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I Hardly Knew Ye, Reverend

Posted by :James Howden On : July 16, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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I likely should have been more familiar with William Sloane Coffin. (I even missed his death this year, an important passage in American life.) I’m old enough, for one thing, although his greatest public attention came when I was still defining student activism, say, as careening on crutches around Mrs. Whitelaw’s class. As a quote-scavenging young teacher, though, I came to appreciate Coffin jewels like these, even when I was fuzzy about who the author actually was: Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat and Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and then defends them in the name of morality. The dude could write.

The July edition of Harper’s Magazine has its “national correspondent” and beloved former editor Lewis Lapham coming from burying Reverend Coffin to praise his greatness in a piece called “Class Act”. (It takes one to know one.) He begins this way: “Among the voices of conscience speaking truth to power during the raucous decade of the 1960s, none was more impassioned or as often heard as that of William Sloane Coffin Jr., the once-upon-a-time chaplain of Yale University who died on April 12…” For Lapham and many others, the funeral had been a chance to meditate upon the silence of a great voice, noting that “the fact of his death prompted the latter-day custodians of liberal opinion…to wonder…where was Bill Coffin now that he was so sorely missed?” One eulogist said of Coffin, “There burned in his heart a sacred rage”; another called him “a first white man to stand with blacks…a patrician who was tribune of the nobodies…a critical thinker with a simple faith…”

How often do we hear of someone straddling those apparent paradoxes now? (Or ever?) Sacred rage. A thinker with faith. A child of wealth who went on to “tell the rich of the midnight sighing of the poor”, as Bahá’u’lláh once put it. And, perhaps most remarkably, a man of religion for whom the Gospels were a call not to moralize or to maintain a comfortable pew, but rather a call to generosity, compassion and social justice. Lapham quotes from Coffin’s first message as Yale’s chaplain to the incoming freshman class: The Lord forbids our using our education merely to buy our way into middle-class security. WOW. This was in 1959, friends. 1959.

Lapham loves words, and he adores those strung together by William Sloane Coffin:

The young, bent upon becoming wealthy and thinking they are fulfilling themselves, are in fact limiting themselves….To love effectively, we must act collectively….Love measures our stature: the more we love the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself….People are to be loved and things are to be used [not the other way ‘round]….Nationalism, at the expense of another nation, is just as wicked as racism at the expense of another race….Hell is truth seen too late…

Mr. Lapham — and it’ll be a black-armband day when he leaves us — closes by recommending a little book called Credo, William Sloane Coffin’s collection of the lessons of his life and the meaning of democracy. I’m buying.

Living in the Car

Posted by :James Howden On : July 12, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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In 1992, it was 54 minutes, and by ’98 it was nearly an hour. And last year, according to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian worker spent 63 minutes a day, or nearly 12 full DAYS across a working year, commuting to and from work. In Toronto, of course, it was decidedly longer: two full weeks for the typical worker bee. (Imagine Los Angeles.) In other words, StatsCan observes, we spend nearly as much time commuting as we do on vacation. Yoicks!

I can still hear Freddie Mercury after all these years, and it’s not “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “I’m in love with my car / Got a feel for my automobile…” I think it’s a pretty dysfunctional romance, for the most part. I’m often amused, for example (when I’m not irritated), by people’s mournful complaints about gasoline prices. (Cripes, I gotta pay nearly as much for gas as I do for soda pop or plasticized water!) But if it’s so bad, why aren’t more people seriously re-thinking their driving habits? Smart cars are still figures of fun and even scorn, and SUVs are not only filling the roads but, as my 6-year-old pointed out to me today, they’re starting to look like Hummers. (An obvious case of grill envy.) I’ve become convinced that many of the most bland and problematic aspects of our cities and ‘burbs come from putting the needs of cars foremost in how we plan them, though that might be a rant for another day. I’m in love with my car, indeed.

