I took this pic with my phone somewhere south of Kamloops on Highway 5.
Last week I drove to the west coast, which meant traversing the province of British Columbia from my home in Calgary, which meant driving through a lot of mountains. And I do mean mountains. My photo above was taken through the windshield somewhere on the Coquihalla Pass (Highway 5) south of Kamloops. It’s meant to give a sense of the grandeur of British Columbia which is so relentless and intense it constantly takes your breath away.
As you can see, and from the video I have included at the end of this post, there are some stretches of road on this journey that are not for the faint of heart. That I could even undertake such a journey is a bit of a miracle, one of those serendipitous events of my life that I love to share, so here goes. (And keeping a long story short . . . . . .)
It all began with a cough. I somehow picked up the cough while visiting Turkey a few summers ago, maybe it was lurking in the Aegean Sea and I just happened to pick it up. Do what I might, short of quitting smoking, I couldn’t get rid of the cough. It went on for months.
One day I happened to be in our local health food store (Community Health Foods on 10th Avenue SW in Calgary) and while in the homeopathy section noticed a cough remedy. I had tried everything else and nothing had worked so I decided it was worth a shot.
In short, I bought it, took it, and a day later my cough was finally gone. I was amazed. In fact I was so amazed that I decided I really should find myself a homeopathic doctor. The next day I went out literally looking for one. It was my mission. While I was having my morning coffee at Caffe Beano, I was approached by a woman who asked me if I remembered her.
The woman was Linda Miller. Linda is an opera singer. Her claim to fame was as the singer of the aria in Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence. Years earlier we had toyed with the idea of me writing a play for Linda that would highlight her skills as a singer, perhaps something we could tour through the schools to introduce children to the world of opera. I even ended up sitting in on a private coaching session in Montreal. It was an idea we never got off the ground, sadly.
Anyway, all these years later, there she was large as life and we were having a coffee together when she said to me, “Actually, I’m no longer singing opera. I’ve had a change in life. I’ve become a homeopath.”
The coincidence, the synchronicity, the serendipity of the moment whatever you choose to call it was so eerie that I got chills up and down my spine. You can’t believe that such things actually happen until they do and then you get a sudden suspicion that maybe there is an order to the universe after all.
Obviously, I put myself in the care of Doctor Miller. (For those in the Calgary area who are interested, check out the website: xerion.ca) As part of our initial consultation, it came out (among many other things) that I was suffering from a serious fear of heights, in particular driving over bridges of any dimension and elevation.
The remedy, for such it is known as, that Linda gave me took care of a lot of things that were bothering me. But since that time, I have given up driving, and so had no clear indication that my fear of heights and bridges was “cured” or indeed that driving through mountain passes would be even possible.
But it was. I had a mild case of the heebie-jeebies a few times, but check out the video and ask yourself, Who wouldn’t? By the time we were driving over the bridges in Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay I was actually peering at the view down below and it didn’t bother me at all.
So you can see that from swimming in Turkey leading to a cough leading to a reunion with an operatic friend with a new mission in life to a drive to the coast, there’s a wonderful inter-connectedness to all of this.
Here’s the video which is actually taken along the Kicking Horse Pass. Looking at it, safe at home back in Calgary, I still can’t believe I actually made that drive!
A journal entry from a few days ago that I thought spun off into a Kafkaesque direction.
Life’s rich pageant drifts by, but I feel remarkably detached from it, as if none of it concerns me, vitally. My involvement seems tenuous at best, feeble even. You see, I sat at the head table, once upon a time. I was even the key-note speaker, once upon a time. The big shot. And a few times when I wasn’t the big shot, per se, I was thought to be even bigger than the actual big shot being honoured by those thusly assembled. You may remember me glaring down from up there, masticating my chicken. I was at the centre of things.
But then I found myself shunted down towards the end of the table, a gradual process, one seat at a time, no longer at the centre. I eventually became the one who sat beside the mid level bureaucrats from various government agencies, sent to convey the Minister’s deepest regrets, sincere and heartfelt, that he or she could not personally attend such an auspicious and truly significant event.
Eventually, they simply ran out of seats at the head table. I found myself down on the floor near the head table, with the paying guests. While no longer at the head table proper, I was still acknowledged by those at the head table, who were after all friends and colleagues, and perhaps were tracking my movement away from the centre with some trepidation, for in my journey, could they not see what fate awaited all of them?
And then I found myself being placed at a table a little further back and away from the head table, out there on the floor along with everyone else. And then finally I found myself sitting all alone at a table that wasn’t even a real table, more of a temporary structure, like a card table, with a wobbly leg and a not quite spic and span table cloth. From this table, one could not even see the head table, it was too far away and besides there was a pillar in the way. This table was situated way in the back of the great dining hall beside the stations where the servers gather to make their forays into the dining room proper, delivering food, removing the plates, serving coffee and dessert, I could see it all happening before anyone else, and yet annoyingly I was always served last. If at all.
