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General Jack Speaks: A Play

Posted by :James Howden On : September 23, 2012
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General Jack Speaks

 This short monologue attempts to capture a little of the spirit and story of Marion Jack (1866-1954), a legendary Canadian Baha’i pioneer who was much extolled by the Faith’s Guardian, Shoghi Effendi, and much loved by ‘Abdu’l-Baha, the son its Founder. The three “letters” that Marion “writes” during the play are fictional, though based on letters that she wrote to, among others, fellow believers Ella Robarts and Edna True. The text uses Marion’s own words where possible, and such quotations are indicated in bold print. Statements about “Jacky” written by or on behalf of the Guardian are underlined. She was nearly 90 when she died in Sofia, Bulgaria, her pioneer post since the early 1930s.

 

[Marion Jack, in the middle of the stage, is seated at a small desk in her tiny hotel room writing a letter and reminiscing. An off-stage voice introduces her.]

“[Marion Jack] was such a lovely person– so joyous and happy that one loved to be with her. Her shining eyes and beautiful smile showed how much the Baha’i Faith meant to her….We used to love to go to her studio and talk with her, also to see her paintings of the Holy Land and familiar Green Acre landscapes….She always entered into any plan with zest….If we could all radiate happiness as did Jacky, I am sure we would attract more people to the Faith.”

 

[Marion looks up and begins speaking.]

August, 1945

My dear Ella,

This terrible war is finally over, and perhaps things can return to normal now. I apologize for using a pencil, but my little inkpot has dried up. I began this letter in a little coffee shop. I like that place as I have had the chance of speaking to a couple of fine men here, so lately I try to frequent it in hopes of catching a listening ear…[and] pass on the Glad Tidings.

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Why Do Men Love Sports So Much?

Posted by :James Howden On : May 19, 2012
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Bill Simmons is one of the best sportswriters I’ve read. His prose pops with ideas, digressions and extrapolations. He churns out words at a high volume (especially in his book on the NBA, but also in his columns for Grantland, which can run to 10,000 words), but still manages to be graceful.

I’m a relative newbie in reading The Sports Guy. I’ve enjoyed reading pieces, by Simmons and the Grantland website’s “usual gang of idiots” (that’s a MAD Magazine reference, for you young’uns), that treat sports as something worth thinking about. (And mocking. And questioning. And loving, all the same.) From the start of this online discussion of sport and pop culture, indeed for his whole career, Simmons has been willing – eager – to rip off the mask of “objectivity” that supposedly marks the true “sports journalist”, and write as an unabashed fan. It’s no shock when a Grantland writer drop a fairly high-cult literary reference into a piece on doomed basketball franchises or tragic-comic ballplayers, but Simmons’s niche is emotion, plumbing the beer-sodden basements of “the agony of defeat”, and the dizzy champagne heights of joy and optimism, when the Good Guys win and whichever Evil Empire threatens them has been justly humiliated.

Simmons thrives on an unapologetic rooting for the laundry of all things New England and an amusing hatred for everything New York teams do and stand for. (See also: Lakers, Los Angeles.)

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Herald-ry 2011: Another Family Newsletter Thundering With TMI

Posted by :James Howden On : October 19, 2011
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[This family report was written in early September, 2011. The author stands by his commentary, if not necessarily his publication choices.]

Good morning, all my relations! It’s a blue-sky Monday in Dalian, and Sarah Harmer is singing “I am Aglow (With Thoughts of You)” in the next room. It’s not only a sweet and lively tune, but it’s a good mask for the usual September sounds in our apartment complex: military training next door. Freshman college and university students in China spend their first few weeks on campus in a kind of boot camp, so we hear endless repetitions of canned marching songs, indefatigable shouts of “Yi! Er! San! Si!” (their counting is outstanding, though limited; I used to think the same things about my high school’s football teams during their early-practice calisthenics), the crow-like hollers of young women crying out their martial arts thrusts and, of course, the Chinese national anthem. This morning’s alarm was megaphoned instructions a little before 6 am, and canned trumpets doing some sort of reveille. HELLO!! Sam was out the door by 7:30 for his third day of school, and Diana was teaching Oral English at her university by 8. So now it’s just me and Sarah, and a mad wind whirling about and through our 9th floor apartment. I can see the Bohai Sea between the cupolas of the apartment buildings across the street. I’ve just received the sweetest email from one of our dear friends here. It’s a good day.

Oh, the beds we’ve slept in!  Canada was a glorious, homely and instructive place to be this past summer. We had two brief visits to our house on Presland Road,

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“Dalian, Dalian, Dalian-ward…!”: A Family Newsletter

Posted by :James Howden On : September 14, 2009
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The excitement is hitting me this morning, as it periodically does. A 4:30 a.m. bathroom stumble turned into an hour of restlessness, thinking of all that is changing in our lives and all of you that are steady in our thoughts. The insects are buzzing, the birds sing (as do the fishing boats and motorbikes), and the sun is preparing to turn a warm and humid night into a blazing sweatbox day in Macau. I’m sitting by the pool in our hotel on the isle of Coloane in this former Portuguese colony that is now one of the Special Administrative Regions of China. CHINA. There isn’t a lot of lounging time, so by the time I finish writing this newsletter, I expect that we will be in Dalian, a small village of about four million in northeastern China. (CHINA!)

