what you should be wearing."

I pulled out my new Oxford edition of my Bible and showed it to him. "You don't have to be concerned about me."
Most of my entries I made in the journal as we crossed Canada focused on the vegetarian food Bud whipped up. Bought vegetables in Thunderbay and created a midnight salad by the river with mosquitoes swarming around. We stopped at the Great Western Hotel in Irvine Alberta for a beer. Had a salad in the park by the covered wagon monkey bars. A freakily faced kid was throwing rocks, and a train rolled by while Bud talked about his Yoga instructor who advocated extreme hygiene after bowel movements. I was thinking of the two tins of tuna I had stashed away in case I got really desperate.

On the outskirts of Medicine Hat the song, When I Need You, came on the radio, so I turned it off. That was Miriam's favorite song. The DJ said it was Wild Rose country. I drove most the day to Calgary wearing my Florida t-shirt, cut off jeans and argyle socks. In the evening I finished the book of Genesis.

We made it to Banff; got a campsite at Tunnel Mountain, showered and went downtown. Stopped in at the school of fine arts where Bud showed his photography portfolio to some students. I ran into Liz Anderson, who went to school with me in grade 10; she showed me around. We went to some Hot Springs at Sulphur Mountain and then walked along a nature trail stopping occasionally to look at the wild flowers.

Meanwhile, back at the campsite Bud was cutting up some mushrooms for soup. The soup tasted awful. I was getting tired of vegetarian food. Sitting on the park bench Bud pulled out his portfolio again. I looked into a Nikon F3, my first time ever, and felt like a kid looking into a Kaleidoscope or perhaps a cheap brass telescope. We decided to go on a hike. We asked directions to the Gondola Lift, and a girl with strawberry complexion and wisps of white hair blowing in the sunny breeze told us the way. There were too many tourist lined up at the gondola so we went to Johnson Canyon to see the waterfall and the inkpots. The road was camper-to-camper traffic; we played a duet on the blues harps to pass the time.

With most of Bud's 35 mm camera stuff in my green trapper Nelson we walked along the river with the railing, passing loads of tourists. At the waterfall the spray blasted us. Bud kept setting up the camera on the tripod for pictures, so I encouraged him to keep moving. A family passed me with their pet beagle, and asked me to blow a few notes on the harp so the dog could sing along. The dog wailed as the shutterbug kept clicking away.
Past a narrow swinging bridge we ran into some down and out country folks sitting by the river. Bud ate a bun and some rancid cheese squeezed out of a tube that they offered us. The bun was moldy; the cheese was old, hot and fluorescent orange looking. The man was totally nude sitting on a rock beside two girls who were dirty and tattooed. They talked of the local grizzly bears they had to contend with in their wild existence. The vision of the country folk against the majestic mountains and the fluorescent cheese was more than I could endure. I urged Bud to push on.

Spent time composing an impromptu symphony by tossing variations of rocks into the inkpots, which were perfectly still pools of pure water. Bud supplied the bass runs with larger rocks. Some of those large rocks came pretty close to hitting me. Bud stopped for a long time to photograph some moss on a rock just as the sun went behind the mountain. While he was engrossed in that wranglers lead two wretched ponies past me in a scene straight out of a Wilf Carter song. It was dark when we arrived at the parking lot by a narrow bridge where a man and his girlfriend stood beside a motorcycle embracing the moonlight.

We left Banff. Bud slept in the ditch of a huge hairpin curve by a hill and I slept on top of the hill twenty feet above the road, a safer place, amid the dried weeds and barbed wire fence where there was not much space to drop off.

"Did I ever tell you about my pet dragonfly... I was in Golden BC fighting forest fires and had the day off in Golden. I went with David, one of the first Jewish people I ever met. We were both planning to go to Europe. I went with him to the post office and a dragonfly alighted on my shirt and stayed there. David was not impressed. A year and a half later I ran into him in Italy in a youth hostel, when I was on my way to Oslo and he was on the way to Africa. I played him Talkin’ Forest. That didn’t impress him. He did laugh at the line: 'The lunches were unbearable as a matter of fact, the bears would steal them and then bring them back.'"

"You know, Miriam never could have married you, because you're not Jewish,” Bud said, taking a cryptic tack as we went down the road. "So it's just as well that you learned how to put out fires."

We stopped for gas and checked the oil. Beside the garage was an old Coca Cola cooler used to store worms for fishing. I looked through Bud's Ikoflex medium format camera at a large sand hill that was falling like a halter top into a 'V' shape. Bud called me back to the car. The car had two souvenir feathers stuck into a crack on the dashboard. Made it to Vancouver and saw a lousy production of the musical No No Nanette in Stanley Park...

