When I was a young lad, my mom would tuck me into bed and kiss her little boy on the forehead before backing softly from my room, closing the door quietly as she left.
The light that crept under the door was all there was to keep the shadowy ghosts that hid in my room from emerging from their hiding places behind closet doors, or inside the large drawers that were built-in beneath my bed. The only sounds in the house came from the kitchen, just outside my bedroom door. The whole town was silent as it huddled under the ice cold Northern Ontario mid-winter night.
Once my body had warmed the soft flannel sheets, I turned around in my bed and pushed my head through the blankets at the foot of the bed so that I could peek through the window at the outside world. Moonlight turned my view clear blue and lit up the smoke that rose slowly from every chimney in the clear cold air. The snow all around glistened like sparkling diamonds on the ground and in the birch trees in the back yard. Street lights burned yellow in the night and the Northern Lights swept back and forth across the sky, entertaining the stars, much to their delight.
Within a few minutes, my warm breath had caused the single paned windows to fog up and become covered in Jack Frost designs. The sounds of the kitchen had died away and it was time for a little late night entertainment.
Turning once more under the covers, I emerged back at the head board and reached for the switch on my little brown tube radio that sat on the built-in shelf at the head of my bed. Turning the switch and hearing the much-too-loud switch as it sent electricity to the glass tubes in the back of the radio cabinet, I waited for sounds to come from the cloth covered speaker. In a moment or two, sounds began to wander in and out; first a clicking sound which soon turned into a humming with a wavering high pitched tone. I was fascinated by these sounds, as they might have come from outer space, or from New York or Chicago, or Toronto or…. .
Turning the dial, I would search for a station that might be playing the latest instalment in the series “The Green Hornet”…or “The Inner Sanctum” or some other radio play. I would turn the volume down to a level that I was sure only I could hear. If my mom knew I was staying awake to listen to the radio she would tap on my door and tell my to turn it off and get to sleep.
Every night was different in the world of late night radio, but the one constant that I could depend on was that…at just the most critical moment in the plot, when the unsuspecting victim was about to be pounced upon, or the heavy door that had hidden the monster from view began to C-R-E-E-E-A-K … the radio signal would fade slowly away to be replaced by the Chicago Livestock Report on radio station WLS or XYZ, or whatever. Try as I might, I couldn’t get my radio play back in time to find out who did it…or why.
Occasionally, I would get a station that was playing music other than what I was used to hearing at home. My parents were big fans of Big Band stuff and Sinatra and Johnny Ray. But I would sometimes get a few minutes of something called The Blues from I don’t know where. The Blues was never played on local radio like CKSO or any station I could find from Toronto when the atmospheric conditions were favourable.
Now let’s roll the clock ahead about 10 years and a great many adventures.
I decided that I needed to stretch my wings and leave the nest. I gathered a couple pairs of jeans and some T-shirts and rolled them into my sleeping bag which I stashed into the little compartment in the front of my Robin’s Egg Blue 1961 VW 2-door sedan. I waited for my dad to leave for work and I said goodbye to my grandfather and my mom and left saying I was going to Toronto or Saint Catherines to visit friends. I’d call, I said when I got settled.
Well, I hung around Saint Catherines with friends for a week or so and then headed across the US border looking for a girl I had met once at a tourist camp near Capreol, Ontario. I knew her last name and the fact that she lived in Clarksville Pennsylvania so off I went to look for her.
I found Route 15 heading south and followed the Susquehanna Trail along the Susquehanna river toward Harrisburg. I had been driving for a long time and decided I’d pull off the road somewhere for a squirt and a ‘burger, and perhaps I might curl up on the back seat for a few hours of sleep if I could find some where to park that looked like it might be safe. With night falling, I came around a long curve in the 2-lane country road and saw a sign that said “Chapman Hollow” turn right. Near the turn off to Chapman Hollow there was a typical country bar on the left with a Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer sign flashing in the window near the door. It was a two story building that was probably built during the ‘40’s and had seen all of it’s better days pass it by. But it was a watering hole and I needed one badly so I turned into the small gravel parking lot and pulled to a stop in front of the door.
