The Vinyl Cafe….Gone But Not Forgotten On A Saturday Morning On The Queen E.

We made it to our house in St Catharines with a carload of plants in just over an hour. Stoked on caffeine from Tim Hortons, and with clear sailing on the usually abysmally slow Gardiner/QEW combo, it’s amazing how being able to keep up a good speed on the highway lightens your mood.
My wife and I talked about a lot of things. We did our mandatory 2 minutes on Donald Trump, and I doubt if he was even worth that.
We talked about our grandson, Rowan, who had just received his orange belt in Karate the night before. We talked about our daughter who is going though the process of getting her first novel published and what that must be like for her.
We talked about all the places we had to go after we dropped the plants off at our new house.
And, for a while, we talked about how sad it was that we could be on the highway at 10am on a Saturday morning and not be able to turn on the car radio and listen to The Vinyl Cafe.

The Vinyl Cafe is hosted by the legendary Canadian writer and broadcaster, Stuart McLean, and it is a real eclectic couple of hours. Interesting music, from right across the country, that you would never hear on conventional radio, usually prefaced by the reading of letters from fans, and of course, stories from the host’s series of very, very Canadian novels, The Vinyl Cafe
The Vinyl Cafe stories are about a couple named Dave & Morley, from Oshawa Ontario, who came of age in the sixties, got married made a family and opened a record store dedicated to the cause of preserving, by buying and reselling, music on vinyl.
Canadian writers, the real ones like Stephen Leacock, Farley Mowat, Mordecai Richler, WP Kinsella and Mr McLean, among others, are the real literary treasures of our country.
It’s often said that Canada is always on the hunt for its own identity as a country. But all you have to do is read these guys and you’ll know that the Canadian identity is alive and kicking and has been for years.
And nowhere would you find more of the true Canadian identity on display than on Saturday morning on CBC radio. You can’t find it in that time slot, these days, but it’s still available on CBC as well as on selected public radio stations in the United States, on SiriusXM Satellite Radio channel 169, on Podcast, and live online.

Me & Me McLean

About five or six years ago I started an email conversation with Mr McLean. It lasted for a couple of weeks and we had a great back and forth chat. It reminded me in a lot of ways of the op/ed series that my pal Phil Friedman and I do. Stuart McLean had a complex way of expressing himself, like Phil does, but the messages were always crystal clear. And he was always up for a debate. It didn’t matter what the topic was, it was just two writers going at what they loved best.
I found found the complexity of his emails a bit paradoxical because The Vinyl Cafe novels are almost childlike in their simplicity, but at the same time, are very poignant.
As Stuart would read chapters from his novels or whole short stories as part of the goings on at the Vinyl Cafe, my wife and I would often be brought to tears at just how closely he had come to touching the nerves of our own lives.
In a way, he is telling the story of a lot of Canadians. Good people who want nothing more than to dom meaningful stuff, enjoy their lives, raise their kids to be good adults and take whatever joy their was to be had from their relationships with their friends, neighbours, other Canadians and each other.

Smelling The Roses and Other Good Things

I believe that this is a simplicity that has been lost as the generations have changed since I was just starting out as an adult. The pace has grown quicker. There is less time, or so it would seem, to just smell the roses. People are ‘on’ all the time. Always hustling.
We are all, in my opinion, way too connected for our own good. We are overly dependent on things like social media and reassurances from friends and strangers for emotional gratification.
We spend more of our time staring at the world through small screens than we do experiencing it in three dimensions.
Tonight, on our way back to our new house, we stopped to get some water and for my wife to order some asthma meds. When we walked out of the Shoppers Drug Mart, we looked up into the sky and found ourselves staring at the clouds.
The day was just starting to fade and there was a beautiful orange hue that made the sky look like something Maxfield Parrish has just painted.
We just watched it for a moment.
Nothing was said. But a whole lot was felt.

It very much appears to me that living here, or at least being here knowing that in a week I will be living here, is having an effect on me already.
It appears to be slowing me down. Causing me to become more reflective, and appreciative of the simpler things like beautiful clouds at sunset.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going all airy fairy on you. It was just a Saturday, like so many others in my life, with a morning spent on the QEW heading home to see my kin. The only difference is that now my house is down there on that road too.
It should be interesting from here on out.

Post Script: Unbeknownst to me at the time I wrote this, Mr McLean is apparently ill and has taken a break from doing the Vinyl Cafe while he deals with his health issues. That's a bit freaky. I just found out about this today. I sincerely wish him well. He's a national treasure here in the Great While North.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/12/13/vinyl-cafe-suspended_n_13610260.html

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