LONDON, ONTARIO – In the last hours of November we happily and gratefully took in the presentation of Handel’s Messiah at Metropolitan United Church featuring the London Symphonia with the Elora Festival Singers; arguably the finest professional choir in the country right now. The four soloists (sturdily competent if not quite stellar) were also drawn from the choir; with the tenor, bass, contralto and soprano stepping forward to deliver their songs and returning to the stand to join in with their colleagues on the exquisitely rendered choruses which constitute the real backbone and splendour of this most beloved of oratorios. The hall was all but sold out and once the obligatory hiccup of self-loathing neurosis was out of the way - otherwise known as the utterly vapid land acknowledgement - the assembled musicians proceeded to earn their rapturous and sustained ovation at evening’s end.

Ever since the Wuhan batflu panic disrupted life as we’ve known it, it’s been challenging to find a worthy Messiah production in London at Christmas time. So this well-organized and well-promoted event felt like a return to sanity and order. In preparation for this show I had all the excuse I needed to start playing Christmas music around the house and in the car a couple weeks earlier than I can usually get away with it. And on an even more personal note, I was thrilled to hear this music again in the very same hall where I first made its acquaintance about fifty years ago. I was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when – having no idea what I was in for – I was taken along to the Met to hear something called Messiah, being performed by I don’t know what choral group. (I suppose it might even have been the Met’s own choir which, back then, was a large and accomplished musical corps.) To heighten my sense of a return, we situated ourselves in about the same spot in that balcony where circa 1975, I was sabotaged by the delightfully shocking realization that something other than rock music could touch me so deeply.
 
This was also my first experience of Messiah in concert since reading Jane Glover’s magnificent, Handel in London (2018). Herself a conductor and director of the Glyndebourne Touring Opera and the London Mozart Players, Glover's book wonderfully expanded my appreciation of the German-born George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) whose formidable industry and gift for invention did so much to help England forge its own musical identity. As a music professional Glover writes that “Handel has indeed occupied a sizable portion of my activity and my repertoire.” While she brings an insider’s perspective gleaned from hands-on experience with dozens and dozens of Handel’s operas, oratorios, anthems and orchestral works – and is able to combine that with her own wide reading and historical research – she still manages to tell a story which remains wonderfully accessible to the layman.

Though Handel’s surgeon father allowed the boy to take his first lessons in music, he was leery of the facility and passion which the young lad immediately displayed. Like so many parents, he feared the unlikely prospects of his son ever managing so unorthodox a talent – however precocious and pronounced it might be – in a way that would be congruent with financial sufficiency. I remember in grade three being haunted by a commonly reproduced illustration that a visiting music teacher showed our class of a young George Frideric in his nightshirt being apprehended in the wee hours of the morning by a lamp-bearing father who has caught him tickling the keyboard of a banished clavichord in the attic. Glover reports that while the scene as portrayed almost certainly never happened, Handel’s father did insist that his son's primary vocational training should be focused on some field other than music.

So Handel proceeded to diligently prepare himself for a career in law and kept up all of his musical activities on the side. Even though his father died when he was twelve, it wasn’t until the age of seventeen that he moved full time into the pursuit of a musical career. Greatly benefiting from all of that paternally administered cautiousness and his own solid grounding in legal principles, right from the get-go Handel was cannily adept at securing contracts and sponsorships. In a field of endeavour where so many great talents get taken advantage of and exploited, even as a teenaged prodigy Handel had an innate nose for business and an unerring eye for the main chance; for what he could accomplish and what it was worth.
 
While working as a second violinist in a Hamburg opera house, he had his first opera professionally staged at the age of twenty. And the very next year he was off to Italy where he rubbed elbows with Correlli, Scarlatti and Telemann and had two more operas staged in Florence and Venice. At the age of twenty-five he was appointed court conductor to the German House of Hanover and was invited that same year to write an opera to be produced in London. Then when a convoluted crisis in succession played out with Handel’s mainstay, the Duke of Hanover, being crowned the King of England as George I, everything came together quite spectacularly. For the rest of his life, this German composer would live and work in England specializing in – then all the rage – Italian operas. He sat on the board of governors of the opera house; composing at least a third of the operas performed there while recruiting and training the singers and players and adapting or swapping out various arias and songs to suit the specific talents of his performers.

He also wrote music for state occasions – Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks being two of the most famous – as well as Zadok the Priest in 1727 for the coronation of George II. This spine-tingling choral hymn has been subsequently performed at every British coronation since then. I also treasure his dozen Concerti Grossi and the fifteen Organ Concertos which Handel himself would frequently perform between the acts of his operas and oratorios. Musicologist Michael Kennedy identifies Handel’s development of the dramatic oratorio – and of these most especially Messiah – as his “most original contribution to the art of music.”
 
Handel turned to the oratorio form out of necessity when the English audience for Italian operas – which admittedly appealed to a pretty select and wealthy fraction of the populace - was suddenly and sharply fragmenting with the opening of a second London opera company. There always had been grumbling in the wider society about why London should host operas in languages that most Londoners didn’t speak. And that frustration greatly fueled the impact when John Gay premiered his wildly popular Beggar’s Opera in 1728. Featuring sixty-nine adapted popular ballads in three acts and telling the stories of low-lifes, thieves and whores, The Beggar's Opera was as startling a gob in the face of the musical establishment as anything that Johnny Rotten ever expectorated in the general direction of progressive rock blowhards in the 1970s. It was time for Handel to develop a new kind of offering for his musical audience.

In 1732 Handel ingeniously adapted a musical form which had enjoyed some popularity in Italy and Germany – the musical rendition of Biblical narratives – and presented his first oratorio based on the Old Testament story of Esther. Referencing a story that was commonly known . . . rendered in a language that everybody spoke and understood . . . straightforwardly produced without ruinously expensive sets and costuming . . .  and capitalizing on the English genius for choral music . . . in one perfectly brilliant and perfectly simple stroke, Handel attracted whole new audiences and infused new life into English music-making. (In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would be British composers who churned out the majority of oratorios.) And his switch to the oratorio form apparently revivified Handel as well. When he composed Messiah in 1742, setting a libretto supplied by his longtime collaborator Charles Jennens, he wrote the entire masterpiece in less than three weeks. 
 
Jane Glover gives a wonderful account of the very first performance of Messiah in Dublin, Ireland in 1742 – at Easter when it was originally thought that this lavish celebration of the life of Christ would have the most appeal. The twenty-seven year-old soprano for that historic performance was glad to get out of England where she had become the subject of scandal by extricating herself from an abusive marriage with a little help from her brothers. “Susanna Cibber received an especial tribute,” Glover writes. “After she had sung ‘He was despised’, the longest aria in the whole work, combining sorrow, desolation, guilt and even rage, the Reverend Dr. Delaney leapt to his feet, crying, ‘Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!’ If Susanna’s reputation as a fallen woman had followed her from London to Dublin, she had certainly received the most public absolution, and in the most august of circumstances. It is to be hoped that this brought her comfort rather than embarrassment.”
 
On my last visit to London, England I spent an afternoon mooching around the Handel Museum on Bond Street which was set up in the building where Handel lived for the last thirty-six years of his life. They’ve done everything they can to restore his three-storey home and studio, outfitting it throughout with period furnishings. Concerts are regularly presented there and most afternoons, students from a nearby music academy play recitals on an antique harpsichord. On the front exterior wall between two windows on what we would call the second storey and the Brits would call the first, is a blue, National Trust plaque which reads: “George Frideric Handel 1685–1759 Composer lived in this house from 1723 and died here”.
 
And believe it or not, right next door, and again between two windows on the front wall, is another blue plaque that reads: “Jimi Hendrix 1942–1970 Guitarist and Songwriter lived here 1968–1969”. Strange near-bedfellows, indeed. But there is at least one parallel between them that merits mentioning: England, and specifically London, refined each of their very different talents to its purest and most striking form. Before moving to Britain, the Seattle-born Hendrix had a career but nothing that ever would have netted him a plaque on a building.

So perhaps you’re wondering whose rendition of Handel’s Messiah I’ve been popping into our domestic sound systems to get Christmas underway. My choice is a sentimental favourite, the now thirty-year-old set produced by London Ontario’s own Gerald Fagan conducting the 135-voice London Fanshawe Symphonic Chorus, the 35-voice Gerald Fagan Singers, the Concert Players Orchestra and featured soloists Leslie Fagan (soprano), Janis Taylor (mezzo-soprano), Mark Dubois (tenor) and Gary Relyea (bass-baritone). Today, it’s hard to appreciate the way in which Fagan and his musical consortiums all but monopolized London’s sizable Christmas Messiah market for about twenty-five years. Though only the first of Messiah’s three parts is concerned with Christ’s nativity (which is why the work was originally conceived as an Easter oratorio) its association with the Yuletide has been established for the better part of two centuries. Through most of the 80s and 90s and into the 2000s, the only way other London choirs could get some Messiah action to themselves was to mount a production during the Easter season when the appeal was much more limited.
 
Always Fagan helmed at least one December performance with the big choir at Centennial Hall and a more intimate performance with the smaller chamber choir in the exquisite acoustics of St. Peter’s Cathedral. Routinely, concert presentations trim about a half hour out of Messiah’s second and third parts so as to bring the whole show in at about two hours. For a few years in the early 90s, Fagan also put on a complete and unexpurgated performance and also a do-it-yourself Messiah where audience members were invited to bring along their own scores and join in the singing on all of the choruses.
 
I was reviewing their just-released recording for SCENE magazine in December of 1995 and had phoned Gerry up with a few supplementary questions as the first disc was merrily spinning away in the background as we talked. Midway through track 20, 'He Shall Feed His Flock', as the mezzo-soprano stepped back and Gerry’s own daughter took over in her pure and soaring soprano, Gerry politely asked, “Could we just be quiet for a couple minutes?” When the song concluded he resumed with two more questions: “Can the kid sing or what? Now then, where were we?”

Over the years, I frequently drew the assignment to preview Messiah presentations for the London Free Press, usually focusing on that year’s guest soloists. In 2004 I was given a little more space than was usually available to write something up for a quarterly called Christian Life in London, and gave Gerry a heads-up that if he wanted to dig into the deeper religious significance of the work, this was his chance. He did not disappoint.
                                                                       
Fagan has brought his battered and much annotated score to our breakfast interview. “Here’s an example of the kind of thing I mean,” he says, enthusiastically flipping open the over-sized book to page 106. “We have this phrase from Isaiah, ‘All we like sheep,’ and look, the notes are all together, everything is moving exactly the same way until we get to, ‘have gone astray,’ and look at the notes here – everybody wanders off their own way. Isn’t that amazing? That’s the gift he brings to this music. With the language, with the setting of the words, he creates these word pictures all the time.”

“Look at this page!” he says now flipping through the book at random. ‘Who is this king of Glory? Who is this king of Glory? Who is this king of Glory?’ He asks that three times before you get the answer. He presents us with this repetition in almost every chorus. Whenever that happens, it’s an obvious reference to the Holy Trinity.”

Fagan turns to a page in the Easter section. “‘Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,’” he reads. “Now this is a mob scene so he has solid chords. Then he leaves those chords and goes to the chastisement where he starts to break things up. I mean, look at the angularity of the writing here when we sing, ‘And with His stripes.’ What’s going on here? Christ is being flogged, they’re cutting His flesh and each word comes with this sharp, cutting edge. But when we get to the end of that line, ‘And with His stripes . . . we are healed’, then it suddenly goes to legato with this wonderful rounded smoothness. The music itself is being healed, in a way. The man was a genius. Every year I’m bowled over by the inexhaustible brilliance of his writing and his setting of the text. And you have to remember, English was Handel’s second language which makes such sensitivity to the text even more phenomenal.”

Because Christmas music is something we return to every year throughout our lives, it eventually accumulates a formidable memorative power that is more pungent than some people are comfortable with. I don’t believe I’m morbid but I do admit that no small part of the appeal of Christmas for me is the annual opportunity it provides to commune with the beloved dead. To hear Messiah’s opening recitative of ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,’ is to be sitting once again with my parents in the balcony of Metropolitan United Church on that December Sunday evening when I heard that beguiling refrain for the very first time and knew this was music I’d be avidly returning to for the rest of my life.

In December of 1991, I was late to the ‘do-it-yourself Messiah’ that the Fagan choirs were hosting at Dundas Street Centre United Church because I’d been at the bedside of my dying father-in-law. The choirs and the singalong audience were well into Part Three, just beginning ‘Worthy is the Lamb,’ when Gerry sent me in with a lyric sheet (a music score would have been wasted on me) to sit among the tenors and the basses. I remember thinking at first how wrong they sounded, how flat, but soon understood that no, they were singing it right. What was missing was the blend that comes from sitting apart from the choir in a hall or a church and hearing all the different sections at once. And then the next thing I knew, I was utterly engulfed in that great ‘Amen’. This final chorus takes six full pages to sing one word. Fagan had told me, “It is treacherously difficult but it says ‘Amen’ like it’s never been said before or since.” Sitting in with the singers that night I was startled into something like an out of body experience by the power and audacity of all those male voices; the music just cascading all around me like a meteor shower. 

My mother-in-law was the person in this world with whom I most shared my love for Christmas music and to whom I most longed to read out whole sections of Jane Glover’s Handel in London when I read it a few months after her death. We had about a ten-year run when I took Sheila to the Fagans’ matinee performances of Messiah at St. Peter’s Cathedral every year. We always sat in the lectors’ section of the pews to the west of the altar where she would be the first on her pins for the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus as well as the ovation at the concert’s conclusion. Also without fail, we were always among the last to leave the concert space. Once she’d dried her eyes and recomposed herself, Sheila insisted on personally thanking and congratulating the trumpet player, the timpanist, the cellist, the harpsichordist (usually Marlene Fagan) and whichever other musicians were still left on the floor. I foolishly wondered at first if this might not be an imposition on exhausted performers who probably just wanted to pack up their gear and get home to supper. But one look at their beaming faces – is anybody ever irritated to be told they were marvelous? - soon assured me that the adoration was mutual. No, it’s never quite the same as it used to be on those Sunday afternoons of happy memory. But whenever I’m enveloped in the revivifying waves of this immortal music in whatever form I am able to imbibe it, I also find myself back in some consoling semblance of Sheila’s company once again.

