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Aleck's Last Playlist - The City Blues

Aleck’s Last Playlist – The City Blues

One time Aleck and I heard about a beer festival coming around town.  Our information was vague. We had a notion that it was happening on Davie, but no. We were on the wrong trail, but there must have been some connection, because the people at the place we went looking at knew where to send us. They said the festival was happening at the Fire Hall Theatre downtown. We wandered over there and…

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Aleck's Last Playlist, Vol. 2: The Country Blues

Aleck’s Last Playlist, Vol. 2: The Country Blues

Beginning that Thursday night in April in 1984, most of the time for the next two decades, Aleck and I roommated together.  He wasn’t always around, mind, but he had a way of moving in and out without fuss (he so rarely had possessions to move with him) that I have a hard time hanging onto the memory of his comings and goings.  But fundamentally, for the next score of years, wherever I happened…

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Aleck's Last Playlist: Vol. One - Professor Longhair

Aleck’s Last Playlist: Vol. One – Professor Longhair

My brother Aleck re-entered my life one Thursday, it seems to me a sunny Thursday afternoon, April 25th, 1984.  The phone rang.  “Is this Ted?” “Yes.” “It’s Aleck.” I couldn’t at that moment remember knowing an Aleck. “Aleck.  Aleck, your brother.  You know, Tommy.” Oh, that Aleck. Now, the last time I’d seen my brother was 1961.  And even though we had lived in the same village together,…

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Legends of Myself 141

Legends of Myself 141

141. Vancouver, 1969:  Portrait of the Graduate So, where were we in 1969?  We hadn’t yet gone to the Moon.  That was later in the summer.  I remember I was hanging in a crowd with Rob in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto when that happened, and, projected on a big screen, we watched Neil Armstrong climb down from the lunar module, saw his almost-ghostly image as he spoke his famous line.  “A…

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Legends of Myself 140

Legends of Myself 140

140. Vancouver, 1968-69: I Was a Teenage Underachiever Sometime in October my cheque from my summer job finally followed me home.  I don’t remember exactly how much it was (somewhere hovering on either side of $200) but I do remember this:  with paperbacks selling at 95 cents, I could buy a lot of books with it. Now, book buying does not lend itself to bulk shopping.  Every book has to be…

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Legends of Myself 139

Legends of Myself 139

139.  1968:  The University of Travel, Concluded

I believe it was Saskatchewan where one night we saw the aurora borealis, green dancing lights above the northern horizon, although we were only guessing then what it was we were seeing. 

It was Saskatchewan also when we were run off the road.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been on it, so I can’t speak for now, but, regardless, much of…

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Legends of Myself 138

Legends of Myself 138

138.  1968:  The University of Travel

A man?  Well, as Treebeard might have said, let’s not get hasty.  When exactly I attained to that ineffable quality, I couldn’t say, but given any definition of man that included the notion of adulthood, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t yet.  But true or not, my father saying such over the telephone meant that I wasn’t, after all, in the trouble that I thought I…

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Legends of Myself 137

Legends of Myself 137

137. Vancouver, 1968:  Escaping to Canada

Grade 10 had been a good year, but Grade 11 was less so, and that was part of my problem.  I didn’t get Mr. Bakker for math that year, and the teacher I did get, while undoubtedly better for everyone else in the class, left me so bored it made me angry.  In Mr. Bakker’s class the previous year, so far as I know, every superior math student in our grade…

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Legends of Myself 136

Legends of Myself 136

Continued from Legends of Myself 134

136.  Vancouver, 1966-67:  Master of the Universe and All That

The years on William Street won’t need a detailed retelling.  Standing still has its charms, but they are the charms of the thing itself, of stability, of the fruits of stability, not usually of narrative.  In Black Elk Speaks, when passing over uneventful years, the narrator remarks, “That…

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Legends of Myself 65

Legends of Myself 65

Continued from Legends of Myself 64

65. Gitanmaax/Hazelton, 1959:  Town and Field

Town.  Hazelton has a miniature town centre, dressed up these days to look cute and old-timey, hopefully to lure the tourists in.  I don’t remember it being nearly so compact, but at nine or ten, one’s expectations might be more compact.  It was large enough for our purposes then.

I remember going into town with…

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Legends of Myself 82

Legends of Myself 82

Continued from Legends of Myself 81

82. Hartley Bay and Laxgal’tsap, 1961:  Cockles and Herring Roe

When uncles came to call at the house where I was staying in Hartley Bay, quarters and dimes often found their way into the palms of the children living there.  They weren’t my uncles, of course, but somehow that is the way I thought of them, and they didn’t distinguish me from the other children…

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Legends of Myself 51

Legends of Myself 51

Continued from Legends of Myself 50

51. Port Essington, 1958-59:  One Room Schoolhouse

It’s one of those bureaucratic paradoxes that sometimes the most challenging jobs are given to the least experienced, mostly because the most experienced wouldn’t put up with them—or already have a job.  The schoolhouse in Essington had one room, one teacher, 10 students, and (potentially) 7 grades.  That must…

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A Plague Diary 12

A Plague Diary 12

What we are seeing south of the border is truly dismaying.

It’s dismaying because of the death toll, 60,000 by tomorrow—and that is almost certainly an underestimate.

It is dismaying because of the number of infections of Covid-19—more than a million in the US, and everybody knows that number is also wildly wrong.  It is far greater than that.

It’s dismaying because of the leadership.  Trump…

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A Plague Diary 11

I wrote the other day about the success of women leaders during this pandemic.  The other side of the story displayed itself only yesterday, the other side being the utter failure of right wing governments.

My opinion–and maybe I haven’t said it enough, it’s an important thing to say–is that right wing governments are fundamentally illegitimate, because they rule for themselves.  They are one…

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A Plague Diary 10

Back at the end of the 18th century, the maritime fur trade started in British Columbia, and the traders that came here from England and the US—King-George-men and Boston-men, as we knew them locally—came up against a reality of  Northwest Coast cultures, the social power of women.  In the journals of the trading captains were written constant complaints about how they had made fine deals with…

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A Plague Diary 9

Every single day feels like waiting.

You wait for the numbers to rise, since rising is their only direction. You wait for the numbers to, please, begin to slow.

Because numbers aren’t numbers.  They are people and families, units of tragedy.

You wait for another day, another threat, another horror.

It’s hard to do anything with so much waiting going on.

Of course, our part is easy, those of us…

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A Plague Diary 8

If you flip our calendar up for June, you see it there, marked for June 6th, the John Prine concert.  He was supposed to come last August, but health issues delayed the tour.  Earlier on, I guess two or three weeks ago, we were speculating whether we were going to be able to come out of our cocoons early enough to make that date, and thinking maybe it would have to be postponed again because of…

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