The Vinyl Café Notebooks (2 page)

I have driven it more times than I care to remember. I have stopped at the Big Apple for pie, and at Iroquois to watch the ships slip through the lock. I have driven in the morning, and I have driven at night, in search of love, and away from love, and back to love. I was born in Montreal, but these days I live in Toronto. That means no matter which way I am going, whether I am driving from east to west, or west to east, I am both leaving home and coming home.

I used to believe the getting there was the important thing. Now it’s good enough just to keep moving.

Anyway. It has been forever since we have spoken. That is my fault. And I apologize. And I hope you understand. I am doing the best I can. I will try to do better when I get home.

The sign we passed says we are almost in Napanee. That means we are almost halfway home. No matter which way we are heading.

3 March 2002

THE PIANO

I was seven years old the afternoon I had my first piano lesson. My teacher was a young man from Scotland. His name was Mr. McLachlan. He wore tweed sports jackets and carried a soft leather briefcase, and, like the doctor and the bread man and the milkman back in those unhurried days of the mid-1950s, he came to the house.

Mr. McLachlan came once a week: Wednesday afternoons after school. He and I would go down to the basement, past the furnace and into the playroom my father had finished with blue-stained plywood and tiles. There was a blackboard on one wall, and a pretty good train set, and in the corner, an old upright piano.

The piano wasn’t there for the early lessons. At the beginning Mr. McLachlan taught, and I practised, on a fold-out cardboard keyboard. Eventually the upright piano arrived, and that, as you might imagine, was a big deal. Especially after the cardboard keyboard.

The piano in the basement was where Mr. McLachlan and I did our work. Or, more to the point, didn’t. Even back then, when I was still in the single digits, I was capable of disappointing and well aware of the disappointment I was causing
Mr. McLachlan. Despite my mother’s encouragement, I never brought discipline or attention to my practising. The two things that were, really, the only requirements for forward motion.

Oh, I progressed. I wasn’t hopeless. My right hand conquered the treble clef in a boyish way, but my left hand lumbered around the bass notes without any confidence, like a dim cousin trying to find his way along a crowded street, always stopping to stare at the street signs myopically and falling behind everyone else.

How Mr. McLachlan kept coming week after week, year after year, is beyond me. He must have had a pupil somewhere who made it worthwhile. Whoever it was, probably some studious girl, it certainly wasn’t me.

And so it was that my piano lessons eventually, and thankfully, ended. Mr. McLachlan and I were put out of our pain.

My brother took lessons too. And probably my sister; I don’t remember about her, but we all stopped. The years slipped by, and somehow I ended up with the piano— probably because I took guitar lessons at university, probably because I became the writer. I was the artsy one. I was also closest to the piano. My brother and sister lived on the other side of the country.

The first place it went was in the living room of my first apartment. I remember how, reunited, I took renewed interest in it; sadly, my self-discipline and perseverance, not to mention my talent, hadn’t developed over the years. Not surprisingly, neither had my playing.

When I married, the piano came with me into my new home, and when I had children of my own, they took piano
lessons too. I used to sit with them while they practised, and sometimes we soared over it, and sometimes we fought over it, and when all was said and done, they had more success than I, for sure, but not
much
more success. Not meaningfully more. They grew up, and left home, and sadly I did too, and the piano came with me again.

We have been through a lot together, this piano and I. A lot of years if nothing else, close to half a century.

And a year ago I bought a new house. It is a modest place, and there is no room for a piano in my new house, unless I wanted to have a living room without a sofa. Or an office without a desk. And I decided I didn’t.

My problem, as moving day approached, was what to do about the piano. Selling it, the reasonable thing to do, seemed out of the question. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I decided I would lend it to someone. They could have it until, well, until I needed it back. Where and when and why that might be I had no idea, but when I did find someone who thought they might be interested, I assured them it wouldn’t be anytime soon.

