Tribute – Rant and Roll

I am crying tonight because Stuart McLean died today. He was 68 years old.

I don’t remember the first time I listened to the Vinyl Café. If I had to wager a guess, I would put myself somewhere between the ages of nine or ten. Growing up, the CBC was one of the few constants in my ever-chaotic world, and my mother and I would listen to its programming non-stop.

Careening from highland dancing competitions, to piano recitals, to badminton tournaments, we listened.

One of my most favourite memories is of driving back from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, together with my mum. I want to say that it’s Christmas, because we are listening to a Christmas story. But I remember the weather outside to be classic Maritime June: warm and wet.

It was a rain for the ages. Blanketing the world in a ceaseless, soft grey. A grey that stretched for as far as the eye could see. Fat drops breaking against the windshield, the radio turned loud to drown out the sweep-sweep-sweep of the hard-working wipers.

It may have just been a re-run.

But I can’t be sure.

The story that we were listening to followed the same trajectory of so many Dave and Morley tales: an innocuous start, a holiday to be celebrated. Plans that quickly turn into the absurd.

Dave never knowing when to say, enough. Mary Turlington, his long-suffering neighbour, frigid and uptight, ever suckered into giving him a second chance.

Upon being invited to Christmas dinner at the Turlington’s, Dave is so nervous that he eats Mary’s potpourri, thinking that it’s homemade chex mix.

It was at the point that he realized that he was, in fact, eating potpourri, that my mum and I laughed so hard that we had to pull over.

Sitting on the side of the highway, tears streaming from our eyes, my body, palsied. My mother screaming, “Oh noooooooooooooo!”

Her facial expression, equal parts horror and amusement, set me off all over again.

And we sat there, until the conclusion of the story.

I never, ever wanted that moment to end.

This past Christmas, as I lay recuperating from the flu of the century, reeling from cancellation of both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Marc wrapped our bodies in our biggest blanket, and we listened to Stuart’s Christmas stories for hours.

Dave cooks a turkey.

Morley and Dave’s first Christmas.

The year they tried to make it to Sidney, but got trapped in the snowstorm.

The winter pageant.

We listened, and we laughed, and we cried, and we laughed.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

We listened to tales of a family. A family that was both defined by,and shined together under simple truths: laughter, loss, and love.

Always love.

One summer, I was cleaning out our spare room. Deciding what tennis rackets to keep, re-reading my first year essays on Milton and Donne, wondering if I’d ever again wear my wedding shoes, I listened to Stuart.

He was reading from the Vinyl Café story exchange. Listeners would write in, and he and his editor would pick different stories to share at their live tapings.

The story that afternoon was about a young man who had joined a teenage musical theatre troupe in his small town home on Cape Breton Island. The group had worked on a production over the course of the summer. Staging would take place right before they went back to school.

The writer recounted how he immediately took a disliking to one of his fellow cast mates. His rival was everything he was not: good looking and cool, at ease with the women in the troupe, and excellent on stage.

But try as he might, he couldn’t stay angry. He soon realized that, as well as a wonderful actor, his rival made a wonderful friend, and they became very close over the next two months.

On the opening night of the performance, the entire cast found out that the writer’s friend had been killed in a car accident, along with his girlfriend. The performance was cancelled, and the whole town mourned.

I was so caught off guard by the tragic ending that I just melted to the floor.

I wailed.

And then Stuart’s musical guests – Madison Violet – began to play their song “Small of My Heart”, and I felt as though I might never be happy ever again.

Today, it’s one of my most favourite songs.

In grade twelve, I bought my favourite English teacher a copy of Vinyl Café Stories in an attempt to tell her how much she had meant to me – she as an incredibly caring educator to myself, a weird and anxious student, who was really trying to just figure it all out.

One night in our old house, I was cooking Marc and I a tofu stirfry, and we listened to the story where Dave and Morley accidentally destroy a cabin in the Laurentian mountains.

I laughed so hard that I burnt the rice. And then, like always, at the conclusion of the story, I burst into tears.

Because that is the magic of Stuart McLean.

His stories are truth and love and light and death and everything that exists in our hearts and our souls. They are small towns and big cities; they are the chords that we all hear, and they are the cords that bind us together.

That help us realize that heck, we’re not all that different.

And in today’s age, where division and fear and hate are king, Stuart’s passing is a huge loss.

So it must be up to us to carry on his legacy.

To tell our stories. To relish and revel in them.

Because stories are how we know how to live.

How to love.

They teach us every day, how to be.

Today, I say goodbye to my running shoes.

This is very hard.

Since August of 2014 they have been my consummate companions, joining me on every run, race, bike ride, and hike.

And I love them.

