Friday, April 13, 2012

On meeting Beethoven's Fifth


In grade 10, at Mount Forest District High School, I was part of a four-some along with Gwen, Lois, and Henny. In the mosaic of our class, we were the 'serious' ones: plain-faced, studious, intense. Walking through the school yard together, we noticed how funny Mr. Gilbert was, how sophisticated Miss Taylor was. While George was the nicest boy in the class, Larry was the cutest. We drilled each other on Latin verbs and chemistry formulas, and wondered what questions would be on the next exam. We looked over enviously at vivacious Deirdre and pretty Wendy, who always seemed to be laughing and flirting with the circle of boys that constantly flocked around them.

Then a new girl joined our class. Her name was Pam Russner. She and her family had moved to Mount Forest from Provo, Utah. Her mother cut hair out of their home. Her father did some kind of agricultural engineering. They were Mormons, even more exotic to me than the handful of Jews in our small town in rural Ontario. I had never met a Mormon before.

Pam was strange and fascinating. While the rest of us spent hours arranging our permed hair, or backcombing our beehives, Pam wore her straight blond hair in a simple Dutch boy's bob. She didn't seem to care about clothes – or boys. She loped through the school yard like a wolf, body canted forward, always slightly ahead of us. She didn't speak a lot, but when she did, she said exactly what she thought – even to the teachers, which thrilled and shocked we four timid girls.

Pam taught Lois and I to fence, lending us the equipment – the black mesh face-masks, heavy white jackets and knickers, the padded gloves and slim dangerous epees. She demonstrated the lunge and riposte, the parry and thrust. We practised on the school's auditorium stage, sheltered from view behind the heavy grey house curtains. Lois and I faced each other a short distance apart, each foot deliberately placed at a 45-degree angle on the strip of masking tape Pam had laid down on the oak boards. When Pam declared, “En garde!”, we bent our hips and thighs into a half-squat, crooked our left arm and hoisted it behind our shoulder, and thrust forward our right hand which held the epee. Pam checked our body positions, stood back and ordered, “Fence!” We shuffled back and forth in a crab-like dance, waving the epees and poking at each other. Afterwards, back in our pleated grey wool skirts and white cotton blouses, we swished through the school halls, feeling slightly exotic ourselves.

One fall weekend as the maples were turning orange and red, Pam invited the four of us to a sleepover at her house. Her parents owned a ranch bungalow high on a hill in the countryside outside Mount Forest. This was a rare occasion for me: I looked forward to it all week with growing excitement. One of our parents dropped us off on the Saturday morning. Pam met us at the front door, and immediately ushered us into her mother's home salon, a small many-windowed room looking out on the garden. A flowered divan nestled against one wall next to a green leatherette seat topped by a cone-shaped metal hair dryer. We bunched together on the divan as Pam's mother deftly washed and styled each head of hair in turn, while Pam produced the odd laconic remark. In the afternoon, we headed outside to the steep paved road. Pam brought out two yellow skateboards, oblivious to the potential ruin of our new hair-dos. We teetered on the skateboards, practising short runs on the tarred driveway, and then Pam challenged us to the hilly road. Two of us looked out for cars, while the other two zoomed down the hill, hearts pounding, hair-dos frazzling. By some miracle, there were no fractured arms, dislocated shoulders or broken necks.

Supper was take-out Chinese food; dessert, crunchy fortune cookies. As the sky darkened, Pam led us into the living room. A long black leather chesterfield fronted by a heavy glass coffee table faced the large picture window, flanked by a teak credenza topped by a bold abstract painting. On an adjacent wall, a low matching bookcase held a long row of record albums and stereo equipment – an amplifier and turntable. Two large speakers stood in opposite corners of the room. There was a real Persian rug on the floor.

At Pam's direction, we pushed the coffee table underneath the window and pulled the drapes closed. She instructed us to lie down on the carpet and close our eyes. Then she pulled one of the records out of its sleeve, placed it carefully under the turntable's needle and turned out the lights. She lay down beside us. The room fell dark, black as the country sky outside. No one dared to speak.

We heard the faint hiss of the needle tracking in the grooves and then the room exploded with the opening bars of Beethoven's 5th Symphony: Dah Dah Dah Dum! Dah Dah Dah Dum! I had never heard anything like it before. My knowledge of classical music was limited to the simple Mozart minuets and Clementi studies that I thumped through in my weekly piano lessons with Sister Mary Lolament. At home, we sometimes hauled out an old portable RCA Victor record-player and listened to The Sound of Music or Oklahoma. This music felt wild, fierce and powerful. The sound hurled at me, as if it was a live thing. As the music surged around, my sprouting teenage body tingled with the urgency of the violins and timpani. I felt I was racing across the fields on a runaway stallion. When the notes of the last movement finally died away, we lay where we were, silent in the dark room, until at last Pam rose and turned on the lights.


Sunday, April 1, 2012

Varney, Varney, one more mile

As much as I love to write, it often falls to the bottom of the priority list. Some time ago, I realized that I needed group support to sustain my writing efforts. And then, poof! an invitation came to join a group of friends who wanted to continue their own writing. Thank you to John, Norma and Joan for getting me back on track.