You would think there would be lots of takers. There was only one, and they had it for about a year. Then one day they phoned me and said, “We made a mistake, we want to give you your piano back. There’s no room here either.”

And so I did the only thing I could think of doing. I arranged to have my piano placed in storage.

And that is where it is today. Although, as I say that, I realize I have no idea whatsoever exactly
where
that is. I haven’t visited the piano, or even asked about it. It is just away, somewhere. It costs $50 a month to keep it there.

I am assuming that because the people who are looking after it are in the business of doing this, storing pianos, that they have given it a good home, and my fifty bucks is buying decent accommodations. I am assuming that it isn’t sitting in someone’s backyard under a tarp. But that’s an assumption; I don’t
know
that.

I imagine it to be in an old warehouse. An old brick-walled factory dating back to the 1920s, where they once manufactured electric fans, or corn brooms, and today is just a room where someone works on pianos. My piano, and a few others like mine, are lined up against the brick wall. I like to think that at night, when the piano tuners have gone home, and the lone security guard has fallen asleep at his post, people appear to play these pianos. Men and women living in cramped apartment buildings, who long to play but haven’t the space or resources for a piano. Or maybe the spirits of all the players from the past who find the temptation of one last concert too much to pass up. And they sit and play the music I never could while the moonlight streaks through the warehouse windows. But that’s just fantasy. I know my piano is just sitting there, under its storage blanket, and that every month I pay to keep it there is another month that it is unplayed.

So this is what I want to know. Why am I holding on to it? Why can’t I say goodbye?

Am I honouring memories here? My father? Who is ninety years old now and built that room in the basement and got the piano down there. Not negligible things. Mr. McLachlan? My boyhood? All those years—can I sell them? Can I give them away for nothing? Am I holding on to a road to the past? There are, I’ve noticed, fewer and fewer.

Or is it a road to the future? Do I think that one day, one of my sons is going to show up, like I did, and say, “Where is that piano, anyway?” Do I think I have to hold on to the past so I can pass it on to the future? So what, if when they asked, I said, “I sold that piano.” Would that really matter?

Or are we talking about dreams here? Do I, in my disorganized and busy little imagination, believe that one day I will call up the people at the warehouse and say, “I want my piano back, bring it home”? Am I, stuck in my fifties, still dreaming that one day I will do away with the desk, or the sofa, roll up my sleeves and sit down the way my mother and Mr. McLachlan always wanted me to, and apply myself to the mathematical mysteries of the key of C?

Is this what happens to dreams? Do they all end up in brick warehouses? And you pay people $50 a month and they look after them for you? It costs $50 a month to keep them free from rain, or sleet, or snow, until the day you phone and say, “I’m ready now; bring me my dream.” And they put it in a truck, and they bring it to your house, and as they carry it down the stairs to the room that you have made for it especially—
your little dream
—you think to yourself,
This time I am going to practise every day. This time, it is going to work out
.

15 April 2007

MY PALM TREE

I was living in a modest home at the time. Not, frankly, the kind of home where you would expect to find a palm tree. Then one Sunday afternoon, unexpectedly, I bought myself another. House, that is. The new house came first. The palm tree came later. But the two events are all part and parcel. The palm wouldn’t exist without the house. Or not in my life, anyway.

This is what happened.

A real estate agent, a friend of mine, phoned and said she had seen a house that she thought I would like.

“I am not in the market for a new house,” I said.

“I think you should come and see it,” she repeated. “I think you would like it.”

So I went. The moment I saw it, I knew I was doomed. It was the house I had wanted all my life. I
had
to own it, and there was no time to dither. If I was going to get this house, I had to make an offer then and there. So that is what I did, and it was accepted, and there I was at bedtime faced with the terrifying prospect of owning two homes. I had to sell the one I was living in, the one that had been, up until that Sunday afternoon, perfectly acceptable but now no longer was. And I had to sell it fast.