I’ve mainly managed to avoid commuting for most of my life, not because of any particular environmental virtue but mainly because I don’t love driving. (Bi-Weekly Bugle: Guy Cred Erodes With Surprise Confession.) I do it well, I can drive for long distances if necessary, but for fun? To blow off steam? (Dangerous, that.) To clear my head? Not interested, thanks, so whenever I could, I have located myself in the community if not down the block from my workplace. Here in Ottawa, my work for the Governor General involved 15 minutes on bus or bike, 25 by sneaker. For the past few months, I’ve just stumbled from bedroom to study, fired up the scribbling machine and I’m off. The 63-second commute, both ways. (The view is nearly as dazzling as the lunchtime banter.)

EcoWoman, on the other hand, pedals out of our driveway ten months an Ottawa year and spends her 63 commuter minutes pumping those lovely legs, taking in the riverside sights and listening to CBC Radio. My lady’s doing it right, say I, and in this town, she’s no Mad Biker Pedalling in the Wilderness, though Ottawa has no shortage of gridlock. Every once in a while, I find myself on the Queensway (or on the 401 over the top of Toronto) during hell hours and think, And folks do this every day? Sheesh.      

Slowed by a Brick in the Road

Posted by :James Howden On : July 8, 2006
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I’m not accustomed to being this current in my reading, especially with something other than the occasional sports page, but yesterday I launched into the summer ’06 edition of Brick, a literary journal published in Canada. (While it’s still summer. Imagine.) It is far from alone in deserving (and needing) a wider readership, and in bringing something just a little loftier to minds ready for more than stock quotations and Red Sox scores; that is to say, to most educated adults. The rewards are many.

Here are two of them. First, I read the transcript of a radio interview I’d heard last spring with Leonard Cohen. Five of his songs were being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame; he was humble, charming, intelligent. (I wrote about it here in an earlier entry.) It was a pleasure to stumble upon such a rare treat again.

Second, I was introduced to literature’s Mr. Roth, not the American novelist Philip but the Austrian writer Joseph, a little-known figure that scholar and translator Michael Hofmann has made it his life’s work to know and love and advocate. “My Life with Roth” gives scant detail about its subject – surprisingly few traces remain, though he lived until 1939 – but recounts Hofmann’s rather random discovery of Roth and the ten subsequent translations he has done of his novels and letters. He had already convinced me to scribble down The Radetzky March on my burgeoning list of Books I Will Get To Someday, but Hofmann sealed the deal by concluding his essay with the following selection from Roth’s greatest novel. Like much great writing, it is more true now than when it was written. It pierces our nearly omnipresent conviction that efficiency and sheer pace are the hallmarks of our cultural greatness. He echoes Gandhi’s famous dictum that “there is more to life than increasing its speed”. Roth wrote,

In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap. When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbours and passers-by alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That’s how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.

 This was my ouch for the day.

(You’re welcome.)

BHL III: The American Odyssey Continued

Posted by :James Howden On : July 4, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Yes, continued, as did (and does) my asynchronous meandering through stale-dated magazines. I’m an Atlantic subscriber, and I can’t keep up. Well, I don’t, at any rate. But I have completed the July/August issue (from 2005), which I went back to because it contained the third instalment of the French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy’s study tour of the United States, “In the Footsteps of Toqueville”. Great stuff, and of a nearly timeless quality that makes it more interesting and more useful than any number of contemporary news bites. (I wrote about the first two instalments here and here.)

I’ll try not to go on and on, but I probably will. BHL’s observations are quirky and smart and engagingly written. He’s good. He returns, as his 19th-century countryman repeatedly did, to American prisons. He muses on questions like public versus for-profit incarceration of criminals and the death penalty. Consider this image from his visit with the only woman on death row, having passed by her “’girlfriends’…the hundred or so women, almost all of them black, in the ‘segregation’ section you need to go through to get to her cell – genuine raging beasts, all dressed in the same brightly coloured jumpers, and shouting behind their bars that they haven’t done anything, that they can’t bear it anymore, that they want to be allowed to exercise, that they screw visitors, that I should go to hell.” The travelogue resumes.