I bought them in response to the death my last pair, which, despite an absolutely valiant effort, died a gruesome death the second time around doing Tough Mudder (otherwise known as Tough Mudder II: Tough Mudderer).

However, I didn’t want to buy them. I had just read Born to Run and was a new student to the school of thought that one should never buy new running shoes unless absolutely necessary.

Gone were (and still are) my days of thinking that there is some arbitrary six-month expiration date on shoes. I wanted to wait as long as possible to take the plunge.

So, reluctant as I was to purchase anything new, I started using a pair of Marc’s old shoes instead. They were a little too large and ugly as hell, but I was steadfast in my commitment to make them work. I only threw in the towel on them after completely shredding my right leg on a hike in Hawaii. They had absolutely zero tread, and after a solid two hours of slipping and sliding all over an incredibly treacherous trail, I lost my footing and cut myself badly on an old, rusted water main.

Sitting there in the wilds of the Hawaiian jungle, as Marc and our friends poured water over my wounds, I tried to remember the last time I received a tetanus shot, and patiently waited for the lock jaw to set in.

When I got home I drove to SportChek and bought shoes.

My new Asics were immediately magic. They fit my feet perfectly and took no time to break in.

At first I lamented their muted colour palette, wishing that I could rock the hot pinks and flashy neon so in vogue amongst other runners. But I quickly came to appreciate their simplicity. I often thought this as one of the reasons they were so perfect a bridge between my legs and where my legs ached to go.

For the entire fall of 2014, I woke up at 5:30 am to run the New Westminster waterfront. Greeting the sleepy sun, I would watch as mountainscapes transformed from Mount Doom to Mount Baker and I would marvel at a sky that was both mottled blue and cherry rust.

IMG_20150121_013324 — Mornings, running to the water.

That November, my shoes carried me to my very first race victory when I won the Boundary Bay Half-Marathon. They helped me push through when, after eighteen kilometers of headwinds and incredibly tight hips, everything in my being was telling me that I should just quit and never run ever again. Instead, they allowed my feet to keep propelling me forward, and quieted the negative refrain inside of my head.

That following January, they were there again when I placed fourth in the Chilly Chase Half-Marathon. My Little Sister Melissa came out to cheer me on, and she spent the morning with Marc and his parents, as they chilly-chased me around False Creek and Stanley Park.

download_20150125_113301 — Melissa and I

In April 2015, I completed a long-standing life goal and ran the Hapalua Half-Marathon in Waikiki. My shoes were up with me at 4:30am as I trekked to the start line and nervously prepped for a 6:30am start. They were there as I poured cup after cup of water over my head in an attempt to cool myself against the ever-worsening heat of the day. They were there as the never ending hill between kilometers fourteen and nineteen ate my legs and left me for dead. They were there as I sprinted across the finish line and cried under the comforting shade of a nearby banyan tree.

10439390_10155639535800179_5571865280071216631_n — Hang loose shoes!

They were there when I ran my very first trail race last June and placed third.

11111128_10155870240270179_7364216653780990822_n — Irish Tom and non-Irish me

My shoes have been left at Sunshine Coast cabins and they have stunk up gym lockers. They have run in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park and along the Toronto waterfront. They’ve bounded up steep forested trails and pounded long stretches of unforgiving pavement.

They have dried out over heating grates and in the searing sunshine. They have ground up Grouse Mountain and adventured all around Brooklyn.

This year they ran with me almost every day from January to May, as I trained for what would come to be the hardest thing I have ever done. They carried me 42.2 kilometers in 3:35: from Queen Elizabeth Park, to UBC, to Stanley Park, to downtown Vancouver. They watched as I flew, and as I broke, and as I broke through.

I really did think that I would throw out my shoes after the marathon.

My friend John urged me to get rid of them. A committed distance athlete himself, he was flabbergasted to know that I was refusing to part with them.

I calculated the rough number of kilometers I had completed with my shoes strapped to my feet.

Probably around 4,000 I wrote.

Get new shoes, was his reply.

But I didn’t. I kept running and training and pretending I couldn’t smell them on days when it rained.

Only this weekend, I finally acquiesced.

I ran a fifteen kilometer trail race in an absolute torrential downpour. My shoes, already hanging on by a thread, weren’t coming back from that morning’s trifecta of water, dirt, and no discernible and immediate drying method.

As a last gift to me, my shoes helped me place third in the race. Perhaps cognizant of their imminent demise, they gave me all that they had, one last time.

And I’d like to thank them for this. Thank them for all that they have given me over their almost two-year tenure in my life. For all of the love, grit, determination, happiness, incredulity, strength, and awe.

My next pair have a lot to live up to.

So they better use those 4,000 kilometers wisely.

Tag: Tribute

We do this thing. We open our hearts to the world around us.

A farewell to arms