I’ll try to be brief. (I will fail. Skim as you wish.)

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Death of a Centaur: An Essay on Updike

Posted by :James Howden On : December 11, 2007
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A classic tension in life and fiction lies between the poles of unfettered individualism and the imperatives of the wider society. North America, and the United States in particular, became in the 20th century the home ground for an ethos that favoured individualism – especially the rugged, masculine kind – as the supreme value. Even religious inclinations were understood primarily in the context of personal benefit. The life, liberty and pursuit of happiness so central to the American project were interpreted increasingly as individual quests, rather than collective ones.

The ideal of the Self-Made Man, grown iconic in the stories of Horatio Alger and the reputedly solo exploits of Lindbergh, Elvis, even Einstein, becomes a problem in the relationship of a father and son. How can a man lift himself by his own bootstraps and still follow in his father’s footsteps? The failure, even the refusual, to recognize the debt owed to paternity is one of the less-known consequences of individualism, especially for males in American culture. The men’s movement that found its strongest – if occasionally cringe-making – expression in works like Bly’s Iron John is based upon one fundamental perception: that fatherly guidance is shockingly minimal in the experience of modern men, that for many there is a smoking hole where a father should be.

Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories from the early 20th century flirt with this theme. The father figure is either remote, implied, someone to be respected in his absence by recalling his views about drinking or literature, or he is suddenly and overwhelmingly present, exposing Nick to struggle and death in a way for which he is utterly unprepared. In Kurt Vonnegut, we see a retrospective longing to understand his distant, disappointed Dad. (Accounting for Kurt the younger’s long retention of the “Junior” in his pen name.) Recently, the most remarkable feature of the apocalypse imagined by Cormac McCarthy in The Road is a fiercely protective and starkly intimate relationship between an anonymous father and his nameless son. We wonder if only such a world-devouring flame could make such interdependence and devotion possible.

***

Given this framework, consider George and Peter Caldwell, the father and son central to John Updike’s 1963 novel The Centaur.

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In Memoriam: Donald Edward Wright

Posted by :James Howden On : November 20, 2007
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He was a curious, idealistic, troubled, and relentlessly generous man. Don was a dear friend. It’s one week ago that he died alone in his apartment, gripped by a sudden exhaustion of heart that took him away before the paramedic cavalry could arrive. He stepped quietly into my mid-teen life while other mentors, more naturally gifted and better-positioned, were making other plans. Many relationship incarnations and over 30 years later, through dogged pursuits of the unattainable and countless heartbreaks – mainly his, though there was never a Significant Other that I knew – my coach and friend has passed over to “the undiscovered country”. He now plays a game with which I am not familiar. He was always a mystery, though I may have known him better than anyone. We are all, finally, mysterious to each other.

I first knew Don Wright when he was a rail-thin, silent-walking 21-year-old with curly black hair and dark eyes that looked down and away. He was probably hitting ground balls to my younger sister, the shortstop. I might’ve been jealous. Who’s this guy? He’s not from here. Maybe he’ll hit me some harder ones later. 

I was about to turn 15. I had turned from my family church (though I was to embrace the Bahá’í teachings not long after). I had also turned away from the other local religion, hockey, and winters were beginning to look like an unswimmable gulf between football and baseball seasons. My father lived in the same house as me, but was a distant figure with problems of his own. I wouldn’t have been able to formulate this then, but here was a dreamy boy, revelling self-indulgently in his isolation but yearning to be found, to be coached.

Before a year had passed, winters were full. Winter meant basketball. Much of the year was, though I didn’t put away my ballglove and pigskin. And Don Wright, a Hamilton boy who worked for the Canadian National railway and lived with his mother, was suddenly very near the centre of my life. He drove a small band of us all over the region in his station wagon, one of those long sixties boats with the faux wood panelling along the side. He was feverishly learning the basketball coaching trade, trying to stay a step ahead of an eager group of late starters who shovelled small-town Canadian driveways to dream the American city game with wet feet and icy fingers.

We didn’t know much about Don, really. He’d had a Corvette, that was interesting. He worked nights, and there seemed to be endless time for us from mid-day to exhaustion. I guess that was enough of an explanation. We were young. It was the 1970s. He took us for our first McDonald’s fries, our first square Wendy’s burgers. He played James Brown on the eight-track tape deck. He taught us crossovers and the legendary practice drills of George Mikan. When he showed us the spin dribble one afternoon, I went straight to Smith’s barbershop after practice, because my long hair had whipped saltily into my eyes at every turn. Mostly, he convinced Barry, Dana, John and me — and countless others after us, without saying too much and with a passion that we had to pay attention to even notice — that basketball was a great game. I noticed. That quiet fire in him found ready fuel in me.