He tours the “obscene nether side” of American puritanism at the Chicken Ranch, a legal Nevada brothel in the boondocks that services Las Vegas customers. A flight over the Grand Canyon yields the “two theories” of its creation, and gives the bemused Parisian a close-up view of modern creationism and “intelligent design”. (He finds it alarming, the “most cunning and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver [sic, American spelling] of the American right in years…” Lévy is not generally so dogmatic in his views, and for the most part is quite refreshingly non-partisan. For example, when he goes to Salt Lake City, he is fascinated by the Latter-Day Saints’ spectacular obsession with genealogy, based on their belief in retroactive baptism of the dead. “I hesitate between two sentiments. One is a certain respect owed to this relentless interest in one’s ancestors, this homage made to the dead….But then there’s also the idea that these Mormons…have found the absolute weapon. How can you possibly fight a church that reigns not just over the living but also over the dead?”

Midwestern miners and social security; U.S. Air Force cadets (motto: Integrity first, service before self, excellence in all we do), conversations with whom impel BHL to vow that he will “think twice before allowing myself to talk glibly, like too many of my fellow citizens, about the imperial American military…[or] the imperial calling of the country itself”; the wealthy, white, Arizona “city of the old” that puts him in mind of “casinos, military installations, and internment camps for the Japanese”; his frustrated efforts to interview the campaigning John Kerry, and his impressions once he finally does (“a European at heart”); liberal-minded college students in the heart of Texas (he was surprised); the bizarre carnival of the Great Western Gun Show and its “morbid flirtation with horror”; the Kennedy mystique in Dallas (“What kind of cliché makes you cry? What is a myth you no longer believe in but that still functions?”); the Memphis national convention of the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal movement that forces him to weigh the “ostentatious display and calculating stagecraft” against “this joy, this fervor, this spirit of communion which I haven’t yet seen in any white church”: these are the people and things he has seen through those public intellectual eyes.

Lévy concludes with a mournful description of the storm-drenched opening of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. Clinton himself is a bit frail after his surgery, and the Democrats after the Kerry defeat. It rains and rains. “It’s not an apotheosis; it’s a debacle…[a] lugubrious ballet…His famous legacy suddenly seems altered by the reflected light of this gloomy, twilit, graceless day…this eclipse…this disaster.” This entry has no proper ending, and neither does the article. Sometime this summer, I’ll get to Part IV. This is me walking along with some good and intriguing writing (don’t you think?).

A Sunday Morning Voice From Israel

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2006
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I think of myself as a relatively literate person – spend enough time around gymnasiums and ball fields, and a guy who reads can get this impression – but apparently I’m no Eleanor Wachtel. I’d never even heard of David Grossman, the (apparently) quite wonderful Israeli novelist, but Michael Enright and The Sunday Edition brought him into my kitchen yesterday morning.

There’d been an April series of interviews and discussions recorded in Israel, most of which I hadn’t heard. The culminating interview was yesterday’s 25 minutes or so (ah, the pleasures of commercial-free radio!) between Enright and Mr. Grossman, a sympathetic and thoughtful commentator on the eternal (in my life, at least) Middle East Problem. Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan have, in the western popular mind, pluralized this Problem, but it always comes back to roost in Palestine, the Holy Land (aren’t they all?), the Greater Israel of the extreme Zionists. And in the centre, the modern state of Israel and the territories it occupies or otherwise influences and warns. The Jewish Question remains, though it has been re-cast in their reclamation of an ancestral homeland in the years since 1948.

“We are a story,” says Grossman of the Jewish people, an enormously polarized one that he wishes was just a bit less compelling. Extremes make for good fiction, but they make ordinary life tenuous and painful. A little moderation might be nice, he thinks: “[Jews] are idealized or demonized, but these are simply the two faces of dehumanization. I just want a solid existence, a place to be, and for us to live an enjoyable life.” (The same is true of Aboriginal people everywhere, including those occupying land near my home town of Caledonia.) Most Israelis want only the same thing. But unlike Grossman, most Israelis have no idea how their Palestinian neighbours live, and they may not want to. (Digressing again, I’d say the same is true of many Caledonians.) “Most,” he told the CBC’s Michael Enright, “cannot rise above the fear that they have for each other. This fear is almost mythological.” (If I were to digress again, I would say something about a similar fear in and around a small Ontario town. But I’m too disciplined for that.)