LONDON, ONTARIO – All my life I’ve enjoyed talking with people who are significantly older than me. Of course, such well-ripened souls are not as thick on the ground as they used to be and grow fewer with each passing year. While it’s possible to commune in a less mutual way with favourite departed souls in reflection and prayer - and books certainly remain a rich source of old-world wisdom as well – such exchanges lack the ‘here-and-now-ness’ and the responsive playfulness of a two-way conversation with a living, breathing veteran who knows who you are and looks you in the eye and tells you what’s on his or her mind. I was a teenager when I first became aware of this partiality of mine because it would exasperate a number of my peers who were eager to shove off and do teenagery things and not hang around talking with fossils.

I particularly remember a Friday night in grade ten when I somehow agreed to go out on a date with a girl who didn’t actually attract me at all. I suppose I’d succumbed to the novelty that any girl had expressed any interest in me at all but it was a hopeless venture that I dreaded from the get-go. I went round to her house to ‘pick her up’ as we used to say, even though there was no conveyance involved and we’d just be walking to a nearby party being thrown by one of our classmates. Being in no hurry to get the ‘date’ part of our evening underway, I sent her into spasms of impatience as I dawdled in the kitchen yakking and laughing with her far more interesting parents who made me promise to have her back by eleven p.m.

We didn’t exactly luxuriate in one another’s attention on the way to the party and once we arrived, we left each other to make our own rounds for the first hour or so. I wasn’t looking forward to walking her home at evening’s end and felt quite blessedly released from any obligation to do so when I spied her in one of the more dimly lit corners necking with a football player who seemed to evince none of my difficulties in detecting her charms. So that evening worked out pretty well for both of us after all.

Around that same time I had a circuit of neighbourhood widows whose lawns I mowed in the summer and sidewalks I shoveled in the winter. After these tasks had been performed, there’d often be conversation. Yes, they did most of the talking but that was all right. They obviously had a lot more stories to tell. Only one of my widow’s self-absorbed chatter had to be carefully channeled or curtailed lest I expire from finicky boredom. But the others weren’t so myopically tiresome and a couple of my favourites would even top up my fee to compensate for the time I spent listening.

One fascinating chat about mortality and loss with Mrs. S. went on so long and grew so engrossingly deep that the light had drained out of the room by the time we settled up and she had to turn on a lamp to make out the denominations of the bills in her wallet.  Our talk inspired me to write a poem containing my first serious musings about the reality of time as a physical dimension that we only get to occupy for a finite term. I’m not saying it was a good poem; so I shan’t be quoting it here. But our encounter got the cognitive wheels turning in my sixteen year-old head in an unprecedented way.

But I didn’t require a job to perform - or a date to waylay - to get chatting with old people. I could fall into conversation with random geezers I’d meet at bus stops or resting on a bench outside of the Fred Landon Library. That library guy had noticed the pair of drum sticks I was carrying and told me that he was a basher too. After comparing our musical enthusiasms for a half hour or so, he invited me to sit in a couple nights later when he’d be rehearsing with his band at the old Sally Ann hall at the corner of Tecumseh and Edward. I took him up on his invitation and to this day, I never go past that long-repurposed edifice without recalling my conversation with that sublimely sweet-tempered man. How admirable I found his sense of musical mission which was so completely unlike my own; not to play for fortune or fame or to drive the girls wild but for the pleasure of blending his gift in concert with fellow pilgrims and offering it up to the glory of God.

I think that one of the reasons old people liked talking to me was because I was so hungry to hear what London was like before I was born. I shared their love for and a fascination with the particularities of a place where - and here was another distinction from many of my peers - I already knew I wanted to play out my life if I could find a way to do so. I was entranced by their tales of how Londoners coped during the flood of ’37 or the Second World War and their moist-eyed reminiscences of vanished or declining institutions like the London & Port Stanley Railway, Hotel London, Boomers sweets shop and the London Little Theatre.

But mixed in among these oldsters’ raptures, I couldn’t help detecting more than occasional notes of regret and bewilderment at how the modern city was losing touch with its best qualities and was forgetting - or in certain instances deliberately erasing - customs and locales that made it so special. I wondered if a melancholic disenchantment with transformations to one’s home ground was an inevitable concomitant of ageing; perhaps even a part of some necessary preparation to letting go of life itself? I hoped that as I aged I might find a way to not let my own sentimental attachments occlude a proper acceptance of what is after all life’s chief characteristic: change.

But, now in my seventies, I find myself similarly railing against what strike me as witless innovations that are degrading civic life and erasing Londoners’ sense of place; like the deep-sixing of an elected Board of Control whose mandate was to consider what would be best for the city overall and not just one isolated ward . . . the traffic-retarding imposition of dedicated bike lanes on city thoroughfares; rarely used through most of the year and utterly abandoned through the winter . . . the arrogant renaming of public schools and institutions because of some judgemental delusion that all of our founders were racists . . . the utter failure to crack down on the squalor and menace that addicts inflict on our public and private spaces. Could it be that I too have become just another old coot bellowing at the clouds? Or do such dubious developments represent a betrayal of standards and a civic ethos that London used to uphold?

I often reflect on Buckminster Fuller’s (1895-1983) visit to London in 1968 where he came to pick up an honorary degree at Western and while he was here, paid a visit to my alma mater, South Secondary School. The renowned American engineer, structural designer and theorist - most famous to Canadians for his design of the geodesic dome which housed the American Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo ’67 - addressed an auditorium full of students and let drop an arresting insight that crystalized a lot of my thinking about London and what made it so special.

On the plane ride up here Fuller had done a quick study of some maps, checking out our geographic proximity to our biggest urban neighbours of Toronto and Detroit and said that in a day to day sort of way, those places were, “Too far to drive and too close to fly.” That part of the quote is precise. For the rest I paraphrase but the gist of what he said was, “You’re beyond the range of influence from both of those centres and this leaves you to your own devices. You aren’t so susceptible to getting sucked into other cities’ orbits and will always have to come up with your own way of doing things.”

During my childhood and early manhood, London could sometimes seem more than a little smug about itself. Beautifully situated and appointed, we were said to have the highest concentration of millionaires in the country. We had a thriving, independent daily newspaper and television station and more national head offices than you could shake a stick at, including such preeminent industry leaders as Labatt’s and London Life. Our visual art scene was the envy of the nation (even TIME magazine wrote about it). I don’t think any city had more choirs per capita and the London Little Theatre was the biggest operation of its kind in the country. I don’t think I’m projecting the confidence of my own youth onto the town where I lived when I say there was an inherent sense of uniquely tuned competence and sufficiency in London in the second half of the twentieth century; a confidence that there wasn’t anything worthwhile that we couldn’t get going here with a bit of ingenuity and drive.

More than fifty years after Fuller’s visit, that’s no longer the case. Globalization and the contortions of corporate expansionism have seen every last one of those old independent enterprises that I cited above swallowed up by other entities and rendered more bland and anonymous. We seem to have forsaken our old traditions and instead bought into dubious agendas that have little to do with life as it’s lived in this very particular neck of the woods.
There is nothing original or community-enhancing about the three big enterprises that our leaders have recently lured to our region – an insect protein-processing factory, an electric vehicle battery plant, and a gargantuan Amazon distribution centre. When you factor in the obscene subsidies we paid to secure those operations and examine the miscalculated projections of market demand for the products that at least two of them make – not to mention the death to local retailers that the third operation represents - it’s hard to not regard them all as financial sinkholes.

My point here (if there is one) is not to push you into a nostalgic funk for a lost golden age that can never be restored to the Forest City. In a reflexive way, I know that I empathize way too much with William F. Buckley’s oft-stated desire ‘to stand athwart history, yelling: “Stop!” But I also recognize that the past is (sigh) irretrievable and that we must get on with addressing new realities and playing out the hand that we actually hold today. But I do think it would mitigate against what feels to me like a badly depleting sense of place if our politicians would talk with people who’ve lived here forever and ask them what they make of the march of progress. How refreshing it would be if our leaders would season their colourless rants about ‘growing our economy’ and attracting new opportunities to London with an occasional reference to our own distinguished past and – who knows? - perhaps even risk an invocation of that do-it-yourself spirit which stood this town in pretty good stead for its first two centuries.

LONDON, ONTARIO – In a year when I have been assailed by too many wrenching farewells, I notched up a lesser but still poignant cutting of a different kind of cord this week; this one carried out – after a decade’s worth of oscillating consideration and resistance – by my own volition. You probably won’t need to sit down to safely absorb this bulletin so I’ll just come out and declare it forthwith. After almost fifty years of faithful readership (and forty years of occasionally interrupted writership) I have cancelled my subscription to The London Free Press. I know; shocking, isn’t it? Indeed, most of my friends will be extending no sympathy whatsoever for this latest severing but instead will roll their eyes in mystification and inquire: “What took you so long?”

When I signed on for that subscription back in 1979, most of the households on our block received the paper as well. With my late-breaking defection, there now remains a grand total of one subscriber on our avenue; a retired gentleman of at least my vintage. From an actuarial perspective, this wouldn’t seem to portend a very bright future for southwestern Ontario’s foremost, English language, daily newspaper. As they only produce five anemic editions per week nowadays . . . and as my long-pondered cancellation was finally triggered by their exasperating failure most weeks to successfully deliver more than three or four of those issues to my door . . . can we even still call the Free Press a daily?

In addition to wanting to support a local newspaper on principle (however lame its current product might be) I expect that my neighbor, like me, was raised on books and physical publications and doesn’t like what it does to our eyeballs and attention spans when we’re glued to screens all day. Younger generations, as you may have noticed, don’t seem to share this aversion. Indeed, they can get tetchy if you ask them to put their devices away when you’re sitting down with them at dinner. But knowing the resistance of people of all ages to pay for anything they access on the interwebs, I doubt there are hordes of younger bucks on our or any other block picking up the circulatory slack by subscribing to the Freeps’ e-edition.

The vast majority of our friends discarded their Free Press subscriptions a long time ago. And for the sake of honesty, I should probably drop this talk about our ‘household’ and ‘we’. My wife carefully devours each weekly edition of the Epoch Times that lands on our porch but hasn’t gone near the Freeps for about ten years unless I flagged some item I thought she’d want to know about and set it right in front of her. More often than not those selected tidbits were an obituary or – back before the Wuhan Batflu Psychosis hollowed out our civilization and rendered most forms of social intercourse inadvisable – a notice regarding a church bazaar or concert or art exhibition.

Back in the day, I used to regard it as a sort of requirement of citizenship to take the newspaper. I couldn’t imagine how any Londoner without a subscription would attain an adequate grasp of local issues so as to equip himself to cast a discerning ballot or understand in any depth how our city functions. But with the relentless jettisoning of writers whose job it was to keep on top of beats that they actually comprehended, that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Along with that shrinkage of what gets covered, there has been a narrowing of editorial latitude at the Freeps that is most depressing to behold. When Post Media bought the paper in 2015, I was briefly hopeful that the range of editorial opinion might expand to take in some of the more conservative views that enliven the National Post. But such worthy scribes as John Robson, Conrad Black, Barbara Kay or the great Rex Murphy (who died earlier this year) never had their columns picked up by the Free Press.

When asked in recent years why I still subscribed to the rag, I was down to three pretty pathetic reasons. One was the Jumble puzzle which I can usually complete in less than five minutes and keeps me in good fighting trim for Scrabble tournaments. The Epoch Times carries one of those puzzles each week (along with a selection of other crosswords and word games) so I don’t quite have to go cold turkey on that. Another is the aforementioned obituaries. Having lived in London for seventy-two years now, it’s rare that a week goes by without coming across a death notice of at least one person I know. But the commonest day for our delivery person to somehow forget that our house exists is Saturday and that’s the day which has by far the largest roundup of death notices.

And my third reason is loyalty. As an op/ed columnist, arts reviewer and features writer, I was a regular freelance contributor for thirty-five years with the paper. For about twenty-five of those years, the Free Press supplied the lion’s share of my annual income and, in the great overarching scheme of things, made it possible for me to realize one of the great dreams of my life; to make a go of it as an entirely self-directed writer in a medium-sized city that I loved. The money was never as good as if I’d been on staff but I almost always had the pleasure of writing stuff that I was actually interested in.

When I took over as editor of Scene magazine in the ‘90s, the Free Press stopped publishing me for a few years which I thought was pretty small of them. I came back on board when Sun Media took over in 1997 and I was one of about ten local freelancers with regular gigs. For a few years around the turn of the century, the paper was published seven days a week for the only time in its long history. Then when Quebecor bought Sun Media, it wasn’t too bad at first but by about 2005, layoffs and cost cutting measures and staff buyouts were becoming pretty drastic. Indeed, I think a case could be made that for all the ballyhoo and optimistic projections that invariably attend amalgamations and buyouts, they are ultimately self-devouring manoeuvres that bode ill for the health of the fourth estate.

The Free Press and I parted ways for good when a rogue publisher named Bruce Monck entered my life and I became the founding editor of The London Yodeller in late 2013. I can’t say that second sacking had a huge impact on my life as the Freeps had already become a shadow of its former self and was only taking one column from me every three weeks by then. And for the next three years The Yodeller was my final and all-time happiest home as a print journalist. We had so much fun and even though we were only a fortnightly, we cleaned the Free Press’ clock with our arts coverage and the sizzle and verve of our columnists. I suppose you could say, “Well, big deal, HG. The Free Press is still here and The Yodeller isn’t.” True enough. But what I seem to have finally determined this week is that when it comes to local newspapers, just being there – like a not very interesting lump on a decaying log – isn’t enough.
 