And Don continued to open whatever doors he could for us, mainly to gyms all over three counties. We got pretty good, I guess, and by the end of high school we toyed with our league opponents and could hang in there against the city kids. Looking back, the way we played and learned to love the game (though starting so late), and the level we attained, were amazing. Don was inexperienced as a coach, and chronically under-confident personally, but still transformed an awkward crew of hockey and baseball players, and some relative non-athletes, into a good high school team. Nobody noticed; we were a stealth mission; we were hoop crazy in a hockey town. But that was the first chapter of Don Wright’s influence on three decades of sporting and educational life in my little town, and well beyond.

Most of his career and his greatest successes, though, were spent with girls teams. They listened better. They weren’t hockey-first, as all Don’s boys teams but mine had been. They were also more likely to embrace the demanding and idealistic Don Wright agenda: your family, your faith, and your education are far more important than our basketball team, but nothing else should be. He expected commitment and sacrifice of his players. Some chafed at this, naturally, but few had any notion of how little he expected of them compared to his own levels of dedicated and fiercely loyal effort. He faced steadily recurring disappointment, given his enormous idealism, but this made the stars shine radiantly. Over the decades, Don’s mental and emotional scrapbook was brightened by the players who got it, who bought in, who said, Okay, coach. Where to now? They weren’t always the best athletes he worked with, though it was fun to see what he could do when quickness, desire and coachability inhabited the same pair of sneakers.

I wanted to coach like him. (Yes, I wanted to outdo my mentor, too. I did it differently, but with the same lofty and sometimes unbearable hopes.) We argued strategy, practice planning, skill development and game management as our coaching careers paralleled and diverged. What we mainly talked about, always, was how to reach kids. How can we get them to play together? How can we draw out their best? What’s stopping Kid A? What can I do for Kid B?

Commitment. Sacrifice. Together, we CAN. That was a team motto of Don’s for awhile. Sometimes, sad but essential to say, the sacrifices that Don made for his teams, for his players, were too much. He remained, as his coaching skill and success grew, the same shy and emotionally isolated person that I had first known as a semi-conscious teenager. His family life had been a troubled one, and his basketball family was his main support. Not surprisingly, that wasn’t always enough.

Life took some harsh turns for my mentor and friend. I’m grieved for the ways I let him down. He made some mistakes. His last years were marked by financial reversals, coaching dreams that soured, and a serious car accident that left him with a heavy limp and constant pain. He struggled – and I have long known that he always did – with a tendency toward depression, which deepened as his circumstances grew narrower, his physical suffering greater, and his capabilities at ever-greater odds with his aspirations.

But among the many reasons that I loved and admired Don, none are greater than this: in spite of those difficulties and disappointments, he kept on giving. For the last three autumns, he coached the junior girls teams at the high school across the street from the apartment where he died. A 2-10 season had only recently ended when his heart finally and suddenly gave out. Coaching, which had once fit him like the one pair of pants your belly hasn’t outgrown, was a strain. Just sitting down on the hard chairs and benches in yet another high school gym made him tired and sore, but he gave those girls everything he had. Just like always. He kept them close in games they had no business not getting hammered in. He took them on an overnight road trip to southwestern Ontario, something that inexperienced groups like this never get to do. The last pictures show smiling, laughing city girls from many cultures, posing without a care along the shores of Lake Erie. The invisible guy behind the camera is my buddy. (Can you see him yet?)

Some of these girls, the most junior leaves on Don’s basketball family tree, will be present when the clan gathers Sunday afternoon for his memorial. They’re young, but I think that they have some inkling of who he was and what he has given them– more than their fellow students who might’ve had hallway sneers or doubtful whispers for the stranger. (Who’s that fat old gimp?) I’ll be back home this weekend, in the town where my brother, Don Wright, first guided and helped me in baseball and basketball, where he showed me the immortal coach John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success”, where he set a well-nigh impossibly high standard of giving one’s time and talent for the sake of young people. Those of us with long associations with The Wright Stuff will laugh and sorrow and remember. We’ll find, I’m sure, the joy that is behind the grieving of a life lost, both for the enrichment Don brought to our lives, and for the sense that his tiredness and troubles are over. He was a bit like Job, and I pray that his spirit knows some rest and welcome. We’ll also try to show the younger ones that there was more to the man than they know.

There always is.

We got together to celebrate Don’s life not long afterward. I had lots to say and feel about that, too.

World Series Baseball: Game ON

Posted by :James Howden On : October 24, 2007
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8:16 p.m.

What a great television! Thanks, Wendy and Bernie!

It’s the 103rd “World Series” of baseball, named not for its global reach — though the game is getting more international — but because it was initially sponsored by a long-defunct newspaper called the New York Globe. (You could look it up, and I hope you will. Going Google-free tonight.)

The participating teams are proving that baseball is a sport that is the least reliable of all the North American major sports in having its “best team” win. After all, baseball is a marathon 162-game schedule, and the playoff series can end in a shorter period than an individual engagement with another team in-season. So here we are, with the Red Sox having come from behind in the American League championship series to win. No surprise here, really. Boston is a big-money team and dominated their division most of this season. However, Colorado had to win 14 out of their last 15 games just to qualify for a tie-breaker, and they have now won eight straight post-season games to take the National League title. Whoever is hottest at the end seems to be the team to watch…

8:24 p.m.