Contemporary Israel’s fear is a recent innovation, though the ignorance of conditions in the West Bank is of long standing. “For the first 21 years of the occupation,” says Grossman, “there was no hatred from Israelis toward Palestinian. They were inconsequential; they were almost as children.” And the Israeli media tended to act not as a lens but as a buffer, insulating Israelis from the reality of military occupation. At least, that is, until Grossman wrote a series of late-‘80s articles about living in occupied territory, a series that eventually became the novelist’s best-known work, a non-fiction sensation in Israel called The Yellow Wind. (It is a must-read, already on order from my local library. Are libraries not the greatest institutions ever? I’ll probably go overdue on this book, and I’ll be happier to pay the fine than you were to read another digression.)

The Yellow Wind reminded Israelis that they are occupiers, a dysfunctional dynamic that can only distort both peoples. Grossman is not engaging in knee-jerk national self-loathing – “we are not the only bad guys here; Israel is not surrounded by the Salvation Army” – but I think he paints a most intelligent, humane and, as far as I can tell, fair portrait of conditions in Palestine. He spoke very strongly yesterday about the great wall that Israel is building to insulate itself from Palestinian guerrilla attacks: “A wall will not stop Palestinian misery and poverty…You cannot impose a border upon your neighbours. A wall is against dialogue. We must acknowledge the harm we have done to each other. We must pay a maturity tax.”

I’m glad Mr. Grossman came into my house. His is a weary but stubbornly hopeful voice, one that deserves a wider hearing and more of my attention. Coming soon to a bedside table near me.

“To Be of Use”: A Good Poem

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2006
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Yes, a good poem for May Day or any day. It’s by an American poet named Marge Piercy, and it appears in a collection called, get ready for it, Good Poems. It was put together by Garrison Keillor, he of the Lake Wobegon tales and The Prairie Home Companion radio show. (A hint as to my current standing as a Man of the People: I’m more excited by the upcoming movie version of the Companion than by any number of Mission Impossible or Superman sequels. Guess it depends which People we’re talkin’ about…) It’s a hymn to simple honest work, and a testimony to the importance of feeling useful in the world. A poem a day keeps the brain at play.

To be of use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows 
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. 
They seem to become natives of that element, 
the black sleek heads of seals 
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, 
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge to the task,
who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters 
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud. 
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. 
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. 

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry 
and a person for work that is real.

It’s Where You Find It

Posted by :James Howden On : April 27, 2006
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So here’s a sports take with literary flavour (or perhaps just a slightly bitter aftertaste. Fear not, my brave ones!) I find that I’m relearning lessons I thought I’d mastered in the more sweat-soaked phases of my life. I’m listening to this advice, directed to those who think they might have something to say in print. It’s all about the drive, but it takes an interesting road in talking about it.

“Most writers must learn to make a pact with dullness. Not boredom, or lack of imagination or passion, but dullness of routine. Keep your daily appointment with the computer screen and keep your ass on the chair until you’ve reached your daily quota. However rich your inner life may be, seek also the dullard within.” David Carpenter’s credo, the foundation of his life in letters (he’s a short story writer and novelist, among other things), is a call I can understand. It says to any writer – this writer – that the idea of waiting around for Inspiration to come one’s way, that the idea of waiting at all for good things to somehow find us, is not only silly but actually takes the legs out from under any ambition or project.

As a long-time athlete and coach, I thought I knew this. No pain, no Spain was a jock mantra in the buildup to the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. I used to make my basketball teams read a mossy but nonetheless wonderful hymn to athletes by the early-20th century sports journalist Grantland Rice. It was a poem (a jock poem!) called “How to Be a Champion”, and it ended like this:

You wonder how they do it and you look to see the knack,
You watch the foot in action, or the shoulder, or the back,
But when you spot the answer where the higher glamours lurk…
That the most of it is practice, and the rest of it is work.