Some related Hermaneutics readings:

From June 8, 2020, on my initiation into the world of The London Free Press:
https://www.hermangoodden.ca/blog/farewell-to-londons-man-of-letters
From January 18, 2021, a paean to a more enlightened system of newspaper distribution:  https://www.hermangoodden.ca/blog/once-a-paperboy

LONDON, ONTARIO – I apologize for my silence these last few months. It’s been a summer like no other. The youngest of my three older brothers has died and I’ve been floundering a bit as I try to re-set my bearings. For as long as I’ve been drawing breath, Bob has been reassuringly close to hand; a constant touchstone and marker of who I am and the people I come from and the place in this world where I belong. In our childhood, we usually shared a bedroom. For most of our adulthood, we’ve shared a postal code (four out of six digits); living a block and a half apart in this perfect riverside neighbourhood that we might never have twigged to if Bob hadn’t bought a house here first and rented us an apartment on his main floor for the first four years of our marriage. And though they didn’t live here at the same time, it was also a neighbourhood in which both of our parents – but particularly our mom - had roots; reflecting Bob’s lifelong knack for keeping his loved ones in his loop. It’s a challenge to come up with an adequate analogy for the scale of my disorientation in losing so constant a beacon in my life. In moments of existential panic, I ping between ‘banishment’ and ‘amputation’ as the truer simile for my devastation in being cut off from such a primal fount of shared memory and insight and meaning.

Though we could easily go a month or two between proper visits, Bob was always securely tucked away in the back pocket of my mind. He was there whenever I needed his help - and vice-versa - though mostly what I remember is me leaning on him. Every time we picked up our conversation again, Bob was as easy to re-engage with as that favourite mutt who optimistically drops a tennis ball at your feet. And there could indeed be an element of playing ‘fetch’ if our chat should venture into the realm of our earliest domestic history. We loved to mooch around in some of our more obscure and neglected shafts of memory; digging up fugitive details from days of yore and dragging them into the present light. What a victory it seemed against the tyranny of temporality whenever we summoned up another lost incident or encounter or almost-forgotten gesture. The names and allusions retrieved in our sessions might mean little to others; might even exasperate them a little like a cheap party trick or an act of self-indulgence: “Get a room, you two.” Yet I distinctly recall a few nights when, well past their bedtimes, I couldn’t help noticing our kids listening in; easing themselves into their own dream states while imbibing fragmentary reports from the scarcely imaginable infancy of their elders.

All four of the Goodden boys were graced with pretty well-stocked memory banks but Bob shared our father’s gift for passing his knowledge along without judgements or airs or editorial embellishments. Though Bob did indeed have his own aesthetic sense and philosophical bent, he was refreshingly unburdened by any overt artistic or intellectual pretensions and was therefore the least egotistic, the least declarative, of the brothers. Wonderfully self-contained, you never caught Bob foisting his latest obsessions and views on others. That quietly forthright sensibility made him our most reliable keeper of family and London lore. I’m also starting to wonder if he wasn’t our primary agent in keeping the brothers connected over the decades and into our dotage. He was certainly the one who gave the others least cause to shake their heads and mutter, “There he goes again.” Next fall, the three remnants of our original quadrant are hoping to reconvene for another reunion which Bob will certainly attend in spirit and where I expect our most constant observation is going to be, “Bob would’ve had something to say about that.”   

Bob had no illusions about the perfectibility of mankind. He knew what ornery, self-sabotaging goofballs we all can be and was capable of breathtaking frankness in appraising himself and others. But he rarely wielded such insights in a thoughtless or unforgiving way. Bob perceived the human tragedy, all right. But no matter how bleak a situation might seem, Bob couldn’t help finding those redeeming strands of comedy and beauty that ripple their way through everything whether it’s convenient to acknowledge them at any particular moment or not. When we were kids, this complexity of vision made it dangerous to sit beside Bob on occasions that called for heightened levels of solemnity. In one of my all-time favourite discussions about ten years ago, Bob argued that if you had to designate a hero in James Joyce’s melancholy masterpiece, The Dead (or John Huston’s remarkably faithful film adaptation of the same) . . . if there was a single character in that tale who most consistently dedicated himself to the alleviation of other people’s suffering . . . then that mantle would best be conferred upon the sloping shoulders of the heartbreakingly funny drunkard, Freddy Malins, who strives so desperately not to disappoint others and yet perpetually, unerringly does.

When we were all a lot younger, Bob’s non-assertiveness could sometimes make him seem a little opaque, a little lacking in commitment. I know it stung him when Ted once captioned a blurry photo of him: “Bob typically out of focus.” But what I don’t think Ted or I appreciated at the time, was that Bob’s comparative lack of preoccupation with his own brilliant and marvelous self, meant that he was present to other people in a way that we were not and couldn’t hope to be. Among the many memories that have been tumbling around my brain these past few months, is an autumn evening twenty-two years ago when our dad was too sick to make it out to his best friend’s funeral, and Bob and I were dispatched to represent him at the visitation. I nodded and discreetly expressed my regrets to these now-ancient figures who’d been hovering on the borders of our lives forever. But it was Bob who actually and literally ‘paid his respects’ to these old family friends – these ‘everyday Mernies’ as the brothers dubbed normies in the lingo they developed as kids – and he did so with an ease of rapport that a more willfully complicated lout like me couldn’t muster. Particularly over the last decade when so many people have been corralled into postures of brittle ideological belligerence, I have come to regard Bob’s capacity to live and let live – never withholding his respect because someone might not agree with his every sentiment or opinion - as perhaps his greatest quality and a serious blessing to all who loved him.

A couple weeks after Bob died, I teared up watching an old Rick Beato video in which he recalled his brother’s relentless campaign when they were kids to make him see how much was going on in Gordon Lightfoot’s song arrangements.  “How could you miss that? You’re not paying attention. Now bloody well listen.” That video reminded me how exuberantly overbearing young brothers get to be with one another . . . about music and everything else . . . with absolutely no harm done. At that age, you just don’t need all that much personal space. And unless somebody behaves like a complete prick and manages to kill off the relationship for good - which I have seen happen in some very sad cases - all that full-access tussling and persuading nets you an invaluable no-nonsense ally who cannot be brushed aside and retains to the end a proprietorial stake in your attention and care. How many of my most grateful memories of Bob are about those times when he cared enough to set me right.
 
Bob had a genius for hauling me down off my high horse if that was required . . . or pulling me back up onto my feet when I was a bit of a mess . . . and he always reminded me  - more often by example than words - that the view’s a lot better and the air’s a lot cleaner if you can try to get out of your head from time to time and see what else is going on in the world; particularly the natural world where things aren’t so routinely fucked up by hypocrisy and envy and pride. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I’ve been tweaking and reworking this essay for so long is because of the precarious pleasure which the writing affords me of continuing to commune with some semblance of my now-departed brother. If there’s been any consolation in this tear-drenched season as I’ve grudgingly come to accept that I will never again be with Bob in any of our customary ways, it has been my dawning recognition that so long as he continues to reside in my memory and imagination, I do not have to lose him altogether.

Let me set down here as a sort of introduction and overview, the obituary that I helped my sister-in-law and niece compose:
                                                                                 *
GOODDEN Robert Morgan (Bob)
Following a seven-month battle with esophageal cancer which he waged with his own stoic courage and the compassionate oversight of Victoria Hospital’s ‘Team Bob’ and palliative care unit, Bob died at home on May 29th in his 76th year with Laura Florence, his partner of 43 years (and wife of two days) and daughter, Jessie Florence, by his side. A Londoner all his life, through his twenties Bob frequently worked with his friends Jim McKillop and Keith Bendall on house painting crews; sometimes travelling out to Alberta and the Northwest Territories on contract jobs. On the side he steadily pursued his passion for gardening and landscaping; formally studying agriculture in Guelph and eventually landing his dream job as groundskeeper at Mount Pleasant Cemetery where he became indispensable and won wide recognition as an authority on the forests of the Carolinian region of which London is the northernmost point. By the age of 30, Bob bought his home on Mount Pleasant Ave. (his commute to work was not a long one) where he would live for the rest of his life and created a backyard garden that was an oasis of beauty, variety and ingenious design. There was nothing Bob couldn’t make grow. 

Born on December 20th, 1948, Bob was the third of Jack and Verna Goodden’s four sons. In addition to Laura and Jessie and her partner, Kane Hill, Bob’s passing is mourned by his three brothers and their wives – Dave and Elizabeth (Australia), Ted and Cornelia Hoogland (British Columbia) and Herman and Kirtley Jarvis (just around the corner in London West). Bob is also terribly missed by six nieces and nephews - Kate, Emily, Oberon, Hugh, Sky and Bonnie - five of whom grew up within blocks of Bob, Laura and Jessie’s house and remember with special fondness the backyard Labour Day barbecues that Bob and Laura hosted each year; grand multigenerational reunions with croquet in the afternoons (with lots of cheating) and conversation that burbled away late into the night. Of the many friends Bob leaves behind, special mention must be made of Dave Dell (who first met Bob in grade two) and Jim McKillop (who’s been through the healthcare mill himself) and supported Bob unstintingly through these final weeks and months. Later this month his family and friends will gather in Bob’s garden to pay him tribute and see him on his way. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Salthaven.

                                                                          *
Esophageal cancer being one of the meanest and swiftest of the big ‘C’s, Bob’s death came only seven months and five days after receiving his diagnosis on October 24th. That date is easy to recall because it happened to be my wife’s seventieth birthday; the grim bulletin casting a sobering pall on that celebration. Then, doubling down on the natal/fatal coincidence, Bob died smack-dab on my seventy-second birthday; the news reaching me about four hours before I was due to make a presentation commemorating the 150th birthday of my main man, G.K. Chesterton. Being in a state of almost-disbelieving shock probably helped me get through that lecture. When we got home from that talk, Kirtley, having discreetly eliminated the word ‘happy’ from the top of my birthday cake, presented me with this year’s big gift; a secretly commissioned portrait of Grace the wonder-mutt (whose passing was commemorated here in February) by London artist Beth Stewart. In terms of disrupting the foundation of the universe as I’ve known it all my life, I am not for one second equating the loss of a brother with a pooch. But I do admit that it was in the unwrapping of that beautiful picture of yet another loved one’s face – “What a lot of death,” I reportedly whispered - that my mourning properly got underway.
                                                                               *
Gender-wise, I suppose our childhood home was a bit unbalanced. But what great lopsided fun it was to grow up in such a headlong herd of unmitigated maleness. We’re told that Verna broke down in tears when Dr. McAlpine confirmed that she was pregnant with Bob who was born only fourteen months after Ted who, in turn, was only seventeen months younger than Dave. (I arrived three and a half years after Bob which gave Mom a chance to catch her breath and meant that I got to bask in her attention in a way that none of my brothers ever could.) With a shudder Mom often recalled a particularly ditzy summer afternoon in 1949 when her family of five was halfway down to Port Stanley before they realized that they’d left Bobby in his pram on the front porch. Never one to succumb to worry if he didn’t have to, Bob was blissfully snoozing away when his keepers frantically doubled back to reclaim him.

On Connington Street where I was born and lived to the age of five, my brothers all shared a bedroom in the attic; a big half-finished room which I scarcely remember. When Mom’s dad, Russell McQuiggan, lived with us for a spell, he also had a cot up there and he and the brothers would employ the same pot for any late-night calls of nature. There was a distinct - though usually permeable - division between the older trio and me and particularly in our younger years, that gap between our ages felt almost generational. But so long as I didn’t become a nuisance or slow them down, I was able to insinuate myself into some of their activities. Sitting in with them when they created miniature cityscapes in the sandbox (or, if it was raining, on a tabletop indoors) I marveled at the scale and detail of their creation and the wondrous dexterity of their fingers. There was one cottage vacation where they pretty well tuned me out of their games and I got sulky because there weren’t any other brats my age to hang out with. But I don’t think I’m idealizing my infancy when I say that I didn’t feel excluded very often and mostly didn’t mind having that bit of distance and leeway between us. 

Bob achieved two significant distinctions during those Connington years. By the age of eight, he had already landed his first paying job; and a most unusual job it was. Bob was the only person I ever knew who had a doughnut route. Once a week some guy would bring around a huge tray of heavenly-smelling doughnuts to the house which Bob would then peddle up and down the street in packages of six. Our father was a salesman for Canada Packers and tried to pass on a few pointers on how to move product but you couldn’t say that Bob took that advice to heart. Our brother Dave recalled that one of Bob’s most faithful customers told him that she didn’t actually like doughnuts very much but couldn’t resist this sweet-faced kid who looked so happy when he knocked at her door each week with no sense of salesmanship whatsoever; guilelessly pointing out to her once that the three doughnuts in the top row retained a lot more of their glaze than the bottom ones which were kind of crummy.

Bob also became known - indeed, legendary - as the owner/operator of an apparently indestructible head. In his section of a family history which I coerced everybody into helping me write, Bob recalled the afternoon when he set his hair on fire while hanging around a city crew who were cooking up a vat of bubbling tar to apply to the roadway. With his dome smoldering away, Bob was all for running home until a neighbor, Freddie Hayward, forcefully intervened; “slapping the fire out,” Bob wrote. “Otherwise I would have burned up.”