Who gets the National Anthem for Game One of the World Series? “The Pride of Boston, and the epitome of our culture, Maestro John Williams…” At the time when he first won an Oscar for the score to Indiana Jones, he was the conductor of the Boston Pops orchestra. So we had brass in the outfield instead of some brassy blonde. I approve.

Pre-game introductions highlighted by one of baseball’s specialties, a close-up shot of Boston manager Terry Francona launching a brown spurt of tobacco juice for the edification of all. Spitting is the thing. Country ball.

Actually, no. The true highlight, and no sarcasm here, is having Boston Red Sox icon Carl Yastrzemski throw out the ceremonial first pitch. (He bounced it to the plate. But he’s still a hero from my youth. I changed my batting stance as a 10-year-old in homage to his high-held bat. The last winner of the Triple Crown, in 1967.) Quite splendiferously cool to see the visiting Rockies lined up along their dugout’s top step to watch the great Hall of Famer demonstrate his old-man arm. And he’s so central to the Red Sox team’s painful mystique, as all his greatness and all those seasons never brought him to the Series championship. They didn’t break the so-called “Curse of the Babe” — they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1492 or so and had never won the big one since until the 2004 exorcism.

8:44 p.m.

Wow, this Josh Beckett is all I’ve heard. The starting pitcher for the BoSox just threw bullets, nothing but fastballs in the high 90s to strike out three straight Rockies. Yikes. (That was 90 as in miles per hour. This may be the World Series, but we are in the Excited States of Anti-Metric Measurement.) But here comes the pride of Canada, the first Canuck to start as the pitcher of a Series game since Reggie Cleveland did in the mid-70s. Jeff Francis, a big left-hander with stuff and style.

8:50 p.m.

Wow. Runty little second baseman hits it out. Dustin Pedroia hit a big home run in the ALCS, too. Second batter Kevin Youkilis lines a double. David “Big Papi” (this reference to him is already getting annoying) Ortiz moves the runner over, and Manny Ramirez drills the first runner home. Not a good start for the Canadian.

8:58 p.m.

The black and purple/blue of the Rockies’ uniforms remind me of the cover to Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality album. Those little armless vests don’t work for me at all, especially with the guys showing off their guns with polyester long-sleeved undershirts. 3-0 at the end of one inning, and the Rockies would love for the rain to turn into a monsoon. One of the many things that make baseball a distinct game: it’s outdoors, and you can’t play it properly in anything more than the lightest of rains.

9:07 p.m.

The Rockies are going to need a second time through the order, after their eight days off, to catch up with Beckett. Four straight Ks now. Whoa! Why bother throwing the curveball? It results in a double that nearly went over the massive Green Monster, the left-field wall in Boston’s Fenway Park. Nice to see a park like Fenway in the World Series, not just a boutique field designed to evoke nostalgia for the days when baseball truly was the National Pastime.

Hey, and there’s my new shortstop hero, Troy Tulowitzki, ripping a double to get the Rockies on the board. (I was a fan, still am, of Khalil Greene of the San Diego Padres, though I haven’t seen him much; but hey, he belongs to the Baha’i Faith, and the minority religionists have to stick together.) Some of his teammates have been waving fairly helplessly, but two doubles in the bottom of the first may have broken the Beckett mystique, just a little. Baseball is, perhaps more than any other team sport, such a mental exercise. You most often can’t overcome poor play with hustle, effort, all that “old college try”. In true baseball-speak, you gotta try EASIER.  

9:37 p.m.

Lots of car commercials, of course. Boy toy night at the television. There was one that had, though, more than just jolting music and chaotic camera angles. There was actually an appeal to ideals and ethics, a frontal attack on our tendency to materialist impatience. But I can’t remember what the product was. Ah. I’m sure I’ll have another chance at it. It played, after all, twice in the first half-hour of the broadcast. And it’s raining hard now in Boston. Oh, oh…

9:51 p.m.

It’s the top of the fourth inning, less than halfway through the regulation ballgame, and all the young baseball fans in North America, at least in the Eastern Time Zone, should be long gone to dreamland. And this is one of many reasons that baseball is dying out in large parts of the continent. I used to race home from school to catch the end of Series games that started in the afternoon. Money, money, money. Seven Ks for Beckett in four innings. Nice. (“K” is the baseball scorebook symbol for a strikeout. Boston fans have been provided with “K” placards by a local radio station. This being the Series, they may not require JumboTron appeals to “Make noise” and “Clap your hands!” I am ever an optimist.)

10:12 p.m.

