Talking to Old People

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.

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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.