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Gord Downie (on the way, and on the way out)

[2-minute read]
On the (last?) tour, rockin' hats, feathers, glitter, and some gently showboating self-mockery.

On the (last?) tour, rockin’ hats, feathers, glitter, and some gently showboating self-mockery.

“Canada’s unofficial poet laureate” is what many call Gordon Downie, the lead singer of the Tragically Hip. Thirty years in to singing — he had, and still has, one of the best set of pipes among rock’s leading men — and growling and screaming and talking his enigmatic and multi-layered lyrics, at least one music writer insists on placing him in the lyrical pantheon with Bob Dylan and “post-Graceland Paul Simon”. Downie is a poet — yes, there is a published poetry collection — and there are many phrases that hundreds of thousands of Canadians can sing along with him, as they have been on the Hip’s Man Machine Poem tour, the one that the band has never said is a farewell.

Young and hairy and restless and good.

Young and hairy and restless and good.

But Downie is dying of inoperable brain cancer. He is not the caged stage lion he once was, and there were times in last night’s final show of the tour, in the band’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario, when we weren’t entirely sure he was going to make it through to the end of the planned setlist. Anyway, here’s the thing: Downie is still a manic stage presence, and he delivered nearly three hours worth of rock ‘n’ roll slamdance poetics, but he’s a quiet dude. Famously private, he had little to say to his adoring fans in Kingston and a national TV audience, even on a night like that. It’s all about the songs, and his band.

But he did tell this little story:

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Farewell to ENG 2D

Here’s an end-of-term bit of old-fashioned letter-writing — hand delivered, mind you! — to a group of kids champing at the bit to feel free of all the literacy I forced upon them. I just had a couple more things to say, and hope that 2 in 28 paid attention:

Friday the 13th
(Lucky us!)
June ‘08

Well, 2D,
(2D, or not 2D / That is the question.) (Sort of.) (Okay, not really, but it rhymes…)

Many a Journal has been written this semester, but not a one by me. Time to change that, ‘though as the photocopier hums merrily along behind me with last-day-of-class exam preparation sheets and other items of ground-wobbling importance, I’m not sure I’ll be able to complete the required full page. But it’s a start. After writing Journals quite madly for years – including, often, those written alongside my sweating students as they scribbled theirs – I’ve been in a Journal Drought. I’ve written many another thing, and some of ‘em were green and growing, but my personal coil-bound thought sanctuary has been a desert.

So this rambling scramble of a letter is my first baby step toward the restoration of my own private record-life-as-it-happens-so-I-learn-and-remember habit.

‘Cause that’s what a Journal is, besides its obvious value in helping/forcing you to get better and easier in putting your thoughts and feelings down on paper. (How can I know what I think ‘til I see what I’ve said? one writer asked.) For most of you of you, by now, getting it down is something you do easily and well; I wish I’d had more time to read and respond to the thoughtful, wonder(ing)ful, funny or frustrated things you spun out of your own life and intelligence. What’s more important, though, is that YOU will read what you’ve written, sometime down the road. There’s a vivid portrait, in words and exclamations and marginal scribbles, of yourself in there, one that you should value and that you should keep, right alongside your yearbook, maybe. (Great idea, sir!)

I wish you all the best, including a summer full of reading: the Best Single Thing you could do for your educational future, I say, AND for those quiet hours when only a book will do…

Peace and progress,
Mr. H.