The Vinyl Café Notebooks (5 page)

There was a girl involved. I missed her. When I got home, I was offered another job, and I chickened out on Lillooet.

And so ended my newspaper career. I have often wondered what might have happened if I had thrown caution to the wind. I know one thing for sure: I would have been one of those reporters who hung around the press room. And by that I don’t mean the news room. I mean around the presses. Twenty years later, when I was a young man married to a different girl and working for the CBC, whenever I got a late-night twitch for news (this was in the years before you could surf the net), I would head down to
The Globe and Mail
press room on Front Street around midnight and snatch a copy of the next morning’s paper before I went to bed. You can’t do that anymore. Or I can’t. They have moved the presses to the suburbs.

Newspapers got me going. And I have made my way, or most of it anyway, as a journalist. But I have never been a newspaperman. I don’t think I have ever had anything published in a newspaper, not even a letter to the editor. Nevertheless, newspapers have been a constant in my life, and if I hadn’t stumbled into CBC Radio, they might well have
been
my life.

I love newspapers. I love getting up in the morning and opening the front door and finding one on my stoop. I have never seen the guy who delivers it. I have no idea who he is. But I trust him, and he has never failed me.

I love the gestalt of the front page. I love carrying the paper to the table and reading it while I wake up.

And later in the day if I find myself alone with nothing to do and feeling anxious because of it—say I am meeting someone in a restaurant for lunch, and I arrive first—whereas other people might buy a drink and settle down to wait, I start looking for a paper. They calm me. They reassure me. They make me feel safe and sound.

There is much to recommend newspapers. Others have written about these things better than I, so I will not repeat them.

But I would like to say two things. The first is that I like newspapers because they exist in space, but not in time. They happen out of time. In fact, they literally
stop
time. Every day the newspaper jams its wrench in the cogs of the clock and says,
This is what it is like right now
. And by doing that, it asks the same of all of us. It asks us to step out of time too and consider the things that are happening and what they might mean to us and to others. It asks us what we think about all that.

The second thing, and perhaps the most important thing, is that a newspaper is a shared experience. On every level. Not only the shared experience of a boy listening to his father grumble about the news. Or two brothers squabbling over the sections. There is all that, but there is more.

When our cities are full of newspapers, they are, quite literally, on every corner. You don’t even have to read them to know what they are on about. You just have to walk around and they will seep into you like ink spilled on a blotter, and in the spilling, they will stain your mind. And that means we are all ink-stained—those of us who read the papers, and those of us who don’t. We are stained with the same stories, and
because of that, all of us, living together, can carry on a common conversation.

And this act of
sharing the experience
is arguably as important as the experience itself. More important, maybe. For it is in the sharing that we foster fellowship. And
that
is what creates community. If everyone has their own private newspaper, as the webmasters would have it, we
may
all be as well informed, quite possibly better informed, but we will become a society of solitudes, each of us lost in our private prejudices. And rather than argue with each other over what might and might not be the common good, we will drift away to the islands of the single issues and soon be lost in the forests of alienation. And soon enough, instead of grumbling at the paper, we will be grumbling at one another, and engagement in the world of politics will seem meaningless to us. Why even vote?

When we all read the same newspapers, it means we are all on the same page. When we don’t, group activities become personal activities, the great public conversation ceases, and before we know it, we are bowling alone.

A newspaper is a grand public space, and all these grand technologies that would replace it—cellphones and laptops, iPods and iPads—take public spaces and turn them into private spaces. The net, with all its weblike connectivity, is still essentially a private place. One person with a search capacity. Each of us a webmaster assembling our own personal narrative.

And in our excitement with it all, and dear God don’t think I am not excited too, we think we can abandon papers to no effect. That it is just another summer evening, and we can throw them out with the recycling.

What I am trying to say here is that our newspapers are more than the sum of their parts.

And I know, I know, you don’t have to say it. I am slashing at waves with my sword. But take note: at the same time that our newspapers are folding, so are our broadcasters.