Then in a rhapsodic passage about all the great forts that the brothers used to build, he recalled a rickety backyard structure with an igloo-like entrance that you had to crawl through. Coming out of the fort, Bob couldn’t see that Terry Ellis was standing just off to the side, recklessly swinging an adze around which, sure enough, split open Bob’s just-emerging head. Again, Bob’s first instinct when injured was to run into the house, but Terry, perhaps fearing a charge for attempted murder, insisted: “I wasn’t supposed to tell my Mom.” But Bob didn’t have to tell Mom anything. She was looking out the kitchen window, thinking, “That kid shouldn’t really be swinging that . . .” when she saw the whole thing happen; grabbing onto the counter to keep from fainting.

Bob recalls his recuperation: “I remember getting stitches in the centre of my head at the hairline and before the stitches were removed, Old Man Loughheed was driving his ugly Studebaker down the street and caught a stone under his wheel. The stone flew at me and hit me exactly on the stitches. More blood followed. Another thing I remember quite well is lying on the dining room table and Dad removing all the stitches. Connington St. was tops in my book.”

Through childhood and adolescence those older three launched a lot of enterprises that I certainly knew about; if not quite from the inside. One of their most intriguing projects was a secret language comprising perhaps a hundred terms; taking their lexicological inspirations from in-jokes and misheard words and the Bizarro World stories in Superman comics about deformed clones who got everything ass-backwards. I mentioned ‘everyday Mernie’ earlier; their term for an unexceptional adult. That term was prompted by one of the barbers in our neighbourhood shop; a handsome enough gent with the innately comic name of ‘Mernie Twitchell’. (To this day, of course, the brothers can recite the names of all three of those long-buried barbers.) I’ve been after the brothers for decades to compile an authoritative dictionary of Goodden-speak before it joins Sumerian, Etruscan and Ancient Iberian in the dustbin of lost languages. Do I need to point out to Dave and Ted that this need has now become more urgent than ever? Or to remind Ted that certain obligations naturally ensue when you share a birthday with Dr. Samuel Johnson; the first and greatest of the English lexicographers?

Because of that closeness in their ages, most of my brothers’ friends were common to all three. In contrast to that rather unusual arrangement, my friends never tried visiting with my brothers if I wasn’t home when they dropped by . . . not if they knew what was good for them. In a recent note my childhood chum, Jay Jackson, wrote with dignified restraint: “I have strong memories of your brothers who were bigger and I was always nervous what they were going to do with us."  Jay was one of my friends who got ‘flavour-sealed’; a term which my brothers picked up from advertisements for a variety of grocery products which had been subjected to a patented vacuum-packing process that supposedly preserved freshness. In that dictionary which scholars of the world are crying out for, ‘flavour-sealing’ would be defined as: “v. stuffing a voluntary victim under the basement stairs and piling in sleeping bags, blankets, cushions and pillows until a muffled cry of claustrophobic terror is discerned and one quivering, red-faced brat is released”. 

After we moved from Connington Street and until I carved out my own living space in the basement of Wortley Road at the age of fifteen, Bob and I were usually roommates which brought us into much closer communion with each other. Bob was always an early adopter of new technologies. At his behest we both had Rocket Radio crystal sets and every Sunday night, we’d tuck down in our bunks and listen to Unshackled; a half-hour drama series that was beamed out of Chicago by the Pacific Garden Mission. Each of us with one little earphone plugged into the outer aperture of a hearing canal, we’d be lulled into sleep by these hackneyed tales that we found deliciously spooky - the breaks between scenes punctuated with cornball Wurlitzer organ refrains - about lowlifes and criminals saved from Perdition by the redeeming love of Christ.  

By about 1962 Bob had saved up to buy a top-of-the-line transistor radio and played it constantly; tuning us in to the early broadcasts of London DJ, Dick (‘the Tall One’) Williams at just that invigorating point in pop music history when all the sappy American crooners were being pushed off the charts by the first wave of the British Invasion. Our mutual musical immersion at an impressionable age established a lasting shared interest between us; at least where contemporary music was concerned. And for the rest of our lives, we regularly gave each other records for birthdays and Christmas and always wanted to know what the other one was listening to.

Bob was the brother I got to tag along with most often on excursions into the outside world. One of the more life-changing of those outings for me was in the afternoon of my seventh or eighth Christmas Eve, when Bob took me to a massive comic-swapping session at Dave Dell’s house; an exchange they held each year to alleviate the agony of insomnia on a night when sleep could be notoriously elusive. Until then my usual comic book fare had been kiddy dreck like Dennis the Menace and Donald Duck but that day I bagged five or six Uncle Scrooges which I loved for the comparative complexity of the characters and narratives. With that stupendous haul almost rivaling the wonders to be unwrapped next morning, I fastened onto two principles I’ve lived by ever since: Always have a plenitude of reading material on hand and you’ll be able to accrue a lot more if you get those books secondhand. 

A case could be made that Bob was the handsomest of the Goodden boys. He was certainly our snappiest dresser. He chose his wardrobe with real care and wore clothes beautifully. You’d see him sporting a common plaid work shirt and think to yourself, “So that’s what those things are supposed to look like.” And if the occasion called for it - or perhaps just permitted it - he knew how to work a military jacket or a western shirt with embroidered arrows smiling over top of the pockets. There were only a couple occasions when Bob’s susceptibility to fashion trends led him astray. I thought his frizzy perm circa 1980 was a preposterous and slightly indecent mistake (inspired, I’m afraid, by TV weatherman, Jay Campbell) and thankfully it was a one-off that he never renewed. And about twenty years after that, I quietly sighed when he succumbed to the tattoo craze with an inky smudge on his right wrist depicting some sort of cellular structure that was subtle enough to ignore. With his more extroverted nature and heightened social awareness, Bob was also the first brother to venture out into the dating scene and took to it like the proverbial duck to water; going steady (in a fairly innocent way) by the time he was in grade ten.

I didn’t really notice Bob’s sartorial flair when I was younger. It was our kids who first alerted me to it; particularly son Hugh to whom Bob would occasionally pass on zippy accoutrements like a string tie. Bob turned out to be a wonderfully attentive uncle; generous with his time and attention and inspired in his giving; often ordering up their gifts from obscure mail order catalogues. Ted and I palmed off all of our kids on Bob when Take-Your-Child-to-Work-Day rolled around on the calendar; knowing our kiddies' vocational prospects weren't likely to expand by watching us brood and scratch our arses as we struggled to hatch ideas for stained glass windows or newspaper columns. But exploring the sinister byways and facilities of the boneyard in the company of their funny uncle . . . that was guaranteed to be a spine-shivering hoot. “This is where folks come to get their final tan,” Bob told Hugh as he showed him the crematorium.

It was Bob the budding gardener and groundskeeper who taught me how to shave. Now maybe it’s an analogy that would have occurred to anyone. But I often recall Bob’s distinctly horticultural tip when I’m grimacing into the mirror and scraping away another day’s growth: “You know how to mow the grass, right? It’s the same principle. You don’t want any tufts between the rows so you’ve got to overlap a little.” Over the course of our adult lives, the shaving industry went a little crazy with the development of multi-blade cartridges and pivoting heads and lubricating strips. About a decade ago when packets of replacement cartridges became absurdly expensive, Bob jumped off that particular merry-go-round and went back to the sort of ‘everyday Mernie’ shaving kit that our dad used all his life: a brush for applying lather and a solid metal safety razor where you slip in a fresh blade every month or two. Bob was so impressed with the superiority of that system that he gave me those same, no-nonsense implements for my 65th birthday along with a little drying stand to hang them on. About a week after he died, Laura gave me Bob’s stash of 97 Astra superior platinum double-edge blades; a windfall that is sure to see me off the globe as well.
 
Perhaps the rottenest trick Bob ever pulled on me – and one of the best lessons he ever taught me – was around Easter of 1970 when I somehow landed a gig to sit in on the drums with a pickup band playing at a party for some nurses-in-training. Bob drove me over to a friend’s house to pick up a couple of cymbals and while I was in the house gathering up my gear, Bob sat in the car and heard the first radio report about one of my schoolmates who’d just been killed in a motorcycle accident. Bob knew this guy had been over to our house several times and got along particularly well with our dad who enjoyed shooting pool with him. Driving home Bob said nothing about the accident but found a way to oh-so-casually ask, “What do you think about old so-and-so.” And being an insecure and caustic little shit – seventeen year-olds can be like that - I rattled off a litany of petty complaints; the only one I remember being his lamentable fondness for The Guess Who; a band who always struck me as gormless second-raters.

“Well then,” Bob said at the conclusion of my uncharitable rant; “you probably won’t be too cut up to hear that he just died.” I can’t say that Bob’s trick cured me for all time of small-mindedness. But it did leave a richly deserved mark and maybe I reined in some of the worst of that tendency going forward. Bob to his credit never gloated about it; never mentioned it again. I recalled it to him a few times in the ensuing years with admiration for how well he’d played it; causing him to lower his eyes and grin sardonically.

In my eighteenth summer, I took my first big road trip with Bob and Randy Fisher; traveling out to the East Coast in a dilapidated Morris Minor which we named Blackball X10; not an easy car to get parts for when things broke down every other day. As the resident non-driver, it was my job to read maps and navigate and to fire up our recalcitrant little heap after every stop by pushing it for fifty or so yards until the pistons sputtered into life, then artfully diving into the front seat of the rolling vehicle. One of my favourite nights on that trip we were camping out on a bluff overlooking the Bay of Fundy when a fog of stupefying thickness rolled in. Always a sucker for eclipses and blizzards and unnaturally pronounced natural phenomena, Bob insisted we head out into the billowing murk with flashlights and we marveled at a fog so dense that you could actually project a shadow of your hand onto the strangely constituted air.

On a night in July of 1977, Bob fished me out of something like depression; or as close to it as I ever got. Kirtley and I were going through the last of our world-shattering breakups. I had hitchhiked out to Vancouver and back over the preceding month, trying to push her out of my head so I could make some sort of fresh start. I no sooner got home than I saw her again – fleetingly – which instantly wiped out whatever distance I’d been able to establish and then she headed out to the west coast for a few weeks herself, leaving me feeling more desolate than ever. We’d actually get married that December but I had no idea then that things would start turning around for the better in about another month. I wasn’t due back at my dishwashing job for another whole week and it was at that low ebb that I suddenly found myself in possession of a great big and utterly empty slab of time. I’d let my parents know I was back in town and that was about it. There was nowhere I had to be or wanted to be so I went nowhere and called no one and devoted what energy and ambition I had to the reorganization of my book and record collections and the fitful composition of gloomy, self-conscious drivel that was destined to go nowhere but my garbage pail.

I was keeping vampire’s hours – retiring at dawn and getting up in the late afternoon - and was drifting into my fourth consecutive day of rattling around my slum apartment with no one but my dog for company. (She at least seemed happy to have me back.) It was early evening when Bob turned up out of the blue and announced that we were going for a drive in the country. He had a set of chairs he’d refinished for the parents of a friend who lived down Watford way and said he wanted some company. So me and Myrtle piled into his pickup truck and off we went. I was so out of it, I found I was actually struggling for the first half hour or so to remaster the art of conversation. It was never Bob’s style to be directly interrogative so sometimes we just drove along in easy silence that would eventually give way to a comment or query that felt incidental enough that I could play along. And in this gentle, cumulative way, Bob sort of massaged me back into the land of the living.

I’ll always remember that moment when I realized what Bob had done for me. Chairs duly delivered, we were on the way back and, dog on my lap with ears a-flapping, I was staring out the passenger window at a gold-streaked horizon as the air, drenched with the scent of cooling hay, buffeted my face. Everything wasn’t all magically better but I did have to admit that it was a rather beautiful world that I lived in and I did seem to have a brother who cared enough to do me the favour of taking me out of myself. Realizing how dangerously unmoored from all human connection I’d become over the last seventy-two hours, I thanked Bob for the change of scenery.

“The folks were getting concerned,” he said. “I told them not to sweat it and reminded them that you are their happiest child.”

“Happier than you?” I asked.

“Yeh,” he chuckled. “I’m a miserable beast.” 

I don’t intend to get into any detailed recounting of my brother’s medical ordeal here. I’m no authority on such matters and am so fed up with the monopolizing dominance that cancer assumed in all of our lives this year that I’m not inclined to give it any more quarter than it has already taken. And where’s the justice – or even the sense - when the only one of the brothers who spent the better part of his working life outdoors is the first one to be taken down by this crappy disease? A doer by nature and an innately kindhearted soul who couldn’t resist any friend’s request for help, Bob’s instinct in his own times of trouble was to ride out any ordeals on his own; hoping not to become a cause of concern or dread for anybody. He certainly hated talking about his medical travails; small wonder when you consider the cheerless round of tube feeding and treatments and surgeries that his life was reduced to in those final months. In precious moments when he wasn’t being prodded and monitored by medics – and if he felt up to seeing visitors at all – he wanted to set this all-consuming illness aside for a few minutes and not have to contend with the disappointment of loved ones who - even if they didn’t insist on talking about his illness – couldn’t disguise their dismay that his prospects didn’t seem to be improving.

I longed to draw closer in Bob’s time of peril but I could feel what it cost his dwindling energy whenever I visited and hated that, try as I might, I was apparently unable to suppress my anxiety at the dreadful process that was underway. Maybe it’s a guy thing, or a brother thing or a particularly Goodden sort of thing. But I completely understood his reticence and accepted that I would only see him in person when he felt up to making an appearance at larger family gatherings and would otherwise communicate via email when he would send along his occasional updates to our fraternal chain letter. Following chemo and radiation treatments, things started looking up for a few weeks in March when Bob was able to put away the feeding tubes and travelled with Laura to Florida to visit Blue Jays training camp. But all those improvements were wiped away with his major surgery at the end of that month. By early May his cancer was deemed to be stage four and had spread to his liver, lungs and brain. There were treatments that might – or might not - ameliorate the worst of his symptoms for a while but there was no longer any hope for a cure. “There is no timeline,” Bob wrote to our chain letter on May 11th, “But we feel there is time.” 