The height of Bud's trip was to stop in Carmel, California, to see "The Master Himself." It was July 28, 1979, the day Bud arranged to see Ansel Adams for a portfolio review. We visited him at his residence overlooking the bay and watched the Pelicans that swooped in single file among the rocks. I think they were pelicans. Ansel Adams was congenial to even me, as I sat and waited under a huge antique drum above the doorway.

I had seen all the photos in Bud's portfolio — including one that I thought would be extremely strange to show one of the World's Greatest Photographers — Girl in the Snow. Bud had a double exposure shot of a short nude girl lying in the snow. If you take a nude photograph of someone on a white drop cloth and sandwich it with a nature shot of a patch of snow in the woods, I suppose you could call it 'Art.' The model, of course, was Miriam. Bud must have gotten her to pose after she had completed her stint with weight watchers.

The first time I saw The Girl in the Snow was at a party at Miriam's place the last weekend of 1978. It wasn't a pleasant experience. That was just after I had seen Miriam in a disco with another guy. We had both bought new suits in London in the summer of 78. She bought a burgundy velvet dress suit, and I bought a tan Harris Tweed three-piece suit. We had never worn these suits until the very day, when we both went out on our own, and ended up at the same disco. Paul was with me at the time and took me up to the CN tower. From the lofty revolving tower Paul said, "It doesn't look good. You had better forget about her." I didn't want to go to the party, but all my friends were there. Nearly everyone looked at the contact sheets. On the trip to California I had seen the shot at least five times, and now Ansel Adams would see it. The things artists suffer through.

Called up Lucy C. and went for lunch at Mike's Munchies in Manhattan Beach. It had been seven years since we had traveled together in Norway and we had a pleasant chat. I played her a couple songs that she requested, Tree and The Wind, and Firecracker Day, explaining that I had changed the lyrics to them to become Philosopher and the Clown and the Yodeling Frog. She told me that her father was sponsoring her medical degree at Yale. The last I'd heard from Lucy was a post card of Le Mont Saint-Michel in France on April 10, 1973. "Dear Toothpaste—BURP—As you can see, I'm still floating around Europe, currently with my father and sister hitting all the fancy restaurants in France. I saw Eric last week and found out the big Dominique is doing the sky scene. I got hung up in Amsterdam all winter working in a meditation center of all places—De Kosmos. The weather is nothing to write home about. Love you Lucy.”

Things were starting to fall apart with Bud. We had fun roller-skating in San Francisco, visiting the King Tut Exhibit, eating at Sushi bars and seeing the ruins of the old beach house. But it got strange when we stayed with some people in LA who were doing LSD. I made the mistake of driving them all to a nude beach and was the odd man out because I declined their drugs. It was a mistake to chauffeur six back seat drivers with their perceptions totally out the window. Sitting at the nude beach, Bud confided that things weren't working out, that we should go our separate ways. He gave me an eagle feather for good luck. I had made a tape of six songs to show around LA. and he wished me well. As I sat there, before leaving Bud for the last time, I thought about the Squatters hut that I had found at Wrecked Beach on Vancouver Island in 1971:
After reaching Long Beach I found at squatter's hut, which was about three feet high, made of driftwood. I put down my trapper Nelson pack and took out the clothes that needed washing, and washed them in the ocean. There was a line of debris, flotsam and stuff that had washed ashore. I struck up a conversation with a blonde girl with an Afro. She sat by the squatter's hut and rolled a cigarette with some tobacco that she had in a tin. Said she was fifteen and looking for adventure while traveling around with her parents in a camper. The most adventure that I could offer her was to read her my poetry. She wanted us to put our heads together and collaborate on some verses. Shortly after she went back to her parent’s two older guys, the athletic type asked about her. "She's fifteen," I said, "And traveling with her parents."

"That doesn't matter," one said. They were drinking wine from a bottle. I had seen the two earlier in the sand, with only their heads showing. They went off in the direction of the camper and handed me the last of the wine. As they walked away I noticed there was a snail in the wine. I didn't drink it. I walked to the rocks and watched the waves make momentary monuments of magic. When the sky became dark some kids with torches made circles of glowing firewood and threw then in the air like the kids did in the book Painted Bird. It was hard to sleep in the hut, with all the sand in my sleeping bag.

In a phone booth off Broadway I made my way up to the letter 'S' in the phone book with one measly roll of dimes. Cliff Stone listened to my demo, in a seventh floor office on Hollywood Boulevard, and didn't like them. I looked at the pictures of country and western stars on the wall, and played him a few more country songs. His opinion changed. He wanted Merl Haggard to do Great Engineer, and Dolly Parton to do Sugar Heart.

Having done that, gotten my foot in the door, I flew to San Francisco to make another demo. When I boarded the cable car at Powel and Market, the morning was clear; the street people hadn't come out yet. I felt good taking the cable car, the same feeling of exhilaration that I had crossing the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time. The morning had been sort of magical, except for bombing with my audition, to busk at Fisherman's Wharf. I played Tour de Farce and San Francisco Bay Blues. The man said "We don't need anymore følkies." As I walked across the street something happened that would change my life forever.




