Driving Minnie's Piano (20 page)

^{Everything was stunning. The
rocks along the shoreline were having a party with those little
dancing birds - plovers or sandpipers or some other name. Seaweed
was rotting and there were seaweed flies that the birds were
feasting on. I had one lone seal pop up nearby and I could still
see him in the clear water when he dove back down ten feet beneath
the surface. Little fish skidded by. Some of the dancing birds got
paranoid about me and as soon as one flew, they all did in a
manoeuvre like a big squadron of spacecraft in a Star Wars movie. I
keep telling them I'm of no concern, not dangerous in the
slightest, but they don't listen.}

^{Against the incoming tide, I
advanced slowly until the current diminished the closer I came to
the headland. I was alone, happy, intensely public and private at
once with my thoughts out here on my inflatable kayak. Just the day
before, some local kids in their own sea kayak claimed to have seen
a shark. Claimed that it bumped into their boat and nearly spilled
them into the sea. I think it just has something to do with a
couple of recent shark movies. I've never even seen a shark near
shore in Nova Scotian waters. I refuse to worry about sharks. We
all carry a list in our heads of things we will allow ourselves to
worry about. I worry about my kids, the house burning down, getting
stuck at really boring meetings, turning into a has-been writer,
drowning, losing my mind and my car rusting out. But, as usual,
today I refuse to worry about sharks.}

^{Instead, I paddle out to where
the waves are now breaking over the old wreck where I once ripped
my wetsuit and I “park” by the jagged stump of metal. Here at the
very tip of the headland I look at the tall dirt cliffs of nearby
Terminal Beach. In the early morning light it is a beautiful but
eerie moonscape piece of coastline scalloped by storms and erosion.
Losing ground. Reddish soil silting down into the sea and shuttled
off by currents to God knows where. But so beautiful. I fall in
love with this place yet again. Music by Bach and Mozart begins in
my head as I bob gently in my inflatable craft, refusing to worry
about sharks here in these clear northerly waters.}

^{This is probably as close to
meditation as I can get. Communing with sea and drumlin, I realize
that the Ice Age has left this coast as a gift. I'm reading it like
one dog reading another dog's story in the sea oats at the beach.
It's all there. Deposit and retreat. Let the sea do the
rest.}

^{An unexpected swelling of the
sea jabs my Taiwanese rubber seacraft up against the jagged rusty
shards of The Wreck itself and I pull myself back through millennia
to who I am and where. Two thoughts occur simultaneously. Oddly
enough, the first one concerns coffee. I would really like a cup of
coffee. The second one is the life/death concern of an inflatable
kayak getting a significant tear and deflation occurring. The
Taiwanese designer has contrived only one air compartment. So if
she goes, she goes. It would be a long swim to
shore.}

^{So now I gently push away from
the wreck and paddle off towards the inlet that will lead me back
into Rocky Run. I find the furrow in the narrow channel marked only
by several long thin poles made from spruce trees. To my back, at
sea, a fogbank has appeared. The north wind will hold it at bay
only so long. By the time I find my way back to fiction, it will
have come ashore, a cloud settling itself snugly over the land,
allowing each of us to retreat into our small safe places to tap
out our important messages for an unknown
audience.}

^{Fools, Baseball and Beach
Stones}

^{There are two kinds of fools:
the ones who know they are and the ones who are fooling themselves.
I'm the former, although there are moments of delusion when I think
I'm the other one. But I'm not. All I have going for me are a few
good hunches and a lot of luck.}

^{In the spring around here some
fools still set fire to the last year's dried grass, often claiming
that it improves this year's growth. I don't think that research
bears this out. I think they just like to see something burn. Fire
is attractive whether it's out of control or in control. And often,
these grass fires do go out of control and burn down barns, sheds
and even houses. It's a messy business and I'm convinced fools
should not set anything on fire.}