Canada’s Pitcher just escaped the fourth inning, but there’s another crooked number on the Red Sox scoreboard. (The occasional one run doesn’t always hurt, but those bent numerals…) Francis may be done for the night, in which case he will continue one of the odd little facts that litter, even more than they always have in baseball, this number-crazy game: no Canadian has ever been the winning pitcher in a Series game. A nice little piece of conversation about Francis a couple of innings ago: born in Vancouver, named for a legendary Montreal Canadiens star (Jeff for Geoffrion, nicknamed “Boom Boom” as the hard-shooting Hab also was). And never learned to skate. So the American broadcast duo has a little fun with that, but I’m thinking What? You name AND nickname your kid after a hockey star and never let a good little athlete play the game? Not that every Canadian boy has to be a hockey head — none of my four have, although the youngest gets outdoor hockey in Canada’s cold capital’s outdoor rinks — but there’s a parental oddity there that I’d like to know more about.  

The rain has eased, and now the necessary five innings to make the game official are in the book. All Red Sox. More of those little ballcaps with the old-fashioned ‘B’ on them will be adorning male heads all over the continent.

10:40 p.m.

And my attention is wandering. Past my bedtime. But I can watch Manny Ramirez, one of the oddest-looking great athletes ever, hit. Three hits tonight. Everybody knows a hitter has to keep his head down on the ball, but he’s perfect. Wow. A flaky dude, a chaotic and sometimes even incompetent outfielder, but what a hitter. (Okay, perfect? Sorry. My error. Had he been a left-hand hitter, now then he’d be perfect.) Just detected another Howden error: Red Sox captain Jason Varitek does indeed wear the traditional knee-high knickers and tall red stockings. (I lost it in the sun.)

10:56 p.m.

12-1. Fifth inning. Another Colorado relief pitcher. I need a relief bloggist.

11:02 p.m.

The Red Sox are still up, now 13-1, and they’ve finally gotten the 3rd out of a 5th inning that seemed to have started yesterday. Cameras just caught a shot of writer Stephen King in a rain poncho, reading a magazine. You may have heard of his novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Okay, I haven’t read it either, but Gordon was a Red Sox pitcher with a fine curveball, as I recall. Naturally, he was called “Flash”. And here’s another one of those things about baseball: no sport has been written about better. There are lots of short stories, a few fine novels and tonnes of creative documentary writing about the game. It’s the only game, I used to joke — and I love baseball — that’s more interesting to talk about than to play. Almost true.

Macho guitars and turbo-charged video about a minivan from Toyota; at the end is slipped in the printed fact that it has the best fuel efficiency among grocery-getters. Not hard to see that peak oil hasn’t entirely penetrated North American consciousness. And then comes the ad for recreational gas-guzzling, the Polaris ATV.

11:26 p.m.

Wendy and Bernie just got home. They’re the guys with the three televisions, any one of which is at my disposal when my lust for sport cannot be sated by radio or on-line reports the next morning.

Just when I thought there was nothing more to say, here comes Ashanti singing “God Bless America” as the since-9-11 7th inning stretch song of choice. No more taking anybody out to the ballgame. Patriotism. Bowed heads. (An echo, of course, of the U.S. Air Force fly-by to punctuate “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Bowed heads and blood lust. Ooh. Did I just say that?) The extreme patriotism of Americans has always been an irritant to me, Canada having traditionally been a little quieter about our national pride (except certain hockey blowhards). We’re getting a little more vociferous, in our reserved Scottish way, and I wince about it sometimes. Our pride is not mainly based on military might, so I feel less compromised about our occasional chest-thumping. But the attachment of national glory to every single athletic contest? I mean the solemnity of l’hymne nationale before each game beyond high school. Surely this is a tradition that, if it weren’t so deep and patriotism such an American article of faith, would have long outlived its usefulness. And to add the alternative national anthem for a mid-game bit of national self-importance is sickly sweet icing upon a cake that’s past its best-before date. I wanted to paste my favourite little bumper sticker over Wendy and Bernie’s TV: God Bless ALL The Nations.

And on in relief for the Red Sox is Mike Timlin. Mike Timlin? He’s still living? He was relieving for the Blue Jays last millennium, for goodness’ sake. And speaking of great relievers, the other Canadian chucker won’t likely get off the bench for the Red Sox. Whither the Eric Gagné of old, he of the unhittable Dodgers closeouts? Hard not to be a bit suspicious about how he fuelled his earlier exploits, but maybe he’s just old. I know that feeling.

12:02 a.m.

Sheesh. Error number three for the typist. Gagné is in, but this IS, after all, a twelve-run ballgame. We’re finally in the ninth inning. We’ll soon be home. And my current favourite name just made the catch for the Sox in centre field: yes, friends, Coco Crisp is in the game as a defensive replacement.

12:07 a.m.

Big Eric closes the game with a strikeout. Yawn. Zoom, zoom, zoom. More car sales. Time to jump into my car.

ODY: Weeks 22-23. Stricken (Streakened?). Travellin

Posted by :James Howden On : March 7, 2007
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Week 22 of Guitar for Dummy started off sweetly. Once upon a mall wander, when I should have been doing my consumptive business and getting the hell home, I hit the pseudo-intellectual indulgences store, where they sell cigarettes, chocolate bars, and more mags about more things than I could imagine. (Hold the cigs.)