We have to keep the public conversation going.

My father is now ninety-two. It was, I think, Bette Davis who said, “Old age is no place for sissies.” At ninety-two my father has given up a lot. But he hasn’t given up his newspaper. It still comes every morning. His paper,
The Montreal Gazette
, began publishing in 1785. It was started by a printer named Fleury Mesplet, who came to Montreal with Benjamin Franklin when the army of the American Revolution invaded and occupied the city of my birth. When the revolutionaries came, they dragged a printing press with them from Philadelphia. The first in the city. The idea was that Mesplet would start a newspaper that might convince Canadians to join the Revolution. Franklin and the revolutionary army eventually left town. Mesplet stayed.

My father still gets the paper Mesplet began. He no longer reads it every day, but he keeps his subscription. We, his family, worry that if it stops coming altogether it would be at his peril. While the paper is there, beside his chair, he is still ink-stained, still part of the conversation, still grumbling.

3 April 2009

RADIO

I have loved radio as long as I can remember—even as a young boy, radio seemed like a magic thing to me. I was the perfect audience: awkward, unsure and without a community of my own. The world of radio was a world where I could belong, a place where I was just as good as everyone else. Listening to the radio, alone in my bedroom, gave me a sense of connection to the larger world.

Montreal was a great city to begin a radio romance. It was a radio hothouse, with Paul Reid personifying the elegance of CJAD, Gord Sinclair Junior, the scrappiness of CFCF, and Joe Pyne summing up CKGM. Pyne was the wooden-legged firebrand who more or less invented the call-in show. Before he hung up on them, he regularly invited his callers to gargle with razor blades.

My favourite Joe Pyne story, though it has never been verified to my knowledge, involves the night he supposedly insulted Frank Zappa.

“I guess your long hair makes you a woman,” crowed Pyne at his guest.

“And I guess your wooden leg makes you a table,” Zappa allegedly shot back.

True or not, if you remember Joe Pyne, you will know that that transaction sounds like it might have happened. It pretty much sums up his show. I couldn’t get enough.

The first radio I remember was a white plastic Fleetwood we kept on the breakfast table. Eventually the Fleetwood was upgraded, and on one of the greatest days of my life, I was allowed to take it upstairs to my room and set it on the night table beside my bed. Because it was a tube radio, it would warm up and glow like a flashlight running on low batteries— a comforting thing to have beside you on a winter’s night. Lying in bed listening to Dave Boxer on CFCF, or Joey Reynolds on WKBW, was like lying beside a campfire that could talk.

One night, when I was listening to Danny Gallivan chant the holy passage of a Montreal Canadiens hockey game, I responded to the cheeriness of the radio by inviting it to join me under the covers—I probably thought it would keep me warm. The light from the tubes was even prettier under the covers, and I was so comfy, snuggled up beside it, that I fell asleep, and pretty soon it got so hot that the plastic body started to melt. By all rights I should have gone up in smoke. The only reason I didn’t is that my father was seized by his own impulse that night, an impulse he was never able to explain. Uncharacteristically, he came upstairs to check on me.

I guess he saved my life, and I guess it was inevitable that I would end up working in radio—seeing as how I was sleeping with them before I hit puberty.

6 June 2010

PETER GZOWSKI

Peter Gzowski died on Thursday. We knew it was coming. I spent the early part of the week sitting in my office staring at the walls. Before the tributes began, it was a week of waiting. Today, I just feel sad and lonely.

Peter had a remarkable career. He did great work. Somewhere, a long time ago, he decided it was his mission to uncover the best of Canada, the people and the places, to seek them out and introduce them to the rest of us.

Because he decided this was important work, and because he was so good at it, we believed it was important work too and we went along for the ride. Somewhere along the way, Peter became what he was looking for. He became a part of the best of Canada.

He was the best of CBC Radio, that is for sure.