^{I'm not the fire-fool type but
I do indulge in things that most respectable people think of as
foolish. As previously noted, I am a big fan of rocks. I like some
rocks more than I like some people, I'd have to admit. Even if a
stone falls off the side of the drumlin onto you, you don't really
think it was intentional. You can't say that about people. People
will purposefully chew away at a thing until the whole side of the
mountain caves in on you. I know. It's happened to me and I've seen
it done to others.}

^{But I don't want to say mean
things about people. The intention of this fool is to take you back
to the beach for a minute. Let's say you are walking on the sand
and find a stone that fits into the palm of your hand. You're
gazing up at a Seaforth blue sky wondering why the damn stone feels
so right. Fortunately for the stone, there's no need to discuss the
matter. See, anything involving people involves discussion and
differences of opinion. True, some people can make you feel as good
as that sun-soaked warm, oblong milky quartz in your paw, but then,
sooner or later, you're apt to have complications. And that's where
the stone you found on the beach has one up on people. It doesn't
get any more or less complicated than it was when you found
it.}

^{I have a habit of carrying the
stone for a while in my right hand, passing it to my left and then
doing one of two things: putting it in my pocket and taking it home
or throwing it in the ocean. In retrospect, I can say in all
honesty (at least as much as a self-acknowledged fool can do) that
the stone is probably better off with the ocean option, number two.
See, if I take it home and put it on the window sill or kitchen
table, someone might move it to get it out of the way of dinner. Or
I might leave it outside my back door with all those other stones I
brought home from the beach - as if I had some grand plan, some
secret purposeful intention of what to do with those stones. But I
don't and I know damn well that when it comes to doing something
with all those stones I felt so strongly about, I'll probably just
seize up with idleness and do nothing more than admire them on my
way out the door.}

^{Now, years are not a big worry
to stones. They have time and a kind of patience that could teach
most of my friends a thing or two. But the toss and gravity drop
into the big blue salty sea is probably quite exciting to a stone
that has been sitting on a beach for several thousands or millions
of years.}

^{There's a satisfactory arc, up
into the air when I throw it, thanks to the fact that I once played
second base when I was eleven for a baseball team called Glen
Meade, named for a housing development in my community. Actually, I
was a lousy second baseman. I daydreamed a lot and second base, as
you probably know, is a sorry place to daydream. The outfield was
where I belonged and, sure enough, I eventually ended up in right
field. In those days, nobody hit into the outfield so it was a
daydreamer's paradise.}

^{Before or after the games,
when the coaches were not around, some of my friends, the ones who
looked for trouble, hit stones instead of baseballs with bats as a
kind of practice. I was already a fan of stones back then but I was
not a stone hitter. I called stones “rocks” or the fancy ones I
called “minerals.” And I didn't like to see incorrigible friends
hit them with bats. Rocks and bats led to several things: broken
bats, broken car windows, kids hit in the head with rocks in
backyards. And I didn't think the rocks and minerals liked the
abuse.}

^{During a game every once in a
while, after what seemed like a millennium, someone on the team
currently opposing Glen Meade, a lefty at the plate, would hit a
ball into right field. I was idling away my time thinking about my
rock collection at home, daydreaming abut finding a geode maybe or
a piece of amethyst (uncommon but not impossible to be found on a
suburban lawn) and lo and Beholden Caulfield, here comes a high
flying hardball into the outfield. Why they let us play with
hardballs, I'll never know, because I had once been playing catch
with Warren King, who would one day be a New Jersey State
Patrolman, and the hardball Warren was throwing hit me square in
the nose. There was blood and pain. I didn't mind the blood. In
fact, every boy privately enjoys seeing himself bleeding because of
the great ruby red theatrical nature of it all.}