Ten days before the end in the late afternoon, I lucked into a more spontaneous visit when I was helping our daughter unload some groceries at her apartment over top of Bob and Laura’s and was invited to sit with Bob in his garden for what would turn out to be our last hour and a half together. As I took my place beside him – the first time I’d set eyes on him in nearly two months - he scarcely seemed to occupy his clothes. I would estimate that his body weight was down by a third. He didn’t get up to greet me or even shift in his chair as he was still hooked up to an oxygen tank from a bout of pneumonia that was slow to depart and had further sapped his constitution. It was a strain for him to speak more than a cluster of words at a time and these were emitted in a higher than usual register because one of his surgeons had accidentally nicked a vocal cord. The over-all impression that he was collapsing in on himself was heart-rending to behold.

Bob wasn’t despairing. And he wasn’t angry. Most of all he seemed exhausted. He could no longer sustain that spirited fight against highly-stacked odds which he’d waged through the first six months of his ordeal. For a few minutes here and there we touched on subjects other than his illness. About six weeks earlier, Bob had expressed his intention to make it out for some part of my birthday celebration. We knew that wasn’t going to happen now. He asked if my upcoming talk on Chesterton was going to be substantially different than the lecture I’d delivered at St. Peter’s Seminary in 2019, and I recalled how touched I was when he turned out on that wildly blizzardy evening five Februarys ago to hear an address that wasn’t exactly up his alley.  But these side discussions couldn’t hold us for long and we’d slide back into the deflation of the present moment. With a whole new note of fatalism that I had no standing to challenge, Bob spoke of an overriding fatigue that could never be assuaged; his inability to attend to anything he read or watched or listened to; how long it had been since he’d known the respite of a good night’s sleep or the satisfaction of a well-prepared meal.

Even though I’d been kept up to date with all the bulletins about his deteriorating situation - and now saw first-hand how ruinously depleted he was - I didn’t fully or consciously grasp that with this gift of sudden access, Bob was tacitly letting me know that he was just about done; that he knew he wouldn’t be bouncing back from this. All I can say in defense of my thickness is that I was new to this tragic business of losing a brother. Unlike taking leave of our parents who’d both made it to a good age, there was no compensating sense of inevitability here; no larger understanding that this was the way things were supposed to be.

But in our very last minutes together, we did go a couple of places we’d never gone before. Before getting up to go, I placed my hand on his knee (Goodden boys don’t do that) and (equally verboten) assured him of my prayers which Bob acknowledged with a gentle smile and a nod of his head. Again evincing his likeness with our father, Bob had no animosity to religion and would attend occasional church services, particularly at Christmas and Easter, but he didn’t like talking about it. And I will always cherish the fact that the final words Bob spoke to me in this world were the same three words that constituted our father’s customary parting salutation - “Bye for now” – with their consoling implication that no farewell is final. However resistant I was to fully grasping the fatal nettle while in Bob’s presence, by the time I reached the end of his laneway and turned for home, I was in tears. On some deeper level I knew what was up and so did the natural world. About an hour later as we sat down to late supper in the back garden, one of the four lowermost branches that ring the trunk of our Norway maple cracked and fell away.

Aside from Laura and Jessie, the person who was best able to overcome Bob’s reserve was his close friend of sixty-some years, Jim McKillop. Having spent a lot of time these past couple decades maneuvering through the healthcare system with chronic back problems, Jim had a good sense of what Bob was up against and was able to provide counsel and strategies without the need for a lot of explanation. As Bob endured the shrinking prospects of his final weeks and months, conversation with Jim wasn’t so daunting, so loaded, as it would have been with me or our brothers on the other side of the country and the globe. The night of Bob’s death, partaking of whiskey for the first time in eight years, Jim called around to all three brothers; passing along Bob’s final messages to each of us and doing his best to answer all of our questions. Without resenting Jim in any way, I envied his account of a moment towards the very end when he was able to sit with Bob in silence, holding his newly bony hand as they cried. Jim’s telephonic marathon that night was a service of heroic mercy. It was well past midnight by the time I hung up the phone; feeling like a wrung-out dishrag but so grateful that Jim had spoken with each one of us before any of those precious details started to evaporate.

During our last visit in his garden on that Sunday afternoon, Bob and I got talking about the spectacular solar eclipse from the month before; particularly enthusing about the way in which the gradual occluding of the sun’s light not-so-subtly deranged the shadows of overhanging foliage on lawns and sidewalks. This reminded me of one of my very favourite memories of Bob from at least thirty summers ago and I shared it with him before saying our last goodbye. We had headed out late at night with our dogs to an elevated section of riverbank along the west fork of the Thames to watch a total lunar eclipse. At the event’s climactic moment, Bob was standing about twenty feet in front of me and just as the last slender arc of reflected lunar light was overtaken by the dark, I swear I saw him lean out to the side on tiptoes as if stretching to see around the disc of blanketing shadow that our planet was casting on the moon. (Yes, we’d both had a few beverages.) It was funny, all right – and in a truly lunatic way - but even that night I was struck by something perfect in his goofy little gesture. Bob has always been this almost contemporary elder who not only knows the rich particulars of my beginning but has also seen around a lot of the corners that I’m coming up to and would pass along tips to help me navigate what lies in store. As of my seventy-second birthday, I feel as if I looked up from some momentary distraction to find that Bob has slipped around the rim of that dark moon for good; leaving me here to construe by other means whatever further messages he may yet send my way.
                                                                      *
Two Aprils ago, I impulsively sent out a rather unusual sort of note to our fraternal chain-mail:

Dear Bros –
I thought you might enjoy a short dream I had this afternoon that left me feeling quite marvellous when I was woken up for supper:

It’s dusk on a rainy night and I’m walking with Bob and Ted in downtown Toronto. We’re in about our fifties, I’d say, and while I want to nip into a magazine shop to see if they have some back issues of The Oldie, I know I’ll have to check back for that later as we’re expected elsewhere and are running a little late. Further down the block, we make our way down some stairs that lead from the sidewalk to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant where there’s going to be some kind of small-scale soiree.

When we enter the main dining area, intimately lit and not terribly large - sort of like the old London Café on Dundas Street - I’m delighted to find our parents are already here, sitting at a table and talking with each other; looking well and happy and with brains that are both intact. I look around to see if Dave is here, wondering if he’ll be able to make it. I’m not really thinking of Australia but it’s somehow understood that he has a lot further to come. And then Dave comes in through the door, dressed in a trench coat and a businessman’s fedora. “Good evening, doctors,” he says rather grandly to us all, shaking the rain off this outerwear as he hangs it all up on a peg on the wall.

Verna laughs good-heartedly and asks, “What does he mean; calling us all doctors?”

And I tell her, “I believe he has just designated us as doctors of life.”   
             
Love, H

Within a few short minutes, Bob was the first to zap back a response; as somehow I knew he would be. “All together and intact,” he wrote. “Marvellous.” 

                                                                        

LONDON, ONTARIO – I was saddened to learn of the death in her 87th year of one of my favourite London music makers and planned to get out to the memorial celebration for Marlene Fagan last Friday at St. James Westminster Church until life abruptly decided that I wasn’t going anywhere that day. So let me extend my regret for missing that ceremony by publishing here a feature article I worked up on Marlene in May of 1998 for The Londoner - which some of my readers may remember as the supplement which appeared for a couple of years when The London Free Press (newly taken over by Sun Media) published a Sunday edition.

I conducted our interview at the Fagans’ gargantuan home on Baseline Road in South London. Marlene had to rush away from a choir rehearsal and came in a little breathless and flustered, laughing that she’d told her choristers that she had to fly as “Herman Goodden is coming over to talk to me with his tape measure.” I found something so touching about that blooper. There was never a trace of guile or pretension in this immensely talented and capable woman who knew her way around all kinds of music, including the grandest oratorios and masses. But that day I saw some nervousness at the prospect of standing apart from that army of singers she so diligently served so that she could be appraised in her own right.

Marlene Fagan was born with a singular musical gift: great talent combined with an intuitive grasp of how to make the most of it. This gift has not only helped her to chart a successful career or her own but turned her into a sort of musical midwife, helping thousands – piano students and choral singers as well as her husband and five children – to realize their own artistic potential. She and Gerald, her husband of more than forty years, have spent two decades developing London’s exceptionally rich choral music tradition. He’s the conductor and artistic director of the 125-voice Fanshawe Symphonic Chorus, the smaller chamber choir known as the Gerald Fagan Singers and the Concert Players Orchestra. Marlene is the general manager for all these groups as well as their accompanist (on piano, organ or harpsichord as each programme dictates) and the organization’s resident arranger. Both Fagans work tirelessly but it’s the chap waving the baton who seems to get most of the attention. Today, it’s Marlene’s turn.

Marlene Fagan’s affinity for music was obvious from the beginning. “My mother loved to tell the story about putting me down for an afternoon nap when I was three and thinking that she finally had a few minutes peace. Then she heard me playing Jesus Loves Me on the piano. I still hadn’t had any lessons or anything like that. I just picked it up by ear. She thought that was pretty amazing. My absolute pitch probably helped but we didn’t know anything about that at the time.”

Pianist Glenn Gould also had absolute pitch. If you threw a coin on the floor, he could tell you what note it struck. Fagan shuns the comparison with Gould but, with a shy smile, admits, “I might be able to do that. Yeah. Or rainfall. Or the hum of an electric fan. Whatever.”

Born Eva Marlene Love in Toronto in 1937, she and her family soon moved to Woodstock where her two sisters were born. By age five she was taking piano lessons. “I always had to play the piano in kindergarten which meant I wouldn’t get to march with the other kids,” she recalls. “I wanted to march and they all thought it was neat that this kid was playing the piano. The grass is always greener you know.”

Her father, Stafford Love, a painter and decorator, was also organist and choir director at Woodstock’s Dundas Street United Church. She sang in his choir until she found a $5-a-Sunday job playing the organ at the upscale Anglican church across town. “My mother, Helen, was probably my greatest influence,” Fagan says. “She wasn’t musically trained but no one was prouder or more supportive.”

In high school Fagan started taking lessons from Cliff Von Kuster and Leslie Munn in London. Helen Love drove back and forth every week so her daughter could learn from the best. All three Love daughters were encouraged in their music but Marlene was the most determined. “I remember being asked at age six, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I always said ‘concert pianist’.”

She would try any instrument. With the Woodstock Lions Club Boys and Girls Band, it was the euphonium – the tuba’s little cousin – then, when her arms had grown long enough, the trombone. Later she played organ for assemblies at Woodstock Collegiate Institute. At sixteen she began teaching piano and founded two musical institutions which still flourish today. One was the Woodstock chapter of the Sweet Adelines, which began as a group of her friends rehearsing in her living room. “By the time I was nineteen, I was being called the founding conductor, which I thought was reserved for really old people.”

The other was a family pop trio, The Love Sisters. “I was sixteen, Gwen was fourteen and Ruth was twelve when we started,” Fagan says. “I always played the piano and did the arrangements. Ruth sang the melody, Gwen usually sang a third higher, and I would take the alto, a third below the melody.”

They worked the usual local gigs – high schools, fairs, IODE meetings, Lions Club fetes – before winning first prize on Teletune, the amateur variety show on CKCO-TV Kitchener. At one point they were invited to audition for the Arthur Godfrey Talent Show; a big U.S. radio and TV show. But they couldn’t afford the trip. Instead the sisters ended up in Detroit on Ed McKenzie’s Saturday Party talent show on WXYZ-TV. Facing some pretty slick musical acts with names like The Four Joes and The Twin Tunes, The Love Sisters offered up their rendition of Muskrat Ramble. When McKenzie held his hand over the head of each contestant, saying, ‘Now let’s hear it’ – the Sisters took first prize: a Columbia record player. “We were so thrilled,” Fagan says. “We never got paid for any of our gigs. We just did it for the love of it – no pun intended. And we played that record player to death.”

No sooner had they won, than a man called the TV station, asking the girls if they’d like to entertain GI’s overseas for the U.S. government. “We were so naïve,” she laughs. “I told him we couldn’t possibly go on any world tours because we all had to get right back to Woodstock for school the next Monday morning. I had to practice for six hours a day. My sisters had paper routes and babysitting jobs. We couldn’t just drop all that and go to Korea.”

That fall saw the Love Sisters begin a forty-year hiatus. Marlene, then eighteen, was off to study music at the University of Western Ontario. Gwen set her sights on teaching and Ruth joined the Armed Forces shortly after graduating high school. Fagan hurled herself into study, practice and performance. She played organ at Hyatt Avenue Church, conducted the Alma College choirs in St. Thomas, taught for the Royal Conservatory of Music at Aeolian Hall and sang with the Earle Terry Singers. Saturdays she’d take the train to Woodstock to teach piano out of her parents’ home. Then there were campus productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas and Purple Patches revues, playing, arranging tunes, even composing the music for a satirical revue. And in her spare time she earned pocket money by “taking songs off records and writing out the arrangements for barbershop quartets. It was probably illegal but . . .”

But she never did finish her degree. “In those days you had to take a lot of academics as well as the music courses and that just wasn’t where my interests were,” she says. It’s perhaps just as well. At a reunion a few years ago she canvassed twenty former classmates. “I’m the only one who’s still doing music. The only one. In some ways I’ve been able to do what I wanted to do all my life. If I had that degree and was offered a teaching position . . . I’m not so sure that would be the case.”