Voggan Toboggan used to work at the brickyard; he had to be tough to put up with all the workers there. He used to come and visit PB and I on his way home covered with brick dust. As he swaggered up our staircase he would deliberately rub against the wall, leaving a swath of dust. Sometimes he would stop by Alfonso’s to buy some French stick and would sit in the front room with a large jar of water splattering crumbs as he took savagely bit off more than he could chew.

One weekend I went with Voggan to Toronto when he got his first tattoo. He looked up a Korean man on Bathurst, and was tattooed in the kitchen with children playing around in the other room. Next we went to the Salvation Army thrift store and bought a leather jacket. Finally he went to a music store on Queen Street and bought a cheap violin. Voggan couldn’t wait to return to Milton to show it off at the Charles Hotel.

When Voggan was first released from jail I met him and went to the Rotary Park. There was a clearing in the forest beyond the tracks secluded enough to smoke. He said he wanted to “buy a ’51 Dodge, get a chic and a sweet kid.” By the bridge over the 16 Mile Creek we threw some stones at a bat, stunned it and were about to impale it on a stick to take downtown, when it flew away. Not long after Voggan’s release he smashed a number of windows on Main Street and turned himself in.



Reminds me of the time Dawn called me up and invited me to a screening of Yellow Submarine. It was playing at the 99-cent Roxy on Bloor. She said "Bring some dope if you have some." We met there; she was wearing a cute cap and had a large bag of popcorn, she had made at home. It was quite funny seeing all the people in the audience smoking up. After the movie we went to Dawn's house, which was near the theatre. There was a cat named Soya bean. On the kitchen table was some tomato salad. She showed me around; there was a waterbed in the basement, where there used to be a bar. One of her housemates arrived; at that time she shifted all her attention to him. They were bantering around about such things as peanut butter. He said that Dawn was not a good host for not offering me anything to eat. I did not stay there that long.


One time, Voggan Toboggan and I skipped school and hitchhiked to Burlington. I was wearing my Tuxedo top and orange pants with a Mickey Mouse shirt. We went to Gerry Plant’s music store, and while I was there I stole a harmonica, taking it out of the box and leaving the empty box there, it was one of the few things I've ever stolen in my life. We were standing on a street in Burlington when Mr. Hunter drove by us around a corner. He was the Principle of the High school and he stared at us. Voggan was mad about me stealing the Harmonica ‘cause he would get blamed for it.

There were other memories — a tin toy revved up and flung across linoleum, with sparks shining in the red plastic window; caps exploding on the sidewalk, hit by rocks or shot from pistols; the red brick wall of the school, and the swings, where a child walked into someone swinging high, and the blood and tears. Some one doing cartwheels. I played sailor with the children a few houses away, and would salute the captain. We’d walk to the forest behind the school and dip a stick in the waterfall to see how deep it was, and saw a toad on the way back, on a clump of dirt, and it took so long for me to see it. There were caterpillars, huge heavy caterpillars moving all the land, with the drivers waving sometimes, and we wondered how many men it would take to lift one. It would be light as a feather with a hundred men. I could climb up the adjustable clothesline into my sister Sue’s room. My first Halloween I dressed as Santa Clause. Every Saturday, I would go with my older brothers and sisters to the golden Mile to the Matinee, and I saw a movie where Nazi soldiers shot the lock on a church door with machine guns killing a nun inside. Sometimes on the way back I would hitch hike, and some one gave us black cough drops and I had to go through the mailbox to open the door.

One evening the sky was filled with planes and Terry sat on the steps and traded comic books and powder horns. A tin jeep with a searchlight on the back lit the ceiling with stripes one Christmas.

Some children dammed up the storm sewer, and the gutter flooded, and my eldest brother bob and mother interrogated me, the same time they did when there was a bar of sample soap missing from the mailbox. We would use a rake to snag rhubarb over the fence of our neighbor, and then we would walk along the street, with white sugar in a glass dipping it.

That summer, we moved to acorn, forty miles away to a two-story frame house on Mary Street. It was Acorn’s Centennial year. Kim, my brother two years younger and I stood on the sidewalk, eating crackers and watching a train at the end of the street slowly going by, that is something we both remembered through the years.

Bob, Rick. Terry and Sue all helped my father tear down the barn in the back yard. Mrs. French and her daughter Barbara, who lived in the house for a short while showed me the tennis courts that, were in the back behind our yard.

My dad didn't believe in restaurants unless it was on a long trip and all the peanut butter and jam sandwiches had run out and the kids were screaming. The sandwiches were heavy on the peanut butter; my mother adhered to the theory that a quiet child is a child with a mouth full of peanut butter. Sometimes when we traveled there would just be a few jars of peanut butter and a spoon for each mouth.