And then one day I had trouble parking and when I arrived at the dining hall, I discovered all the doors were closed and not only closed but locked. I stood in the empty vestibule with my ear to the door and could hear fragments of the speeches being given and some muted applause. Then I sunk down in one of the overstuffed leather sofas and I guess I must have fallen asleep for when I woke up, the doors to the great dining room were open revealing and the serving staff stripping all the tables and even setting the tables on their edges and rolling them away. A woman in a grey uniform was vacuuming and when she approached me, I lifted my feet for her which she acknowledged with a smile revealing several gold teeth. And then I left.
And then perhaps because I moved and changed addresses, the invitations no longer arrived in the mail and perhaps I missed them online – I get so many it’s hard to keep track of them all. And maybe the organization got a better deal on a dining room at another hotel and changed locations, I don’t know. On a day that seemed reasonably like it could have been the day of the luncheon I put on a dark suit and made my way to the hotel and up to the banquet hall floor, but there was no one there I recognized, or who recognized me, just some men in red blazers who seemed vitally concerned with plumbing fixtures, in which I have little or no interest, myself.
Nowadays, I don’t even bother looking for it, and while I don’t dwell on it, I think about it sometimes, the head table, and how it was to sit at it . . . .
As artists, none of us just evolves under a cabbage and then suddenly enters into the world fully formed like Zarathustra emerging from his cave. Most of us undergo (and endure) years and years of training at the hands (or at the knees) of those who have gone the way before. Some are teachers, but a select few become our true mentors. In my life, I was lucky enough to have three mentors who stand out above the rest. They’re all dead now, God love them. After a reminder about one of them by way of a chance conversation with an old friend on Facebook last night, I thought I should spill a little cyber ink on all three of them.
In the mid -70’s – the time of disco and long before the advent of digitization, I put down my basketball and decided to study music at the University of Regina. This led to one of the most unlikely pairings in the history of education, when I was taken under the tutelage of Thomas Manshardt, pictured here.
I was a raw unsophisticated kid from the old north end of Regina. I don’t know that we really use the term “good ol’ boy” in Canada, but that would give you an idea. Tom was easily the most sophisticated and cultured person I have ever met, which is a polite way of saying he was a total snob, and not always a very nice one. But he was exotic, unlike anyone I had ever met before, and before long I came totally under his spell.
He was the last pupil of the legendary pianist Alfred Cortot, which put him, and by extension me, in a lineage once can trace directly back to Chopin. To learn how to play Chopin from Tom was to learn if, a few times removed, from Chopin himself. (I’ve included a somewhat surreal video of Cortot at the end of this post.)
How he found his way from les grands salons of Europe to mid-70’s Regina is beyond comprehension, really. I can’t even imagine what the place seemed like to him. I’m sure he went to his grave with no awareness at all of the Roughriders or any of the rest of it. But It was a job, one that paid him well and allowed him to spend his days playing the piano, probably more wonderfully than anyone else I have ever heard.
I don’t know that I had ever encountered an actual gay person before I met Tom, although the fact that my best friend growing up, Roy, was gay was common knowledge, although never talked about. (Roy eventually came clean years later in a gay bar in Toronto, but that’s another story.) It may be that Tom was attracted to me. Certainly we spent many an evening sitting on the carpet of his Regina apartment (he possessed no furniture), drinking huge tumblers of Pernod with water, listening to Cortot and other masters of a bygone age. Maybe it was at times a tad potentially promiscuous and I was just too naïve to recognize it, I don’t know. But those evenings spent listening to Tom talk about art and music and life in general probably shaped me as an artist and even as a human being than any other person or situation ever would.
It was Tom who said again and again that art is a way of life. That may not seem like an earth-shattering notion now, but to a young man from a working class neighbourhood, it was news indeed. He showed me there was another way to live my life than the one that was expected of me. If I am an artist today, it is due to Tom’s influence.
The most obvious and persistent influence Tom had on me concerns my enduring love for fountain pens. He used a Montblanc Meisterstuck 149, which is still in my estimation one of the most beautiful objects on the planet. Tom kept a daily journal, as I do to this day. In fact, it could be said that my interest in keeping the journal grew greater than my interest in music, and so there came a day when I had to bid Tom adieu and get on with my life.
I would be a writer, it seemed, and not a musician. But either way, I would be an artist, trained not so much in the piano but in life studies by one of the finest artists I ever had the chance to meet and work with.
Tom came to a senseless end a few years ago. His legacy of music excellence lives on through his long time partner Lawrence Amundrud.
eugene stickland 