Imagine seven children, ages one to twelve, crammed into an old sage-green Rambler station wagon. In the back seat, two young boys sit on either side of the oldest child, their big sister. She jabs each of them with sharp elbows whenever they try to reach across her to slap one another with their striped towels. Three older boys jostle on the the rear-facing bench at the very back of the wagon. A red Coleman cooler doubles as a foot rest. No seat belts in this era. In the front seat, the parents, weary from the week's work of milking cows and night-shift nursing. Between them sits the one-year-old, sucking her thumb and fingering a doll, its copper hair springing wildly from a battered head, one blue glass eye staring fixedly at the car's push-button dashboard, the other eye permanently shut.

It's a hot Sunday afternoon in July during the mid-'60s. My family is heading for a picnic outing at Varney Conservation Area, a 20-minute drive from our farm near Mount Forest, Ontario.

Earlier that day, heading home after Sunday Mass, my father bent to my mother's will and agreed to the picnic. He would much have preferred to stay home – alone – enjoying a rare moment of quiet privacy. Now he drives without speaking, his eyes fixed on the road. He steers using one rough and calloused hand, the middle finger chopped off at the first knuckle after an accident with the hay baler. Occasionally he barks at us to stop fighting or to sit still. My mother rolls down her window, lights a cigarette, and watches the rows of bright green corn springing up out of the passing fields.

On my left side, my little brother Richie begins rocking back and forth, crooning, “Varney, Varney, one more mile.” He had composed this line after our first trip to Varney several years before, when he had asked, “Are we there yet?” and was told to wait until a road sign would tell him we were close.  “Varney, Varney, one more mile,” he chants. Like a flock of crows, the rest of us pick up the refrain and soon the car rocks with our noisy squawking. Varney, Varney, one more mile, louder and louder until my exasperated father yells at us to shut up. It's impossible to suppress the giggles that burble through our clamped beaks. My father glares at us in the rear view mirror; my mother interrupts her dreamy smoking to turn around, scolding us with a stern look. Then, surprisingly, my father sticks out his long tongue at us, and our giggles are set free, dissolving the tension.

Finally, we pass the sign, green letters on a brown wooden board: Varney Conservation Area, one mile. Dad parks the car next to a crescent of cedar trees hugging a small pond. There's a sandy beach and a diving board on a wooden scaffolding. Parents serve as lifeguards. My brothers tumble out of the car and race for the water, blue and red swim trunks hanging from their bony hips. I help my parents unload the cooler with its cache of cheese and bologna sandwiches, a large plastic jug of cherry Koolaid, nine plastic beakers, a handful of paper napkins and two packages of Voortman's ginger spice cookies. Finding a clear spot some distance apart from the other families, my mother shakes a dark green plaid blanket onto the sand, one hand clutching her cigarette package, matches tucked into the flap. She places these next to the cooler, then steps out of her pink-striped cotton blouse and denim shorts to reveal a black swimsuit encasing generous breasts and a thickening waist. Scooping up the baby, she walks to the water, sets the child down, and then lies full-length on her stomach in the shallow water. My mother loves to swim. Patricia splashes and gurgles. My father folds himself into a lawn chair with a dented aluminium frame criss-crossed with frayed green and white webbing. He rolls up the bottoms of his dark brown trousers, exposing stark white ankles and bony feet. Settling into the chair, he takes off his socks and shoes and pushes his long toes deep into the sand in search of the coolest spot. He hates the water; in fact, never once in all my life did I ever see him swim.

My brothers splash up and down, flinging droplets from their hair like young puppies. One dives down to bring up a clump of muddy sand, and soon all five are slinging mud at each other. My father yells. The mud-slinging stops. Meanwhile, I walk self-consciously to the diving board, pulling down the seat of the new tangerine one-piecer that I bought after hours of poring through the Eatons' summer catalogue. I do a running dive, and practise my crawl till I reach a shallow spot, then stand on my hands, arching my legs as high as I can above the water's surface. I roll over and over, water rippling my body, my long brown hair streaming behind me. I'm a delicate mermaid and although he's not yet in sight, I'm convinced a handsome young prince is swimming towards me. I know he will immediately fall in love with me, astonished by my beauty and charm.

We swim for hours, until our fingers wrinkle, our lips turn blue and our teeth chatter with cold. My mother calls us out of the water, swaddling us in towels. We eat the sandwiches, slurp down the Koolaid, and steal one more cookie than allowed. Just five more minutes, we plead, and fall back into the water for one last swim.

The sun is sinking slowly behind the cedars as we pile back into the car. My mother leans over Patricia, sprawled on her lap, to turn on the radio to listen to the 6 o'clock news. There's some half-hearted pushing and shoving in the rear-facing seat, then, silence. Telephone poles flash by, and the pastures glow in the evening light. My brothers' heads nod. Some fall asleep. Richie stays awake, rocking back and forth as the fields spiral past. “Varney, Varney, one more mile,” he chants softly. Then his voice too trails off. He yawns and leans his head against my shoulder.