Getting out of the car, I locked the door and stretched before pushing the door aside and stepping inside. The place looked clean and tidy and smelled only slightly of cigarettes, American beer and old wood. The place was empty with the exception of the bartender and myself, so I wandered over to a booth and sat down. Soon the bartender came over to the table and asked me what I wanted. “A burger and a beer”,..”Please”… I said.
“I think you’re too young to be asking me for a beer”, he said. “OK” I said, “Can I have a Coke then?”. “Sure,” he said as he turned to go to the kitchen.
At that point a man about 30 years old walked in and sat down at the bar. The bartender brought him a beer and they chatted for a few minutes while my burger was being set onto the griddle. The bartender went to the fridge and pulled my Coke from behind the door. I was thirsty enough to want to drink the Coke, but what I really wanted a beer…or two. Then I saw the bartender open the fridge and put my Coke back inside and take out another beer which he handed to the young man who had just come in from the dark.
The young man brought the two beers over to my table and handed one to me. I thanked him and asked him to sit down. He declined. He had seen my VW in the parking lot with an Ontario Plate on it and asked countless questions until my burger arrived. When I told him that I was going to sleep in my car that night, he said he’d talk with the bartender about getting me a bed for the night in one of the rooms upstairs. I didn’t have enough money to spend any on a room so I said that I’d be OK in my car. The next thing I knew, these men who, it turned out, were brothers gave me a room with a fresh bed for $2.00…just enough to cover the laundry cost, they said. So, after my burger and beer, I said goodnight and dragged my duffle bag up the stairs for my first night in a real bed on over a week.
The room was nicely appointed with a large bed with a chenille bedspread and two big pillows. There were thin curtains on the window with a dark green pull-down blind to keep the sun out. I tried to pull it down, but it was stuck in the full “up” position, so I resigned myself to rising early. There was a porcelain wash basin standing on a night table with a porcelain water jug nearby. There was a small washroom at the end of the hall so I took my little leather bag of toiletries and walked down the creaky wooden hallway floor to the light green wooden door of the bathroom. I don’t recall very much after that but I do recall how nice it felt to get into bed and put my head down on the pillow. I fell asleep immediately.
My sleep was fitful and filled with ragged dreams of headlights and white lines in the middle of the road. And there was music…Blues was drifting through my sleep. There was a guitar and a string bass and a fiddle and a harmonica…and singing.
I awoke not long after I had gone to bed with the sound of the Blues coming from the room across the hall. I got out of bed and got dressed, thinking how rude it was to be making noise at this late hour. I stepped out into the hall prepared to meet with some stiff opposition to my request that they break up the party and leave me in peace, but instead was met with broad smiles and a warm invitation to join in.
I was completely taken by surprise! There were four elderly black men in the room. One held a violin, another had several harmonicas on his lap and yet a third man’s arm was slung loosely over a large guitar. The fourth man was standing beside an overturned washtub. The washtub had a chord attached to the middle of the bottom of the tub and the other end of the chord was tied to the upper end of a shoulder-high broom stick. This was the source of the bass sound that I’d been hearing. One of the men went downstairs and came back with a chair for me to sit on and then they settled in for about an hour of the Blues. There was no sheet music…not that I would have been able to read it, but they didn’t read music either. Everything they played, they worked out during sessions like this one and one night a month, they met in this room for a night of music and a couple of bottles of beer. For much of the night, they played and we all sang and in the end, after they had packed up and left, I fell into bed at 4:00 am for three or four hours of very deep sleep. The Blues had found me, entertained me and hooked me for life.
You're right Lynnette...shopping for our table can be quite daunting. I picked up a few things for dinner on the way home from work recently and found myself reading all the labels and trying to make a sensible decision on each item. The romaine hearts came in either organic or reasonably priced; the salad dressings were either the by-product of a grade 10 chemistry experiment or not-so-reasonably priced and the...well, I could go on and I sometimes do.