He was a sort of quilt maker. The individual parts of his quilt were often ordinary. Some of the moments, of course, were extra special: the first interview with Ellie Dansker and the Red River Rally, to name two. But mostly, like any quilter worth their salt, he worked with scraps. It was only when you stepped back and looked at the overall effect that you realized the grandeur of his creation.

People are always asking me what he was like. He was a bundle of contradictions. He wasn’t the guy you thought you knew from the radio. And he was the guy you knew from the radio.

If you didn’t know him, and you met him, you might have been disappointed. You might have thought he was chilly and standoffish. He wasn’t chilly and standoffish. But he acted that way sometimes. People say he was shy. I think he was more private than shy. I think there is a difference.

He was certainly complicated.

He was a man who dealt in the realm of ideas. But he was driven to ideas by instinct and emotion. He was the Canadian nationalist who, more than anything, wanted to have written for
The New Yorker
magazine.

He was a serious person who liked to play games—especially if they involved words. He was sloppy about his clothes and meticulous about his grammar.

On New Year’s Eve, this year, he provoked one of the guests he had invited for dinner to search through a stack of reference books in an effort to determine whether it was more Canadian to say
railroad
or
railway
.

He was more a journalist than a gentleman.

He was thoughtful and he was selfish.

His work absorbed him. He noticed everything—except the world around him. One day, his friend Peter Sibbald Brown went over to Gzowski’s cottage at Lake Simcoe. You didn’t knock on the door up there, you just wandered in, so Peter Sibbald Brown wandered in and found the cottage filled with smoke—coughing, eye-stinging smoke, and he thought to himself,
Even Gzowski couldn’t generate this much smoke
. He
put his hands over his eyes, and staggered in, and found a log had tumbled out of the fireplace and was smouldering away on the hardwood floor.

Gzowski was sitting at his computer in the little alcove where he worked. He had noticed the smoke. But his offhanded response was to crack the window open about a quarter of an inch.

That is how I will remember him, at work in a smoke-filled room. Sitting across from me, perhaps, in a radio studio, with just minutes before we go to air, his head is down, he is ignoring me. He is using a black felt marker to scribble a lastminute note onto his script, rewriting his intro fifteen seconds before we’re on. Just before the control room gives us the go-ahead, he looks up at me with a mischievous smile. That’s how I will remember him.

He grinned like that on the radio, and in his home—pleased as punch whenever he found a question that would shift the spotlight off him. His mission was to make the other shine brighter. He seemed to bring out the best from those he was with.

I will remember him in the early morning at Lake Simcoe, sitting at the end of his dining room table, bare feet, absorbed by the crossword, a cup of coffee going cold beside him, his fingers, already in the early morning, ink-stained. I’ll remember him looking up with that twinkle and bringing something up from the night before. And while you were busy thinking about that, he will ask your opinion about some political issue that is bothering him and you know absolutely nothing about, leaving you standing there wondering whether you should fess up or fake it.

He loved to laugh.

And because I loved him, I loved to make him laugh.

Over a period of about a decade, I had a regular spot on his radio show,
Morningside
. Of all the things we did together, his favourite was the day we cracked up. I was in the middle of an inconsequential item, and we both got the giggles, and then fell into out-of-control, gut-sucking laughter. Laughter so wrenching that we couldn’t carry on. On the tape of that morning, you can hear us going over the edge and then his desperate attempt to bring us back. We both thought we had crossed some sort of line we shouldn’t have crossed. We felt self-conscious about it until the mail started arriving, and we realized quite the opposite. Everyone listening had joined in the laughter.

That’s what he did best. He sat in his studio, and he let us join him.

27 January 2002

THE PEOPLE

YOU LOVE

I met him at a wedding. He was about my age. He was a strong, charismatic and intelligent man. We sat beside each other during dinner and then, when the dancing began, we sat and talked. We talked about our children. Eventually he told me about his daughter, Kathy.