While at Western Marlene met Gerry Fagan. Coming off a summer job, he was late starting classes and a teacher asked Marlene to look after him. On their second date, Gerry asked her to marry him. Gerry, an accomplished pianist who lacked the resources to aim for the concert stage, earned his degree and found work teaching music and English; first in Ottawa, then London, then Listowel. He and Marlene had five children in quick succession – four girls and one boy – and she scaled back her musical efforts for a while. “When we moved to Listowel, we really started working again,” she recalls. They crisscrossed Canada with the National Youth Choir; he as conductor, she as accompanist. She began teaching again, juggling a roster of about twenty-five students.

A stint as church organist at Listowel’s Knox Presbyterian Church, led to her becoming that church’s choir director as well. “My first Sunday, I had twelve in the choir (one being Gerry) and by the time I left I had about 120. I played for Gerry’s high school choirs, so he had to sing for my church choir. That was the deal.” They jumped at the chance to return to London in 1978 when Gerald became Coordinator of Continuing Education at Fanshawe College and took over the Four Counties Choir which he developed into the Fanshawe Chorus and Fagan Singers. “At first I thought I would just continue with my teaching but then I got really involved with the choirs as well.”

In 1990 rheumatoid arthritis forced Fagan to stop playing recitals and drastically cut back on teaching. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to play,” she says. “We’ll just have to see.” Undaunted, she set up EML Artists Management Inc. to represent concert singers. “I was dealing with a lot of agents at the time, bringing in soloists to sing with the choirs. I’d get off the phone and say to Gerry, ‘I could do better than that.’ Young singers don’t understand that you don’t just open your mouth and sing and it’s going to happen,” she says. “At an audition, conductors don’t care that you were up all night with your children, that you’ve had a long journey or that you couldn’t get the right accompanist. You have to show them that they can hire no one but you.”
Arts funding cuts have made things even tougher, she adds. “But the bottom line is never the money; it’s your work ethic. If you’re good at what you do and it’s all you want to do – then you’ll get the work.”

Fagan has also stepped up her work as an arranger. For The Fagan Singers’ annual Cabaret concert, she routinely tailors thirty songs for chamber choir, vocal quartets, trios, duets and solos. And she keeps a close eye on her singers. “There’s so much to do that sometimes you forget when somebody new joins the choir, how excited they are for that first concert. It was so sweet this year for one new girl. Somebody gave her flowers after her first concert. She was just beaming . . . and I thought, ‘Well, there’s what it’s all about.’”

It was Gerry’s idea to bring the Love Sisters out of retirement for last year’s Cabaret. “And it was like we’d never stopped singing,” Fagan says. “We all knew exactly how to phrase the music. We just did it . . . It was really emotional that first night because Mother had died just the September before. We were thinking about her a lot; knowing how happy she would be to hear us singing together again.”

The atmosphere at Centennial Hall was already euphoric after The Love Sisters sang Sincerely, Muskrat Ramble and Teach Me Tonight. Then three of Fagan’s daughters, Louise, Judy and Jennifer joined their mom and aunts on stage to sing Goodnight Sweetheart.

Late last year saw the limited release of a new CD, A Sentimental Journey with the Love Sisters, dedicated to their late mother. The recording was originally conceived as a family Christmas present, but Jennifer Fagan persuaded her mom to order a few hundred extra copies – and then sent one to daytime TV hosts Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford. So what will Marlene Fagan tell Regis if he wants The Love Sisters to entertain U.S. troops overseas?

Fagan claps her hands and laughs. “Well, it sure won’t be that we have to go back to school.”

Here’s a link to a Hermaneutics essay from November of 2019 where I talk mostly about George Frideric Handel and his masterpiece, Messiah, and include a significant section discussing the Fagan choirs and their performances and wonderful 1995 recording of that opus: https://www.hermangoodden.ca/blog/a-lifetime-of-messiahs  

LONDON, ONTARIO – While I’ve long been aware of tensions that can trouble relations between artists of various kinds and more conventional denizens of the workaday world – such soul-wilting energies as resentment, projection, envy and contempt – I’m happy to report that these were not issues in my home of origin.

Two of Jack and Verna Goodden’s four sons early on showed signs of Bohemian proclivity; Ted primarily as a visual artist who would make stained glass work his specialty and myself primarily as a writer. Our parents didn’t exactly see the point in the eccentric projects we took on. And to be honest, neither did we; not all of the time. But assuming a parental posture of something like, “Who knows? It might work out,” the folks pretty well left us to our own inclinations; figuring that so long as we weren’t torturing cats or building altars to Moloch, it probably wouldn’t do us any harm to take our fledgling interests for a run and see what could be developed.

Indeed, in a few instances, you’d have to say that they quietly encouraged us. In my eighteenth year they gave me my first typewriter as a Christmas present - a beautiful second-hand Remington Noiseless; the first in what would turn out to be a fleet of such machines that I sequentially drove into the earth until computer technology and the advent of the word processor forced me to adopt a new technology. (Yes, even as a teenager, I was resistant to most kinds of change.) And more passively - but, in a way, more impressively – our parents allowed each of us to annex considerable portions of their home to use as our first studios and never grumbled about the resultant loss of space; Ted heading up to the half-finished attic and me moving into the two thirds-finished basement.
 
In an article I wrote about Ted’s art practice about a quarter century ago, the atmosphere in our home of origin was described as one of ‘benign neglect’. Jack felt wounded by that comment and attributed it to Ted. Incredibly enough, it was several years after Jack died that I thought to revisit the article and discovered that it was me who'd dropped those dreaded words in a descriptive paragraph. That Ted didn’t rebut them at the time shows that either one of us could’ve said it. And on reflection, I suspect I first heard the phrase from Ted and utilized it in the piece. But I felt awful that I’d left Ted all alone in the doghouse of Jack’s annoyance and didn’t step up with some graceful rephrasing of my own to try to repair the injury.
 
Obviously Jack was fine with ‘benign’; it was ‘neglect’ that got up his nose and - even though we didn’t intend it that way - rightly so. I hope that by the end of his life Jack understood that both of us were deeply grateful for a home life that granted us the latitude to freely explore more irregular interests and less traveled avenues of self-expression. This wasn’t the case in a good few of the homes that we knew best. I particularly remember a quarterbacking friend of my brothers who was routinely reduced to tears at the prospect of having to face his father on those dark days when South’s football team lost a game. How tricky it must be, I thought, to sort out your own best gifts and aptitudes in a home where you were subjected to such intrusive pressures.
 
Another expectation that our parents never burdened us with was higher education; which was just fine with me. Indeed, I didn’t even finish high school. But even though I was about the furthest thing imaginable from an academic keener, I learned a lot about my chosen craft at South Secondary School and was more than encouraged to pursue my literary aspirations by a handful of exceptional English teachers. A couple weeks ago I attended the memorial service for one of my favourites; a teacher whose class, strictly speaking, I wasn’t even enrolled in. Though I’d dropped out after grade eleven, Ian Underhill allowed me to monitor his grade twelve class, marked all my essays as if I was one of his diploma students and – most helpfully for me – got me to cut back on my showboating excesses and dig into the subject at hand with something approximating academic rigour. To this day when I’m working on a piece where a more sober approach is called for (or any essay that requires footnotes) I tell myself, “Do this one for Mr. Underhill.”

Ian taught in a portable classroom that was set up in the northwestern corner of the football field; giving his class a physical set-apartness that seemed to inspire a different kind of application in his students. It was only a short walk from the main school but schlepping over there in all kinds of weather to a space that was his and nobody else’s, seemed to awaken a slightly more independent and committed spirit in his pupils; letting us know we could do things differently there.

I watched Ian guide students who were struggling to devise strategies for taking hold of the challenges they faced and encourage those who were sailing along a little too comfortably to branch out or up their game a little. And no matter what kind of tripe you were reading in your spare time, this omnivorous reader had a genius for recommending something that was kind of related to your current enthusiasm but a whole lot better for your soul. Ian was one of the first people I knew who carried a torch for my favourite Canadian novelist, Richard B. Wright. (Dig in here if you’d like to see my full exposition on RBW:
https://www.hermangoodden.ca/blog/a-celebration-of-richard-b-wright )

By the time I left South, I’d written a hopelessly indulgent autobiography; a book that nobody else should ever read but an invaluable record, to me, of childhood lore that might have slipped beyond recall if I hadn’t set it down when the material was still reasonably fresh. I’d also compiled a couple hundred pages of short stories, edited two school newspapers and contributed poems and dramatic snippets that were incorporated into a couple of school shows. Ian, bless his heart, read all that stuff – which really can’t have been that much fun - and gave me insightful advice . . . which sometimes . . . or eventually . . . I took. I’ll always remember the wonderfully gentle way in which he suggested that an account of my first trip to the East Coast was perhaps a little too influenced by my reading of Tom Wolfe. In effect, he had caught me plagiarizing – in spirit if not in word – but didn’t humiliate me in that calling-out so much as nudge me over into my own proper lane. Admiration for another writer can pull you off your own best course, he told me; particularly when you’re young. It’s something to watch out for.

Ian unintentionally taught me another valuable lesson that year. That grade twelve English class took up the final period of the school day and I used to love it when his old friend and English-teaching colleague Bill Cockburn would swing by the portable after our class to check in with his compatriot. Watching these two riff away about Moby Dick or baseball (they both loved the game and about fifteen years later, Ian was instrumental in helping me line up W.P. Kinsella of Shoeless Joe fame for a reading at the Forest City Gallery) . . . and hearing them groan about some insane new directive from the office or speculate about whether J.D. Salinger was developing anything other than his toenails during his long silent phase . . . their easygoing banter assuaged my concern that friendships might not be so important to men once they became adults.
 
During that same year, I also monitored Marion Woodman’s Philosophical English course. And that was it. Solely focused on writing and reading, I let every other subject go hang. And even though the school was not receiving any government funding for my very partial participation in their curricula, they still saw fit to award me with a medal for my work in the ‘Creative Arts’ and a mighty cash stipend - forty dollars as I recall - which I immediately blew on books and records, including the Stones’ just-released double album set, Exile on Main Street. All of which was pretty damned sporting of them, I would say, and (like the indulgence of my middle class parents for the artsy inclinations of their children) indicative of not just tolerance but encouragement for aspirants who were setting out on unorthodox paths.
 
South would canvas local businesses to put up the money for those awards. Mine was called The Birks Medal and featured an engraved Romanesque head of the founder of the Birks Jewelry Company, Henry Birks, on the front side. A few years later a friend dropped around with his boring and crabby communist girlfriend in tow - a nearly extinguished flame he was working up the courage to dump - and she scooped up my medal from a shelf near my desk, screwed up her nose and groaned out loud. "And just what the fuck does that capitalist stooge know about the creative arts?" she asked.
 
I was stunned by the vindictiveness of her outburst. And for that matter, wasn't the design and manufacture of jewelry a form of art? And if he was nothing more than an uncultured tycoon, wasn't it kind of commendable that he'd spread around some of his largesse in this way? I’d just met her for the first time five minutes ago and she pulls this? What an ignorant pillock, I thought. And then – and I don’t know where I got the nerve or the inspiration to even try to pull this hoax – I looked her square in the eye and said, “What do you mean? Henry Birks was a founding member of the Group of Seven?”
 
“Was he really?” she asked, aghast at her faux pas.
 
“You betcha,” I said. “You can look it up when you get home.”
 
(Oh, for the days when you could feed somebody a line of hooey and they couldn’t pull a gadget out of their pocket to regain their equilibrium.)
 
I realize that I’ve been thinking about that horrible girl quite a lot these past several months whenever I watch news clips of massed protesters; seventy-five per cent of whom seem to be arrogant, uninformed women with a monstrous sense of entitlement and a simmering resentment for anybody who doesn't share their particular ideological possession. There they are night after night - gluing themselves to masterpieces and roadways, defacing statues and monuments, yelling down conservative speakers and donning kaffiyahs in addled emulation of middle-eastern terrorists – attempting to work out their daddy issues by dumping on the patriarchy or Western civilization or capitalist society; all of which have granted them the luxury to take their liberty and comfort for granted.

LONDON, ONTARIO – I recently gave our reading group a holiday from our usual theological fare and assigned one of my all-time favourite novels, How Green Was My Valley (1939) by Richard Llewellyn (1906 – 83). This was at least my third immersion in this coming-of-age tale which is told from the perspective of the youngest son in a large family at the turn of the last century as their way of life in a Welsh coal-mining village is steadily degraded by economic exploitation and environmental plunder. Though written in English, the narrative is conveyed in a beguiling prose that seems to have been somehow steeped in the characteristic lilt of the Welsh vernacular; ie: “We sat in the sun, on a turf as soft as my mother’s tablecloth and greener, with the wind kept away by the rock, and angry because of it.”

How Green Was My Valley was published within weeks of Britain declaring war on Germany and, following an early flurry of ecstatic reviews, the novel started racking up phenomenal sales that no publisher’s marketing department could’ve predicted. Perhaps feeling the need for a refresher course in values that were worth fighting for, an enormous international readership took up Llewellyn’s alternately tender and raucous chronicle of a boisterous family which has its spirited disagreements but never breaks faith with one another. Descriptions and imagery that you can taste and smell and feel, convey a sense of place that is positively incarnational and the story itself constitutes a kind of hymn to the glories which can animate and crown even the humblest, most unadorned lives.

I first read How Green Was My Valley as a teenager – maybe eighteen years old – in a bid to gain a little insight into my father’s background. David John Goodden (1914 – 2003) had emigrated from Wales at the age of fifteen; sent on ahead to Canada to work on a farm and make smooth the path for his parents and sister who would follow several months later. (Dig in here if you’d care to learn about my father’s life: Remembering Jack). My initial sense of paternal connection deepened to personal identification as I read on, strongly relating to the temperament and aspirations of the budding writer who narrates the tale: a book-crazy boy (with the good sense to adore Samuel Johnson) who also happened to be, just like me, the youngest of four sons.

