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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

LONDON, ONTARIO – The first time Donald D'Haene registered on my consciousness was around 1993 when I was editor of Scene and trying to work up some enthusiasm for that magazine's annual cover model contest. Like a lot of fellows, I've always been indifferent to what strikes me as the higher neurosis of high fashion. Hemlines could go up or down or straight to Hell for all I cared. I shouldn't have been on the committee to choose that year's winner, because, frankly, I didn't understand the underlying premise of the contest. The big prize was a makeover, followed by a professional photo shoot. This struck me as a kind of madness. Having just chosen the best-looking girl out of a pile of photos and CVs, we'd then pass her off to a small army of beauticians, stylists and consultants, who'd work her over until she looked like someone else. Where was the sense in that?

"Maybe we should be choosing the homeliest girl," I helpfully suggested. "Someone who could actually use a few pointers in improving her appearance." This was met with stony silence.

LONDON, ONTARIO – In addition to some of its more routinely trumpeted pleasures and solaces, as you get older Christmas becomes an annual opportunity to spend time communing with the ghosts of the beloved dead. One old friend who’s taking up more pronounced residence in my thoughts this week is Jane Loptson, who died ten years ago in the hallway outside of her apartment at the Mary Campbell Co-op in the early afternoon of December 27th. She had been venturing out to buy some groceries following a rough Christmas when she’d had more than her usual difficulty breathing.

LONDON, ONTARIO – The celebration of Christmas is about the personal intervention of the Divine in human affairs. In the first book of the Old Testament, God creates man and woman and invests them with free will which, a mere five pages later, has so completely caused things to run amok that this temperamental Deity sets out to destroy everybody but Noah and his family and those lucky beasts and birds which have male and female representation on board the ark. In the New Testament, disorder and chaos have returned to mankind (actually they’ve been pretty constant through both Testaments and continue to this day) and this time God elects to send His only Son to instruct people how to live and to win us salvation.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Colleagues and patrons were completely blindsided when London artist, Alan Dayton (1949–2013) died ten years ago this May at the age of 64. It took several months for family and friends to pull together a memorial and retrospective exhibition for him at Eric Stach and Catherine Morrisey’s riverside studio as not even those closest to him knew anything was wrong until very shortly before the end. Dayton may have justified his secrecy as a strategy to spare others anxiety and dread. But shocked as his friends were to learn that he had even been ill, they also shook their heads in rueful recognition that so discreet an exit perfectly accorded with the man they knew and so suddenly missed. The shy and reticent Dayton never did call attention to himself. Indeed, his forte as London’s foremost portraitist was to lavish his attention on others.