You have to put in the hours. You hope that Inspiration will seep into the cracks of all your efforts, but you don’t wait for the tap at the window. You go out and find her. You take that daily constitutional. You do your reps. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re hoisting jumpshot after jumpshot, pumping iron, working on your chord changes or getting your daily pages done.

I’m listening to Grantland Rice. (You know GR. This is his, too: “For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks not that you won or lost / But how you played the Game.” One of the great things we ever got from sport, say I.) I like Carpenter’s dullard within, too. But this is wisdom that goes far deeper than our centuries, thoughts much older than the NBA or the Olympics or even that great hitter, Willie Shakespeare. There is an ancient Arab proverb which says, “He who seeketh out a thing with zeal shall find it.” And one of the only verses from the Qur’án that I know from memory speaks with the Creator’s almighty and encouraging voice: “Whoso maketh efforts for Us, in Our ways will We assuredly guide him.” Now, that’s inspiration. (So’s my mother. Happy 86th, Mum.)

Jane Jacobs

Posted by :James Howden On : April 26, 2006
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My wife, Environmental Avenger and all-around Sustainable Cities Babe, has been educating me for about ten years on Jane Jacobs and what she has meant to urban planning, urban thinking, urban renewal. It’s been a good but fairly steep learning curve. After all, for this small-town Baptist –especially after spending a dark and deeply annoying decade in Toronto one year – cities were nasty and brutish places where stays should be short. Scrape the grime and the moral sleaze off on your way out. Park your principles. Pick up your smile on the way out the door….

Maybe I’m growing up, though. There are wisecracks about Ottawa as the City That Fun Forgot, but it is a city and I mostly like it here. I also understand better some of the wretched costs of our pursuit of Country Living for Everyone! I still can’t get used to going to a supermarket and knowing nobody there, but when the news of Jane Jacobs’s death came through yesterday, I had sufficient respect for cities, and knew enough about her work to improve them, that I felt a real pang of loss. Diana was her neighbour for awhile in the Annex in Toronto, but I only knew her as a deeply appreciative reader. I had finally read her classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, under professional pressure. (When I worked for Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, I was forced to read all kinds of magnificent stuff; here, we were preparing together for the William Kilbourn Memorial Lecture she was giving in Toronto.) It entirely changed the way I looked at cities and suburbs, it astonished me as the work of one citizen opposed to the way her city (New York, at that time) was developing, and it impressed me with the clarity and power of its writing. Gosh, she was good.

Now she’s gone. She left us with several remarkable books, and her final one, Dark Age Ahead, needs to move to the front of my next-to-read line. Citizen Jane was a ferocious and compelling example of civic activism and intelligence, and we’ll be referring to her for a long time.

Oh, To Be Young and Aboriginal!

Posted by :James Howden On : April 26, 2006
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Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail is a blunt and practical woman, a columnist I always find interesting even when I don’t agree. (On the other side of the coin of opinion, Globe-ster Rick Salutin often strikes me the same way.) She had a column yesterday on the Caledonia/Six Nations standoff. Said standoff, with its barricades and its bipolar policy of mutual assured inconvenience, has this worst quality: it makes it look as if there are two sides, a White Towny one and an Aboriginal Activist one. This is another of those persistent and phony dualities, so easy to set up and so damned difficult to extract from people’s thinking. There are MANY sides to this thing. Anyway, back to Ms. Wente.

She begins with an assault on cliché, one of her specialties. The politicians haven’t learned anything from the last standoff at Ipperwash, we’ve been hearing, but Wente says, “Baloney. They learned everything from Ipperwash. Above all, they learned not to touch a native protest with a bargepole.” Her frequent tone is one of weary dismay. She can dish out caustic commentary, but mostly isn’t a slave to cynicism. “As usual,” she writes,

the roots of the dispute are buried deep in ancient history. Who knows where justice truly lies? Not I. I doubt the myriad of lawyers and mediators, who have laboured on this case for many years, know either. The paperwork now amounts to a staggering 70,000 pages….  In any event, for many native people these disputes aren’t really about the facts. They are about respect, recognition, and identity. The politics of protest are enormously empowering. The young adults who make up the majority of the protesters grew up on images of Oka. What would you rather be — a 20-year-old high-school dropout with dim job prospects, or a Mohawk warrior in combat fatigues…?