Stores like this — does anyone call them “smoke shops” anymore? — with their racks upon racks of magazines always hypnotize me if I allow myself to walk in. Mercifully, I can usually pass by the sections for women, knitters, video game junkies and home repairmen. Normally, the music section is also beyond me, unless the cover features an artist I know. I’ve always loved music, but I felt outside it. Now, however, that I was a Certified Guitar Butcher, it seemed unjust that I had never bought a music mag, so it was a breakout day: would it be Guitar? Guitar One? Acoustic Guitar? Fingerstyle Guitar? Vintage Guitar? Guitar World? Old Fart Guitar Diletantte Galaxy? (I made up one of these.) I settled, for a reason I can’t remember, on Guitar Player magazine. 

It was a bit of a Looking Glass experience. It had English text, photos of (mainly) familiar things – faces, guitars, curvy women reminding me that I was an ol’ babe in BoyLand – and ubiquitous advertising, but it was a strange land where I could see and read and still not find much sense. (John Mayer (?) plays Regular Slinky and Power Slinky…okay, sure…Fasel infused classic wah cutting high gain distortion searing double-edge tone…I think that was a good thing, but it took me awhile to figure out where the verbs were…) It went on. I noticed spank-guitar shred lessons and alnico classica humbuckers. I certainly didn’t understand the local customs or dialect in this new world. (Toto, I don’t think we’re in Sports Illustrated anymore…)

I thought Guitar Player might teach me something, and that it might be good airport reading, because we were off on a family trip. We’d decided on Guadeloupe: it would be an immersion in French, and we knew two couples who had lived and worked there. Okay, and palm trees and sun. Just days ahead of our flight, I’d found that friends of these friends could lend me a guitar for the two weeks we’d be there. I stopped hunting for a titanium guitar case for baggage handlers to play catch with. Gordie would stay home and safe. 

4:30 am taxi, 6 am hop from Ottawa to Montreal, 9:30 Air Canada flight to Point à Pitre, during which we removed the many layers of clothing we’d needed for -25 degrees C. and got ready for the tropics. We arrived, met by other new friends. (So good to belong to the Bahá’í community, with friends and fellows everywhere we go.) Got settled in our gite, joined our new friends for an evening, returned weary and grateful for a clean bed at about 11 pm, and only then realized, with a foggy head but emotional air raid sirens, that my guitar connection hadn’t been at the meeting. ARGH!

I was up against it: The Streak was in jeopardy. The goal I’d set for myself had been 365 straight days at the altar of the guitar muse. The day before we left, I had played for the one hundred and fiftieth consecutive day, and looked forward to playing in the warmth of a Caribbean evening. But now it was late, in a guest house in rural Guadeloupe. (The nearest neighbours were cows and roosters.) I made a desperate stab-in-the-dark request. Good news: Yes, the proprietor said, my grandson has a guitar you could borrow! Profoundly helpless and regretful news: But he doesn’t live here. Maybe you could have it by tomorrow.

I was buried by it: The Streak was over! Hard to take, but there was no way around it. I had made a promise that in the end – well, in the middle, actually – I couldn’t keep. Shoulda brought my own guitar. Damn! Did we go to the wrong meeting, maybe? Where was Christine?… But there you go, and there I went. It was a lovely night for sleeping, and I was crispy with fatigue et un peu de chagrin. But it wasn’t the disappointment that kept waking me up – it was the damned roosters. 

Rose-Hélène was true to her word, and the grandson’s small guitar was in my hands for our first full day on the island. It took a long while to tune – at least I’d had the foresight to bring my electronic tuner, or I’d have been cooked trying to coax music out of that thing. After about six or seven minutes, it made some recognizable noises, though it had ridiculously high action, rather like the ol’ broken-necked Degas that I started with. It was a comfort to be back on the musical trail. I didn’t even try to go all heroic and somehow redeem the sins of the previous day. Jes’ played, and it felt good to not be too desperate or anal about the whole thing. Life goes on. The Streak was at One.

After two days with the baby guitar, I was back to full-size after finally meeting my connection. (Some people go to the Caribbean in search of illicit chemicals. I scored six strings.) It was a full-sized classical acoustic, dusty and out of tune but a good machine. There were little coloured circles all over the fretboard, but I didn’t really try to figure out the chord calculus. I just did my dusty old things in a bright new place: the windows of our gite were always open, so I tried to do my late-night strumming softly, thumbly. (I ended up not using a pick the whole time there.) After all, the other guests were, well, heck, some of ‘em were considerably older than ME, and dawn comes early in Gwada. (And according to several neurotic cocks, it comes over and over again, the all-night rooster version of the movie Groundhog Day…). So no psycho percussion, no windmills, no blues hollers or howls of frustration.

All was well, and then a few days later, it happened again! ANOTHER MISSED DAY. Was it the water? (Or the lack of it?) Was it bad sleeps, or hot days after Canadian ones? I’m not sure, but after a day as the loyal chauffeur and pack mule for the princess, and then some beach time and too much sun and a miserable drive home, I couldn’t friggin’ get around to the guitar because I had my head in a toilet for much of the evening. I finally was able to tumble into an exhausted sleep, and I didn’t even consider playing. Sigh. And so a new challenge came: would I still get that daily practice in without the absurd but effective spur of a long run of commitment?