Though they may still be regarded with indulgent affection, few of the books that thrilled me as a teenager retain (or, rarer yet, increase) their lustre when revisited as an adult. Wuthering Heights, Huckleberry Finn and The Wind in the Willows are three others that have held up for me that way; Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, not so much. I fell in love with How Green Was My Valley all over again at the age of thirty-one. I can be more precise about the timing of that second encounter because Kirtley and I read it aloud to one another while pregnant with our second child. And in a bid to salute our forebears without getting into the tiresome and confusing business of directly recycling familial handles, we bestowed the first name of that narrating character on our resultant son, though forgoing the Welsh spelling of ‘Huw”.

How Green Was My Valley was Richard Llewellyn’s first novel but his was hardly a case of beginner’s luck. Llewellyn fitfully worked on his book for twelve long years; first taking it up at the age of twenty-one and setting it aside repeatedly as he worked at a series of sometimes pretty menial jobs and served six years in India and Hong Kong with the British army. While the novel set Llewellyn up for life, it also cast a pall of anticlimax over the rest of his career as he was never able to equal (let alone surpass) its artistic or commercial success. I tried to read one of the novel’s sequels when it turned up on the cart of library rejects being offered to inmates of the old Middlesex County Jail where I was serving a three-day sentence for running a red light on my bicycle. I was pretty desperate for literary diversion in there and was predisposed to give anything by Llewellyn a chance but that sequel, set in a South American community of Welsh expatriates, just didn’t take hold. Perhaps I was too distracted by the appalling novelty of my surroundings. (See here for the inside skinny on my incarceration: My Life of Crime. )

In my subsequent five decades as a reformed ex-con and voracious reader, I haven’t had occasion to give any of Llewellyn’s later books a chance as they never seem to turn up in the used book stores that I haunt. For that matter, How Green Was My Valley doesn’t turn up with much frequency anymore either; though whenever it does, I snap it up and pass it along to a friend. While the book was popular enough to be made into a beautifully shot if greatly truncated film in 1941 (directed by John Ford and starring Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp and Roddy McDowell) that movie is commonly and quite undeservedly dumped on today for the cinematic crime of nudging out Citizen Kane for Best Picture in that year’s Oscar race.

As late in the day as 1975 the book still had sufficient resonance to inspire a far more comprehensive, six-part BBC adaptation featuring an almost entirely Welsh cast that included the great Stanley Baker (in his last role) and the always-intriguing Sian Phillips as Huw Morgan’s parents. If you dig around you can probably scare up the series on YouTube though the actors’ accents can be a little challenging without subtitles.  Fans of the British Invasion will be amused to note that Jeremy Clyde (of the 1960’s pop duo, Chad and Jeremy) plays the mine owner’s toffee-nosed son whose greedy machinations have much to do with the ruination of village life.

And the novel itself is rarely referenced nowadays unless it’s being crapped on by snarky academics like University of Edinburgh lecturer, Wendy Ugolini – a “cultural historian specialising in ethnicities, race and identity formation” – whose bitter denunciations dominated my recent interweb search for commentary. Ugolini dismisses the novel as “a typical product of those who wrote about Wales for a market.” (What? Writers aren’t supposed to try to earn money?) And she issues further demerit points for historical and topographical distortions, appropriation of voice and misrepresentation of Welsh life. (Oh man, I am so glad that I never had my love of books bent out of shape by attending university.) Ugolini is outraged that ‘Llewellyn’ was a pen name for an author who was in fact English-born. That the name “Llewellyn” was in his family’s background, and that he’d spent every childhood summer with his mother’s relatives in Wales and wanted to pay tribute to people and a place that he loved . . . all of that stands for nothing in the eyes of Ugolini who regards such open-hearted inspiration as a form of theft.

Over the years I’ve encountered a few fellow devotees who discovered the book for themselves – always older people – and only twice have I come across recommendations from big name writers. Recently the Dante scholar Anthony Esolen penned a charming Substack essay about the 1941 movie. And about twenty years ago I was floored to hear (or did I read?) an interview which I’ve never been able to subsequently track down with the Catholic-bashing Christopher Hitchens where he credited Llewellyn’s most celebrated novel as a formative experience in his own life as a reader and writer. All of which goes to show that even the meanest curmudgeons can secretly harbour a glimmer or two of human generosity.

Look, I know Llewellyn ain’t Tolstoy or Dickens. And in the wake of my most recent reading, I might even concede that How Green Was My Valley exhibits a few infelicities that commonly turn up in first novels. There is perhaps some unevenness in conception and apportioning of emphasis; an occasional crudeness in stitching certain sections together. But these imperfections scarcely matter as so much of this book’s appeal derives from the uncalculating sense of youthful élan that drives this story along.

In addition to his peerless eye for the dynamics of family life, Llewellyn beautifully captures the sense of sanctuary and renewal that a loving home provides to all of its members; most particularly young children as they make their first tentative forays out into an intimidating and bewildering world. We watch the sting of a long day’s tutelage with an arrogant schoolmaster evaporate when Huw gets home and his mom does nothing more than greet him as a beloved human being and pass him a well-buttered bun and a warm cup of tea. In such moments both the stomach and the heart are refortified. When bullies start to become a problem on the schoolyard, Huw’s father and his brothers arm him with practical lessons in self-defense. Quite early on there’s a scene where the older brothers and the father come to loggerheads about whether or not the time has come to form a miners’ union. While they're all racked with uncertainty and fear about how best to avoid financial peril, that particular discomfort pales next to the misery each one of them feels to suddenly find themselves at odds with their kin.

In perhaps the novel's most powerful sequence, Huw has accidentally witnessed a poor woman giving birth in desperate circumstances and is so shattered and shamed by the experience that he can scarcely meet the face of anyone when he gets home. No one gives him a hard time about it but their demeanors are so awkward and regretful that he elects to retire early to bed to await what he thinks might be punishment from his father:

“I cannot tell how long I had been asleep when I woke up and found my father looking down at me with the lamp.

“‘I am sorry I woke you, my son,’ he said. ‘I hear you had a bit of trouble tonight?’

“‘Yes, Dada,’ I said. ‘Will I take off my shirt?’

“‘Stay where you are, boy,’ my father said, with a smile well on the way. ‘Not strapping you, I am. Only talking. Are you awake and clear?’

“‘Yes, Dada,’ I said.

“‘Right, then,’ my father said. ‘Listen to me. Forget all you saw. Leave it. Take your mind from it. It has nothing to do with you. But use it for experience. Now you know what hurt it brings to women when men come into the world. Remember, and make it up to your Mama and to all women.’

“‘Yes, Dada,’ I said.

“‘And another thing let it do,’ my father said. ‘There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is no room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw today, so come the Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors. Let the memory direct your dealings with men and women. And be sure to take good care of Mama. Is it?’

“‘Yes, Dada,’ I said.

“‘God bless you, my son,’ he said. ‘Sleep in peace.’

“I did, indeed.”

Throughout this gem of a novel, Llewellyn portrays moments of epiphany, simple and profound, when a burgeoning consciousness starts to really take form and develop. And he perfectly sketches out the earnestly imitative way in which a young boy models himself on the older men in his life, steering himself towards the fulfillment of certain attributes and skills that, for now, he only perceives in the most nominal way. We come to appreciate how very much the entire enterprise of growing up hinges on trust in the steady guidance of people who can see further and deeper than the child can, who have his best interests at heart and will be there to help pick up the pieces if something in that approach goes wrong. 

And finally I must note a new and disturbing undertone that burbles away during a 2024 reading of How Green Was My Valley. That broad and timeless approach to child-rearing that is celebrated in this book is completely at odds with the kind of faddish dictates that prevail today when parents’ best instincts are commonly challenged by educational and governmental apparatchiks of stupefying shallowness who prioritize the conditioning of social units above the proper cultivation of souls.

LONDON, ONTARIO – I regret to announce that thirty-one days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Grace (March 1, 2009 – January 28, 2024) has taken leave of this world.

Precisely one month before the end, on what happened to be our forty-sixth wedding anniversary - talk about a ceremonial buzzkill - Grace suffered a spectacularly upsetting ‘vestibular event’ (basically a stroke) that looked like it might carry her off right then and there. But, much to our delight, Grace managed to pretty well build herself back up from that calamity over the course of the next week. Yes, there was a new weakness, an unsteadiness, in her back legs which tended to splay if she was standing on a slick surface. She couldn’t back up so easily and had to think about how to navigate stairs; particularly when going down. And although it had nothing to do with perplexity, per se – unless she was holding some great inner dialogue about ‘What on earth is happening to my body?’ - she frequently tilted her head which made her look like a distaff version of the RCA dog cocking his ear at the bewildering sound of ‘His Master’s Voice’ emanating from that phonograph horn.

So she regained about two weeks of reasonably comfortable life in mid-January. Though she was spending a lot more time snoozing, she kept on top of her herding duties; monitoring the coming and going of people in the house. She was still able to get in two walks and two meals each day and found ways to hoist herself up onto the couch or the bed, though she was no longer able to settle into narrower spaces like the chair in my study where she ordinarily sat sentinel through a good portion of the night. But clearly, her game was still worth the candle. If this was going to be the new doggie-normal, then fair enough. She was getting to be a pretty good age, after all, and we were all content, even grateful, to carry on within these more limited parameters.

Then in the last full week of January - all of Grace’s recent work of adaptation and rehabilitation seeming to count for naught - some pitiless, cosmic hand decided it was time to crank down the dimmer switch on our dog for good and she slipped into her final decline with one capacity after another fizzling and conking out. The only way to visit with her in those last few days was to get down on the floor beside her with a box of Kleenex close to hand, patting her and nuzzling your face in her fur and telling her what a good girl she was. She never complained vocally – unless you count the odd sigh - but minute by minute her breathing grew shorter, her eyes weren’t so responsive and her most dependable barometer of happiness had stopped wagging and thwacking altogether.

She leaves behind a piercing sense of absence which assails us every few minutes as we look down in the corner where her water bowl should be . . . hear a noise that sounds just like her stirring in her sleep . . . pull on a coat or a pair of shoes and miss the feel of her nose nudging a hand to see if a walk is in the offing. This is a hard patch every time; the very worst part of owning a dog. But we’ve been here three times before over the course of our married life – with Myrtle, Ben and Badger - and experience tells us that these ghostly cues and reflexes will not sabotage us so incessantly forever.

Gradually, eventually, such hauntings will diminish in their frequency and poignancy. Perhaps a few months down the line - having first circled round in obeisance to an instinct from the age of pre-domestication when dogs prepared their beds each night by tamping down the grass - Grace will settle into her place in the personal pantheon of great canine souls we have known. Looking forward to that day when her memory can be invoked without crying like a baby, I lay down here a few laurels of tribute to the glory that was Grace.

The first thing that needs to be said about this consistently surprising creature is she wasn’t the dog we thought we were getting. Alerted by a Kijiji notice about some mostly-Border Collie puppies being offered for free at a farm outside of Aylmer, our eldest daughter drove me out the first Saturday in May of 2009 to check out the newly-hatched litter. We were – unwisely, I’ve come to believe - seeking to replace the beloved Badger; a mostly-Border Collie mutt who’d gone to his reward four months before. But staring down into the fenced-off corner of a basement den where this tangle of black and white puppies vied for our attention, I was troubled by a childhood memory of the pure-bred Boston Terrier which my parents hastily picked up to assuage their children’s grief after our mostly-Boston Terrier mutt had been run over. The sad truth is that we never managed to bond with Nipper like we had with Boots. And that wasn’t just because our new pure-bred wasn’t as bright as the mutt we so ardently missed. Even if she’d been a more perfect copy of the dog we’d so lavishly loved, any dog who wasn’t Boots was going to fail at that unwinnable game. I don’t think Nipper ever had a chance to imprint herself on our consciousness as a worthwhile pooch in her own right.

It’s probably a fit topic for a different essay altogether but let me just plant a dark suspicion here: that a lot of second (and third and fourth and fifth) marriages are doomed by a similar drive to recapture some lost and irreplaceable magic through replication. Whether you’re talking spouses or dogs, if you really want to go another round when your first one’s played out . . . if you actually want a fighting chance at achieving happiness or success . . . then do everybody a favour by choosing your subsequent candidates from a completely different point along the intra-species spectrum.

That’s certainly how it worked out for us and Grace. By some wonderful stroke of fortune, it so happened that there was a second litter of puppies in another fenced-off section of that same farmhouse basement; these ones the mongrel products of a tryst between a German Shepherd and a Scottish Collie. And it occurred to me that adopting one of these divertingly attractive mutts instead of another almost-Border Collie, wouldn’t just be a whole new experience in dog husbandry. It also wouldn’t set me up for any divisive comparisons between the new dog and the old one. And if I got a girl this time, that would be mixing things up even further. All of our previous dogs had been predominantly black; making them challenging to photograph well. But the white, tan and brown patterning of this second litter’s fairer-furred coats, seemed to sharpen all their contours and features; emphasizing their elegantly slender snouts, adorably floppy ears (these would eventually perk up) and big dark eyes with exquisitely delineated lashes.

Every other time I’ve acquired a new dog, there were at least two preliminary visits to their home of origin. But Gracie was an impulsive, one-stop deal. Not even one hour after first setting eyes on her, I paid about a hundred bucks to cover the cost of various inoculations (and received papers attesting to the same), tucked her inside the front of my coat and we were on our way back to London. She squirmed a bit, looking around with some concern as we first pulled away. But within a couple minutes – lulled perhaps by the hum of those rolling wheels – she seemed cool with the idea that everything she’d learned about the world in her first eight weeks was now about to change.

As we pulled into our laneway, Kirtley came out to greet our brand new almost-Border Collie, and I reminded her of the time she went out to buy a green rug for our backroom and came back with a roll of maroon broadloom. “This is kind of like that,” I said. “And she’s a girl. And I think I’ve already named her. You’ll love it. It’s got heavy-handed theological overtones.”