 The “dropout” comment is inflammatory – it’s another overstated either/or view of the reality that exists for native youth – but the comparison does contain some much-needed seeds of white understanding of the long-term combination of despair, stoicism and anger that lives in Aboriginal communities across Canada. And Wente, alongside her rejection of the “politics of protest”, shows some comprehension of the history that has created it. (Though she undermines her credibility a little with a reference to the “Six Nations Reserve in Caledonia”. South and west, actually. Yikes.) But she is like a lot of Caledonians these days, and many pretty bright Canadians: she wonders what’s wrong with native people, especially the young.

After all, the explanation goes, consider their advantages: tax-free buying, tuition-free education, and the best country in the world to live in. What’s their problem? Here’s Wente again. “Today the opportunities for young aboriginals in Canada have never been better. And yet, it’s hard to see the opportunity all around you when you’ve been nurtured on so much grievance and injustice….Many of the injustices were real. But how do you move on? How do you make peace with the modern world when you are haunted by ancient wrongs and obsessed with a romantic version of an idealized past?” She summons an alternative example, the story of Skawenniio Barnes, a Mohawk from Kahnawake Reserve who is on her way to the Ivy League on full scholarship. I agree with Wente: Ms. Barnes is a brilliant example, someone with great talent and drive who “changed the script”. But when the columnist goes on to say that this student’s wonderful – I would even say heroic, miraculous – accomplishments and prospects are “worth all the land-claims settlements in the world”, I shake my head.

I, too, wonder how far we go with apologies for historical wrongs, and the re-packaging and re-naming of land. I wonder when enough is enough, but I don’t doubt that land will be (must be) part of Canada’s attempt to get anywhere near justice on matters Aboriginal. But if whites think native people are so deeply fortunate, with all their perceived “extra rights” and advantages, how many would want to exchange positions? Maybe it ain’t so easy being red. Maybe we should be trying harder to answer this excellent question: Why aren’t there more like Skawenniio Barnes? I’m pretty sure we would be abashed and ashamed if we actually listened to honest answers.

Fred in My Head

Posted by :James Howden On : April 25, 2006
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Synchronicity is alive and well at my house. Loading up the crockpot with the contents of various plastic and metal containers – je suis le maître de la cuisine, mes amis – I was listening to Fred J. Eaglesmith and the Flying Squirrels. It was their double live album from Santa Cruz, CA, called Ralph’s Last Show.

I’m learning to trust my Radio 1 intuition. When the commercials on sports radio got too annoying (cripes, when aren’t they?), and the heads were going to talk OttawaSenatorsHockey! for another seven straight hours anyway, I flipped to CBC 1 and heard that Fred was going to be interviewed. Cool! Now listen up. If you don’t know Fred, you have your earphones plugged in to the wrong hole. He’s the real deal: terrific songwriter, storyteller and singer, with a tight and road-tested band and a fiercely independent nature.

Fred grew up in my neck of the southern Ontario farmbelt (near Alberton, I think). I’d always wondered about his name, and figured out this morning that he belonged to a big Christian Reformed church family – sounds like his background is Dutch, part of the Elgersma crew – that required some wildness to escape from. He’s a rough-cut romantic, scarred by love, burnt by the passing of rural livelihoods, and transfixed by tractors and trains. “Today, Dad, I sold the old John Deere / The man who bought it’s gonna fix it up / And put it in a museum…” His latest album, all of them on his own label, is Milly’s Café, and he’s in good voice.

Fred has a gently fanatical following for his live shows, where he mixes wry storytelling with an ever-changing string of wry, melancholy and exuberant songs like “White Rose Fillin’ Station”, “Pretty Good Guy” and “My Baby’s Got Big Hair!”. His albums are good (and there are lots of ‘em), and his live shows are better. He’s on the road for over 200 shows a year, so you should be able to catch him sometime. You might want to try a ride on the Eaglesmith train, kids, “’cause I like trains / I like fast trains / I like trains / That whisper your name…”