My favourite practice of the trip happened a couple of days later. I sat on a rock, down near Atlantic’s edge in a town called Le Moule. For an inland lad like me, the swell and the roar of the waves is intoxicating, and I liked it well. The surf pounded relentlessly, and I sweated profusely. I turned my ballcap backwards to keep my neck from reddening and, but of course, to present the image of an arty young vagabond, sitting on a rock, discovering himself and chronicling his generation in song by the sea. (Too bad there were no other rampant sentimentalists there. If a narcissist plays by the ocean / Does anybody see?) So, yes, I was a bit self-conscious – still! – about playing “in public”, even though there was almost nobody around. Still, I had a blast: beautiful scene, beautiful sun, one idea in mind and time on my hands. It felt like a vacation. Sweet!

Our first week in Guadeloupe was a delight. (Except for that toilet episode.) I was quite proud of myself that the end of The Streak didn’t sabotage my commitment, or hasn’t seemed to. It was the only bit of dark cloud we had. So now the count stands, for those of you scoring at home, at 159 out of 161 days – not what I’d been planning, but a fair percentage. The Streak is now at 5. Whoop-de-do…

ODY: Weeks 20/21. The Song is the Thing.

Posted by :James Howden On : January 25, 2007
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Category: On Second Thought

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There was a part of me that hoped that by this time, nearly 150 days into this crusade, I would be obsessed. By and large, my habits are pretty well established when I’m at home, and it’s no great inconvenience for me to get my work done. But knowing how I can get utterly locked in to patterns of thinking and concentrated (if brainless) activity, I had thought vaguely about how to manage a raging addiction to guitar playing. How will I handle it when I stop coming to meals? What’ll I do when my writing day begins to suffer because the boy just wants to play?

Well, safe at home, I guess. No worries about dependency yet. I recently read a piece on Tom Morello, the rocker with a brain (and a social conscience, and a lifelong love for the Cubs, I believe) from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. He started on the guitar relatively late, as a Harvard freshman, but made his own fervent pact to play each day, no matter how many essays were due. Legend has it that those playing sessions could last as long as eight hours. (Show-off! Creep!) Mine have approached ONE hour, oh, maybe twice.

And unless I start heeding advice from the Sonshine Boys – Dad, you gotta play more SONGS! Find stuff you like on-line, or write your own! They can be as dumb as rocks, but they’ll get you pumped — that kind of momentum will never be able to sweep me along. DAMN, but I’m a slow learner!

Songs, songs, songs. So what are the great songs I’ve loved, the singable songs for the very middle-aged? Time for a list, in no particular order, and then I’ll see which ones are actually Playable By A Guy Like Me:

Lorelei (The Pogues): might be simple enough, and so much feeling.

Jungleland (Bruce Springsteen): wow, but maybe too complex? One of the greatest songwriterly things ever. And Blood on Blood, or almost anything from Nebraska.

Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles): is a cello required?

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Jimmy LaFave): I love the LaFave version of this old Jimmy Webb song. On a Bus to St. Cloud is another melancholy, lovelorn ballad that Lafave delivers well, a song by Gretchen Peters.

So many from Bruce Cockburn, but let’s say “Tie Me at the Crossroads” and “Great Big Love”. Maybe I should learn one of his sensual ones, though; odd that this introverted, rather intellectual master guitarist has written some of the sexiest stuff ever. “Sahara Gold”, par exemple.

Boots or Hearts (The Tragically Hip): some alt-country type should record this, I’ve always thought. Locked in the Trunk of a Car knocks me sideways, but I don’t know how campfire friendly it is. Son One wants me to learn Wheat Kings, but it doesn’t get me. Not yet, anyway, but it is a three-chorder.

Naïve Melody (Talking Heads): I wonder if these are too funky for simple guitar playing. Byrne does a guitar-only rendition of Psycho Killer on Stop Making Sense, which may be manageable.

Road Trippin’ (RHCP): I don’t like earlier stuff much, but Californication is a terrific album. Real melodies and harmonies.

And this is so much fun, I could go on and on and never actually learn any of ‘em!! Ah, resistance. I’ve been reading a lot about you in The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and here you are, Resistance, you old seducer. There is one song that I’ve been working on, though, and the satisfactions are strong. It’s a chord progression to play behind a prayer I’ve learned to sing: Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain…where mention of God hath been made and His praise glorified… It’s a sweet and lovely invocation of the holiness of all places, when the spirit is given its due. And blessed is the spot where music is made, too, whether couch or bedside, but the chords are a bit tough for me: A, A7, E, E7, and D are more than manageable, but I still stumble over three bar chords. There’s a B minor, and A#7, and an F# minor.

But The Spot has begun to prove to me the wisdom of my young teachers. It’s nice to play something that sounds like a song. Keep at it, ol’ fella. 147 days down, and better days to come. Maybe even a little compulsion, for a change.

ODY: Weeks 18/19. 133/365. Home and Hearth.

