Remembering David Morrison Blaikie - 1909-1976
July 28, 2009 | Filed Under Black and White, General, Portraits | 1 Comment
On this day 100 years ago my father was born in Upper Stewiacke, Nova Scotia, a good man who lived a good life and died too soon at age 66. His name was David but everyone called him Morris. I remember him as he was in this photo at the family mill, his hand on the lever, the big saw shrieking through endless logs, his hat forever flecked with sawdust. He worked there 44 years and never got over its closing in 1968. He married my mother, Eva Gray, at 33 and raised four children in a house where twice that many often crowded round the dinner table, including mill hands and anyone else who happened to be there. He put two spoons of sugar in every cup of tea and went driving every Sunday, never forgetting the way sugar and gas were rationed in the war. He played the organ for the choir at church, and had a violin. Our house rang with hymn sings that I hated as child, yet would kill to hear again. He kept a weird blue apron in a box and took it with him to monthly meetings at the Masonic Hall. A Liberal, he voted Tory only once, when Bob Stanfield entered national politics in 1967, and no Liberal ran against him, and even then he did it grudgingly, mainly to portray himself in political arguments as “a man who changes his vote.” He played the stock market, rooted for Montreal, chafed at unions, wanted Sonny Liston to shut up Cassius Clay, and favoured Bob Winters over Pierre Trudeau. He hoped I’d go into the mill but wished me well in journalism and held his tongue when I cheered for the Leafs, voted NDP and helped organize The Canadian Press. He never drank and never smoked and was not overweight. He died of heart failure March 3, 1976, on a winter holiday in Bermuda. My oldest sister still lives in the house he built at the corner of the Otterbrook Road. Every time I’m home I visit his grave. I wish I was there today. (Photo by Al Eastman) — The Mill — The Village — The Ritual
Tim Hortons - the crossroads of Canada
July 26, 2009 | Filed Under General, Portraits | Leave a Comment
It is not the coffee, hot and black, that brings me back, nor the wisps of rising steam, nor the doughnuts, bagels or apple fritters. It is the comfort, or the idea of comfort, that always calls, a mirage that lurks in the crimson lights where all my country seems to pass and all its cultures flow — the lipstick women and unshaven men, the wide-eyed kids and soccer teams, John Deere hats lined up with burkas, jackets that say Coach and Leafs and Harley Davidson, a parade of all we are and all we are not in double-double time. Here on any given day we link our small and common moments in small and common acts, unaudited, unnamed. Here the clock ticks intermission, and we seek respite in the ticking. I am never quite alone at Tim Hortons, no matter how alone I am. But I do belong to a dwindling band. I knew Tim Horton. He lived long ago on Saturday nights in every town and village of Canada. I saw him wheel at the blueline, skates aglitter in black and white, and heard the voice of Foster Hewitt with him — ”He shoots, he scores!” And that too brings me back again. - David Blaikie. The Story of Tim Hortons
The summer of billowing green
July 25, 2009 | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
The land is alive this summer, beyond the city, where country roads unfurl along the fence lines on long afternoons and reach past luxuriant farms, waiting, waiting for the clouds to part and the sun to spill down on swaying stands of Queen Anne’s lace and infinite acres of corn. This is the summer of billowing green, the hay, the trees, the fields of velvet soy beans. I love to drive with the windows open and feel the air, cleansed by shining maples and trembling poplars. I love the light on the rippling river and all the scents of summer. Even the cattle know this year is special, their pastures pulsing with green. Yes, it is cooler and wetter than normal, but wild and fertile too, rich as the weeds that spurt from the gravel shoulders, teeming with brilliant blooms. This is the north land’s furious art, flung far as the eye can see, hot as a late day thunderstorm and passing almost as quickly. By the time I top the hill, autumn will be in the air— and deer by the quarry will already be sensing snow. - David Blaikie.
The old mills are dead now
July 13, 2009 | Filed Under Black and White, General | Leave a Comment
The old mills are dead now, silent across the great Northeast, and cities like Lowell and Nashua ring with the sound of their corpses. They haunt the horizon where once they hatched like mushrooms on the banks of Concord and Merrimack Rivers, quivering with the memory of all who toiled there, all gone now, slipped off with the currents that swelled the head ponds and ran the mighty wheels and the clattering looms, and spun the dust that filled the pockets of the Appletons and the Cabots, and the lungs of farm girls and Irish immigrants – and the French Canadians from the north – their coughing wracking the rooming houses at end of deafening days. “Jacques et Gilles work at the mill / That stands beside the water / Could be Lowell, could be Lawrence / Or Nashua, New Hampshire,” sing Kate and Anna McGarrigle on Matapedia, their haunting 1996 CD. “Jacques et Gilles, they hate the mill, but they’ve too many sons and daughters.” Now, only the crumbling remains, windows smashed, vines crawling up abandoned walls, bricks baking in a smoldering sun. The mills went south where the cotton was, and blacks who picked it − and where the unions weren’t − and now they’ve gone again, to China, Taiwan and Bangladesh. Today there are only ghosts, and a museum, and some memories in books, and the graveyards of course, and shelves piled high with free trade knock-offs − at Wal-Mart. – David Blaikie July 2009
Jack Kerouac - ‘Only a jolly storyteller’
July 8, 2009 | Filed Under General, Portraits | Leave a Comment
Lowell, Mass. – I came to Edson Cemetery this morning, a brooding day of thunder skies, and trees dripping on the shining grass, and I found the grave of Jack Kerouac, flat beneath the shifting clouds, the place where Dylan sat with Ginsberg all those years ago, in 1975, when Rolling Thunder was rolling through New England, and I was young, and far away, and Ginsberg asked how Dylan knew Kerouac, and Dylan replied, “Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.” And ever since that time I have wanted to come here and look myself upon the stone that says Ti Jean, John L. Kerouac, Mar. 12, 1922 – Oct. 21, 1969, He Honored Life. This morning was that day, with traffic rustling past the Citgo station on Gorham Street, and workmen in orange clothes tearing up the asphalt beyond the iron cemetery fence, and there was a Budweiser can on one corner of the stone and a pair of wet shoes on the other, and the Third Step Prayer in wet blue ink (from Franse) that said, ”Relieve me of the bondage of self … take away my difficulties.” And the workmen moved on while I was there, and I breathed the freshness of the rain beads and said thank-you. “I have been writing my heart out all my life,” Kerouac said. “I am only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes, and my only plan is the old Chinese Way of the Tao: Avoid the Authorities.” And so he lived and so he died, and so his heart with all its aching is buried here. – David Blaikie - 8 July 2009. Writing
A gravestone in Vermont
July 1, 2009 | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
“We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.”