The real estate agent who had lured me into this predicament agreed, reluctantly, to handle the sale.

“We are going to have to fix this place up if we are going to have any hope of selling it,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

By “we” she meant “me.”

She put me in touch with a man whose job it is to make disreputable houses irresistible. One of the things the man did was stand in my living room and point at the window where my desk was.

“Get rid of that desk,” he said. “Move the couch. Buy a palm tree.”

I got rid of the desk and moved the couch, but I decided that a palm tree, which I suspected would cost a couple of hundred dollars, was excessive. I decided not to get the palm.

A week passed. A couple of weeks passed. And then a month. My house didn’t sell. Then one day, when I was at the local corner store, the kind of place where you go for a pack of cigarettes or a lottery ticket but certainly not a palm tree, I saw they had a palm for sale: $125.

I explained my housing predicament to the man behind the counter. I asked if he would consider renting me the palm.

“I just live around the corner,” I said. “I just need it for a week or two.”

I promised to be careful with his palm. I offered him $25 rent, and the opportunity to sell it once I was finished with it. This didn’t seem as good an idea to him as it did to me. He showed me another palm, a less robust palm.

“Fifty bucks,” he said.

So I bought a palm tree. And wouldn’t you know it, my house sold.

Not knowing what else to do with it, and feeling a certain obligation, I took the palm with me to my new house.

I am not one of those people who are good with plants. In fact, until I bought the palm, I didn’t own any houseplants. Not one.

Don’t get me wrong. I like green things. From time to time I buy cut flowers. But I am not good with them either. Even cut flowers seem to die faster in my care than they do in the care of others. But their death never feels like a tragedy. Or, more to the point, like it is my fault. Cut flowers are, after all, supposed to die. It is the natural order of things. The death of a vase of tulips is like the passing of an elderly aunt—something to mourn, perhaps, but not to fret over. The death of a house plant always feels more like a homicide. Or at least manslaughter. I have stayed away from them.

But suddenly, as well as my new house, I owned a plant—the palm—and because we had been through something together, I felt this obligation.

I can’t say for sure that my palm
was
the reason my house sold. But I can’t say it wasn’t either. It did look spectacular by the window where the desk used to be.

And now, a year has passed, and I have cared for my palm, if not religiously, at least responsibly. Enough, anyway, that it is still alive. I feel good about that.

I have learned a number of things about and from it. I have learned that when it wants to grow a new frond, it shoots out a spearlike appendage that stands around for weeks, somewhat stiffly, like an awkward guest at a cocktail party,
until one day,
abruptly and for no apparent reason
, it unfolds. I have learned that when the current fronds turn brown, and my palm appears to be dying, and I feel like giving up on it, I shouldn’t. Because if I keep watering it and cut off the old growth, new growth appears. So far, anyway. The lessons I have learned from it are the important lessons of patience and faith.

I don’t want to give you the idea that I am the perfect owner. I am not the perfect owner. My palm doesn’t look as good today as it did when I got it. But let’s be honest, neither do I.

My palm tree is, after all, clearly out of place in the city where I live, a little tropical tree cast ashore in the cold north, first finding refuge at a corner store of all places and then in
my
home. I don’t know which would be worse. We have endured, my palm and I, and now we are heading toward our second winter together.

The way of the heart is often a mystery. It is hard to know why we love the things we love. And maybe it is better that way. But I do know this. We grow to love the things we care for. We like the responsibility, I think. It feels good to be needed.

I am now a guy with a new house and a palm tree. I don’t want my little tree to be homeless again. I want us to make it through this winter. Together.

15 November 2009

LOSING PAUL

It was late afternoon. I was sitting at my desk. The phone rang. I looked up at the name and the number on the call display and my stomach lurched. I thought,
Why is Alan phoning me from Moncton?

Alan and I hadn’t spoken for years. Not that we had had a falling out. Just that we had been busy, living our lives. I didn’t want to pick the phone up. I did, of course.