^{But I was not a fan of pain in
those days. It was a short, sharp pain that would psychologically
damage me forever. It helped turn me from being a reckless, clumsy
second baseman who daydreamed a lot into a daydreaming right
fielder who privately hoped no one would hit a ball into his
territory. So, as you can imagine, when someone would finally pop
up a good one in my direction, and coaches, teammates and assorted
alert family members in the bleachers began to shout my name (as if
from far, far away in deep space) my brain would kick in with the
memory of Warren King driving a fastball into my nose and my brain
told me I should be nowhere in the vicinity of where the fly ball
was going to land. So I never developed a great reputation as a
right fielder for Glen Meade.}

^{I was a fool in those days but
not a total waste. I didn't know I was a fool because I was just a
kid and figured that some day I would be older and wiser. (Fat
chance of that, I now realize.) But there was much to assess at
that critical moment when the ball was arriving at its apogee. And
me, alert, paranoid, and, above all, feeling protective of my
physical self, especially any part of it having to do with my face,
my neck or my groin. You see, I already knew exactly what it would
feel like to get hit in the nose and figured getting hit in the eye
could be worse. I had experienced a nightmare already about being
hit by a hardball in the Adam's apple and a nightmare was as good
as a real-life experience in those days, maybe better. And there
were theories circulating among my peers about what it would feel
like to get hit hard with a hardball down there in the
crotch.}

^{Catchers were the ones who
most openly discussed what it would feel like to get slammed into
with a fast pitch right in the balls. That's why they had the
luxury of wearing a cup. They liked to tap on it sometimes,
especially the catcher for our team, my good friend, Bob
Blomquist.}

^{But outfielders as a rule did
not wear cups. Sure, I know what baseball fans are thinking: the
odds of a high fly ball whacking into your family jewels is very
low. But I was only eleven. I had not had a university course in
statistics under my belt, so to speak. I had my
emotionally-scarring Warren King experience and I had my phobias
well under cultivation.}

^{In baseball, you are given a
baseball glove to defend yourself with. Catchers get that big
padded sunflower of upholstered leather to fend off injuries from
young pitchers with lightning arms. But I just had an old
six-finger thin leather glove from Sears. Yes, six fingers; one was
an empty, a flaccid leather flap of a finger for that gap between
thumb and first digit. I had saved my money long and hard for that
glove and I bought it from the Sears store where they had cardboard
cut-out stand-up replicas of Ted Williams. I had thought Ted
Williams was only a baseball player, an old one at that, but
apparently he also fished and played golf. I didn't mind fishing at
that point in my life because it had a certain macho element - a
kind of contact sport with nature. Hooks drew blood when you were
lancing worms and threading their carcasses onto them. But golf
sucked big time and always would in my book.}

^{Well, way
out there in the outfield with the ball about to come careening
down out of the sky you can imagine how much faith I had in my
glove. The sun was directly in my eyes out there in right field.
People were shouting my name - all of the accurate and
not-so-accurate renditions of my labels-for-life:
Les! Lesley! Choyce, comin' at ya! Heads up,
Lester! It's yours, Lestoil! You got it, Lesman!
And so forth.}

^{As you already know, I would
have preferred to be back home with my rock collection, labeling
new samples: shale, gneiss, schist, mica. But I was, instead, in
the hot spot and wondered why I played baseball at all. I had one
good sun-blinding peek up into the sky and realized there was
absolutely nothing to be seen of a baseball coming down in the
midst of the full optic weight and velocity of solar radiation. It
had occurred to me before that I should wear sunglasses in the
outfield (better to hide behind) but I had had second thoughts,
imagining that if you did get hit in the glasses with a baseball,
glass and/or plastic would get smashed and lodged in your eyes and
you'd be in worse shape than if the evil rawhide-covered orb just
pancaked your eyeball.}

^{“Lescargot, take your time!”
That was the coach. He was always telling us to take our time,
which I never understood. When someone was running from second to
third, he'd yell, “Take your time!” When you were at bat, when the
pitcher, Don Hildreth, was about to send a searing fastball into
his catcher's leather sunflower. When you were about to attempt the
impossible and catch a high pop fly in an outfield so blasted with
solar radiation that the grass was dying under your
feet.}