Posted by :James Howden On : January 9, 2007
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Category: On Second Thought

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Well, I just keep hacking away. It’s all about hideously retro concepts like faith and, ugh, duty. I can do dutiful, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some beautiful. I could sure use some inspiration. Just after the funeral dirge that was the last progress (?) report, I actually put together two really fine days of practice in a row. Whining is virtue! Venting can be fun and productive. Catharsis lives!

There was no aha, no shining moment of clarity. But as has happened before, coming back to work on smooth and semi-automatic chord changes did the trick, for a couple of days anyway. The Big Picture was awfully cloudy, but the microscopic viewpoint helped me see some new things. I realized that my index finger is always en retard when I’m shaping a D chord, so I’ve been focussing on getting that reluctant follower to lead for a change. He’s still not trustworthy, but Finger One can surprise me by doing what he ought to without me having to remind him every time.

Because we were either on the road or doing home improvements for much of the last two weeks, it was as if my 100-Day guitar habit had never been. More than once, I staggered gratefully to bed after a too-long day, pooped and dim-witted, only to realize that I hadn’t visited the Six String Chapel that day. Argh! Much groaning and rationalization ensued. Don’t be so anal. It’s after midnight anyway, so what does it matter? Besides, maybe One Missed Day – oh, the horror! the horror! — will give you something more interesting to write about, you know, the tragic death of a perfect attendance record (what is this, Sunday school?), and the inspirational story of overcoming that awful setback and building anew. No? Well, how ‘bout this? Just between you and me and the dishes in the sink, nobody cares whether you miss a friggin’ day! You’re not that important! This is about as meaningful as a dog taking a dump in the woods. Rover has a consecutive days streak going, too.

One of those days was the Princess’s birthday, so to that snarling voice was added her sweet one. It had been a quiet and lovely evening, and sleep was calling when the realization hit. “Oh, stay with me, it’s so warm. And it’s my birthday…” Now that was pretty convincing. I came close to falling from musical/dutiful grace, such as it is, so I had to summon my best argument. (Not so much to convince her, but myself. And it worked. It might even be true.) “If I miss one day, a second one won’t matter. Next thing you know, a week’ll go by and I won’t mind much. I’m not in lessons, so who’s gonna notice? The thing is, I feel like I could mail the whole thing in. It’s bloody fragile.” Okay, so maybe I’m a drama prince. (We all gotta get some drama somewhere.) But this Guitar Player persona IS fragile, and I could lose my tenuous toe-hold on the sheer face of music very easily. So I stumbled down to my mom-in-law’s laundry room, leaned against the washer and played some cement-floor blues. It actually felt good, like a small sacrifice that might someday have value. And the Princess was sleeping, and the bed was just as warm, when I gratefully crawled into it half an hour later.

A few days after that tiny crisis, I had a more comfortable perch in my big sister’s living room, and somebody to play with. It was the Return of the Itinerant Artist, into my personal space at least. While I didn’t get as much time as I’d hoped for guitar renewal with my music guru and son the IA, it was marvy good. He answered some questions, and made helpful observations on my technique and on my earnestly clumsy approach to this whole business. He showed me how to play the acoustic guitar line to “Wheat Kings” by The Tragically Hip. (It’s just G to C and back, with a D thrown into the chorus. Pretty much the same ingredients as CCR’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain”, but an entirely different rhythm. I’m going to have to hear it some more, because I’ve lost the feel of it.) We looked at my attempts at playing the Twelve-Bar Blues sequence – still having some trouble getting smoothly into the B7 chord, but I know da blues – and then the IA gave me a great and much-needed experience. “Okay, Dad, you play that line, over and over, don’t stop, and I’ll solo over the top of it.”

And away we went, two acoustic guitars in a quiet small-town living room, and I was playing MUSIC! I need to find way more of that. Holy Fun! ‘Course, when ever now and again I tried to get a little creative with my strumming rhythm, I instantly lost track of the chord changes. And it didn’t matter. The IA would just nod, smile and keep picking, and I’d gradually find my way back into the groove. Sweetness!

And on another road trip night, in another living room, brother-in-law Silent Paul and I followed our epic country walk with some guitar sharing. (He’s not so silent when it’s just two guys and some ideas that he cares about.) Actually, most of the sharing was his, as he’s a lot farther down this road than I am and actually performs in his church sometimes. He showed me a fine little sequence that starts with a different fingering of the basic E chord, leaving the first finger free. Sliding that same shape up the fretboard, and barring the 5th, 7th and 9th frets behind it with the free index finger, produces respectively a higher A, a B and (dropping finger three) a C minor chord. Nifty. SP got excited about showing me this guitar lick, and worked hard to figure out how to write the sequence of chords for me, since he plays it beautifully and brainlessly. I’ll need at least one more visit down home before I grasp this sequence – Paul gives me way too much credit – but it’ll be, at least, a fresh reason and a new way to work on barre chords.

Even better, it was a chance to share this way-too-solitary cruise with others. For those two nights, playing guitar was less lonely and more interesting. (This playing alone in my cave is what the IA mainly means when he shakes his head at my weird way of learning guitar.) I still don’t play well with others, or very much, anyway, but there’s hope. Two living rooms’ worth.