As she grew into an adult over the succeeding months, I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t getting a little carried away by my absorption with our new dog’s remarkable beauty. In January of 2010, we were four or five episodes into The Pallisers series (based on Anthony Trollope’s six linked novels of English parliamentary life) when it suddenly came to me why I found the actress playing Lady Glencora so attractive. “Don’t you think Susan Hampshire kind of looks like Grace?” I asked my wife. “It’s the eyes that are really doing it for me.”

But it wasn’t just me. We’ve never had a dog that collected compliments from random strangers like Grace. I did most of my dog walking late at night which meant that such encounters were fewer in number but – with the pubs emptying out and all that – considerably more loquacious. The stupidest comment I commonly received was, “Oh, your dog looks just like a wolf.” “No, she doesn’t,” I’d correct them. “You could maybe make out a case for a fox or a dingo.” Kirtley usually took Grace out in the afternoon and was routinely bombarded by tributes from fellow pedestrians. On at least two occasions, she had drivers pull over and get out of their cars to walk over, crouch down and pay their homage face to face.

With some German Shepherd parentage, I was initially concerned that Grace might develop the hip problems which that breed is prone to. But as she grew it became apparent that she’d been blessed with long and sturdy Collie legs of exceptional dexterity and strength. If the right person happened to be visiting in our back room (Kirtley’s mom and our youngest daughter were particular favourites) Grace would execute an Evel Knievel leap across the coffee table to join them on the couch; the breathtaking spectacle of her flight contrasting with a controlled landing of such poise that it almost seemed prim.

Living near the river with lots of open areas and flats, we rarely took her out to dog parks but when we did, she exulted in her capacity to outrun every other pooch on site. She kept a file on all those parks’ locations and if we happened to be driving past one, she’d let us know that a return visit would not go amiss. And, incredibly enough, it was the same deal when driving past the veterinary clinic. Unlike every other dog in the world, Grace solely associated visits to the vet with dog treats – and who cares about the needles? - and was ever eager to drop in, with or without an appointment, to see if they had any more of those liver-flavoured tidbits that needed to be hoovered up.

Part of what contributed to the beauty of Grace’s coat was its constant replenishment. Hence, she was a formidable shedder. The worst I’ve ever seen. With a lot of dogs you can expect a couple weeks of follicular fallout per year. With Grace this happened seasonally and the volume was unreal. We replaced three dark carpets in the house with lighter-toned mats to conceal the extent of our problem and held her personally responsible for the second-degree murder of at least one vacuum cleaner. That picture at the head of this page was taken one breezy afternoon in the parking lot behind the old Mennonite Relief Store in Aylmer (where I once bought all eleven volumes of Will & Ariel Durant’s History of Civilization for $5.50). Waiting for Kirtley to get back from some errand - which probably involved Spicer’s Bakery - our daughter combed out Gracie’s coat for half an hour; producing a dozen puffy orbs of blonde fur that rolled across the landscape like tumbleweeds and caused one woman walking past to scowl at us like we were industrial-scale polluters. “Yeh, bite me,” I muttered at her, under my breath.

The only bone of contention that ever developed between me and Grace had to do with her bizarre attitude towards certain paper products. Whether it was just a neurotic quirk or she was compensating for some dietary deficiency never became clear. It started in my study where she’d raid used Kleenexes out of the garbage can. When I stopped pitching tissues in there, she went after boxes of fresh ones on my desk so I moved those to a higher shelf. Then she developed an appetite for pieces of paper on which I’d written in pen. I think it was 2020 when she devoured two cheap desk calendars in quick succession and then really ticked me off by eating five pages of detailed notes I’d compiled about a friend’s novella. I smacked her for that and she retaliated by peeing on my chair; which constituted, I guess, an impasse or a truce. And then I broke out laughing at the realization that there might have been some truth to what always struck me as the most preposterous of schoolboy excuses for slacking off: “The dog ate my homework.”

I eventually brought the war in my study to a close by setting my chair at an angle that barred canine access to the top of my desk. So she moved her campaign to other rooms, seeking papery products to mangle when we left her alone for a few hours. We’d try to remember to move stuff out of her range before leaving the house but sometimes slipped up and would return to find she’d done a number on a box of Kleenex here, a notebook there, even once a papier mache bowl in which we kept our keys. Then last fall, for the first time ever, she went after an actual book that had been left out on the dining room table; Barbara Amiel’s memoirs, Friends and Enemies. That’s a serious doorstop of a book which she couldn’t devour in one go, so we took to leaving out its tattered remains as a placebo or a decoy and would cheerily ask her when we got home, “So how’d our voracious little reader get along with Babs tonight?”

But all such squabbles were forgiven and forgotten by the end. And I don’t think there’s a single book in the house that I wouldn’t happily feed her one page at a time if it meant that I could be with her again in some of the easiest companionship I’ve ever known. For the last third of her life, barring illness or cataclysmic rain or blizzards, we’d wrap up each day – usually between four and six a.m. – with our Rosary walk. We had several different routes we could go, most of them traversing river walkways and lasting thirty to forty minutes.

We learned this rather elaborate form of prayer together, taking a little booklet along with us for the first couple months until we committed the cycle of four different sets of five mysteries to memory; each one of those mysteries being meditated upon each night by the recitation of ten Hail Marys. Some will accuse me of anthropomorphism in my suggestion that Grace took any actual interest in this elaborate religious exercise. And while I would allow that she might not have been primarily focused on prayer as we moved along our starlit path in such a great smelling world, I would point out that the most deeply entrenched word in any dog’s limited vocabulary – the one that is guaranteed to make her ears twitch - is her name. And I was dropping hers fifty times a night.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Quite early in my life I recognized that summer is the season I find most oppressive. Not wanting to be a year-round whiner, I made a sort of pact with the world that I’d restrict my meteorological grumbling to June through August and this hasn’t been a hard bargain to keep. Not being a driver I’ve been able to maintain a child’s love of snow – the heavier the better, say I – up to the present day. No matter how inconvenient snow might be or how boring it is to shovel the stuff multiple times during the same day, I can never go out into a freshly polarized landscape without thinking to myself, “This really is one of the most beautiful things that our world gets up to.”

So I’ve never wanted to flee a Canadian winter but ten years ago this month, I was firming up plans to do just that when the opportunity arose to be with all three of my brothers in Australia. It was going to be the first time we’d all been together since burying our father ten years before. And owing to the fact that The London Yodeller had just started up in November of 2013, I was actually earning some decent coin for the first time in my so-called professional life and was able to make the trip.

It was my oldest brother Dave who first threw a spanner into easy Goodden-reunion planning in 1969 by chasing his wife-to-be Liz down to her home town of Melbourne after meeting her in Canada on the last leg of her own globe-trotting trek. With or without Liz and/or daughter Kate in tow, Dave managed to make it up to Canada every three or four years and would unfailingly extend his invitation to each of us to come on down to the other side of the world. Our parents had made the grueling, international dateline-crossing trek in 1980 to see their only (as yet; this would soon change) grandchild in her natural habitat. From their trip I learned about a certain Twilight Zone aspect that attends such Canada/Australia treks. According to one’s airline itinerary, it takes two days to fly from Toronto to Melbourne and no days at all to fly back home.

My other two older brothers and I were able to resist Australia’s call so long as the three of us resided in London and Dave was prepared to schlep his way up to us every few years. But then Ted, the second-born, started messing with that arrangement by routinely summering out on B.C.’s Hornby Island and then moving there altogether in 2012. While it’s always great to get together with any of the brothers, all four of us were starting to miss that special frisson – a sort of snapping into place of all the necessary elements to empower a full electrical circuitry of unadulterated Goodden-ness – that only occurs when the full quartet re-constellates in the same physical space.

Accompanying us was Dave Dell, aka the Dell Dog. He was first an early childhood friend of third-born Bob, but because the older three were born within 17 and then 14 months of one another, he was soon taken up as a good friend by all of them. (In an act of regenerative mercy that our mother greatly appreciated, I debuted three and a half years after Bob.)  The Dell Dog’s always been a sort of avuncular figure to me; one of the few of my brothers’ friends who never gave me a hard time and would even put up with me if I wanted to sit in with them. Being practical and technically competent in ways that Gooddens, sadly, are not, Swamper Dan (he also has more nicknames than should be allowable; I’m sparing you at least two others) was indispensable to our entire Australian mission – helping to book our flights, ensuring that we met them, presenting us with agendas each morning for the day ahead and photographically chronicling the entire adventure.

At first blush everything seems quite different on the underside of the globe. You’ve got your koalas, Tasmanian devils, platypuses and ‘roos, a total absence of snow, a plenitude of large, noisy birds squawking away in exotic palm and gum trees, and a distinctive architecture that is largely defined by measures taken so as to mitigate the blistering glare of the sun. Sitting around an up-island Tasmanian airport on yet another scorchingly brilliant day, the sound system started to play George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun, and I announced to the brethren, “Now there’s a song that no Australian would ever have thought to write.” At nighttime, they don’t even have the same sky as a completely different canopy of stars twinkles overhead. And while it might be the same sun which occasionally emerges on some afternoons up here, it doesn’t come at you full-on like theirs does for 364 days of the year.

And yet having said all that, I was struck again and again by how very much Australia shares with Canada . . . well, at least, Canada outside of Quebec. They have the same ubiquitous British Empire influence owing to its almost simultaneous founding. Australian place names feature that same weird mix of imperial and aboriginal nomenclature. Even though they don’t have our excuse of living in such geographic proximity, they too struggle to keep American cultural hegemony at bay. I sighed while moving through the Sydney airport when the first thing I spotted on Australian TV was the bloody Ellen Degeneres show. And in both of these very large countries the preponderance of settlement takes place on the fringes – along the American border up here, around the outer rim down there.

From shopkeepers to temporary companions on tram cars or at shows and church services, I remember the Australians I encountered as refreshingly friendly and forthright. None more so than the guide who showed us around the extensive grounds and buildings of the penal station at Port Arthur which operated from 1830 until 1877. For the first 23 years of its existence, this station was the main dumping ground for the thousands upon thousands of convicts – more than 150,000 of them in total – who were forcibly evicted from Great Britain and dispatched to the other side of the globe to serve out their sentences. It was cheaper than housing the criminals in British jails, it was easier on the conscience then putting them to death and the evictees were put to work (unpaid, naturally) in the forests and mines of Australia, sending needed resources back to Britain and helping to establish infrastructure in the new colony.

It was brutally hard work but those who co-operated with the system were also given vocational training as blacksmiths, shipbuilders, carpenters, shoemakers, etc., so they’d have something honorable to turn their hands to when they got sprung. Once their sentences had been served out, these convicts-turned-freemen could return to Britain if they wanted to and could raise the scratch for the voyage but the vast majority of them stayed put. If the climate agreed with you, life was a lot freer and more inexpensive in Australia and so it was that up until the 1850s when mass immigration got underway on a huge scale, rehabilitated convicts comprised a substantial fraction of the pioneering population.

For the first hundred years of its national existence, Australians were a little embarrassed about the role deported criminals played in their development and downplayed that chapter of their story. In the 1960’s that attitude started to swing over to its opposite extreme and today it can even be a source of defiant pride. Our guide told us about descendants of those convicts who tell him their great, great grandfathers were deported to Australia under absurdly trumped-up charges and decry the utter corruption of that old system. One woman apoplectically told him her forbear was sent to Port Arthur for nothing more than stealing a measly section of rope. He took down the esteemed gent’s name, checked it out against the records (and the one thing you’ve got to hand the British colonizers of that time, they kept great records) and learned that that particular section of rope had actually been attached to another man’s horse and that particular theft was his 13th conviction.

“Of course, people want to think well of their families,” he said. “But human beings – some a lot more than others – are perverse and ornery creatures. Was Port Arthur successful as a prison system? I don’t answer that question except to pose another: Our prison system today – how successful would you say that is?”

Thanks to the global interconnectivity of the interwebs, I was able to edit two issues of The Yodeller while I was down under. This meant that I wasn’t around to hold the publisher’s hand when our original layout person went insane and completely sabotaged the first of those issues. For a couple of days it appeared likely that my new job was about to evaporate. But after a few frantic phone calls from home, Kirtley offered to revive the same husband/editor and wife/layout wizard arrangement that had worked so well for us at SCENE twenty years before and – without missing a beat and greatly improving the look of the Yodeller in the process – saved the day.

With a magazine to edit and a crisis to, however remotely, massage, I had to miss out on a couple of side-trips that my brothers and the Dell Dog undertook. But I did have my first real swim in the ocean on a beautiful red-sanded beach not far from Melbourne on our first Wednesday and it was a revelation. Ted successfully got me to float for five minutes at a stretch; something I’d never been able to do in fresh water. It’s the salt in the water that does the trick, and boy, can you ever taste it. I think it was my first acquisition of a major life skill since Kirtley taught me how to blow bubble gum bubbles on our third or fourth date in 1970.

And I did take part in the biggest of our excursions; a four-day tour of the south-eastern island-state of Tasmania; the most wooded and mountainous and temperate (its closer proximity to Antarctica shaves a few degrees off the broiling daily highs) of all eight Australian states and territories. On our second night we lucked into a beautiful inn on a steep hillside in Bicheno with a heart-stopping view of the ocean and nocturnal visits from a herd of kangaroos.

The next morning I dropped into the manager’s office to pick up some email with his wi-fi and walking me back down to our van, he said he’d never hosted an expedition quite like ours before. “I think a lot of people would like the idea of doing what you’re doing but then they’d have to ask themselves, ‘Could I really stick it with my family for three or four weeks?’ You fellas actually seem to get along. You’re lucky that way.”

Indeed we are. And negotiations are underway as we speak for our next fraternal confab; this time in B.C.