Why I Became a Writer
(A Piece of the Puzzle)
When my two younger brothers and I were children, the words "Blind River" were as magically evocative to us as "Shangri-la."
A tiny town in northern Ontario, Blind River was where our maternal grandparents, in a rustic lakeside community populated entirely by co-faculty at the Ohio college where they taught, spent their summers. And where my brothers and I experienced summer idylls whose very infrequency (sometimes two years between visits, a child eon) only burnished their magical aura.
Begin with the lake. A miles-long, meandering expanse, unseeable in its entirety, ringed by immense granite birch-and-pine-fringed boulders, worn smooth by wind and time. Dotted with cabins, some along the reedy, near-beachless shore, some precariously perched above flights of impossibly rickety rough-hewn steps. And all of them built of logs, heated by stone fireplaces and wood stoves, and proudly scornful of such new-fangled conveniences as telephones or electricity.
So all intercourse between residents—and here the magic truly begins—was conducted by boat. Specifically, rowboats with dinky little outboard motors that—when not anchored in search of perch or trolling for pike—were puttering across the lake to the community dock to get the mail, or, picnic basket astern, to a friend's cabin for a pot-luck dinner. And the sunny patches of those granite hills were dotted with wild blueberries, so tiny it took an age for my brothers and I to pick a pie's worth. Which (along with ambrosial wild blueberry pancakes) our grandmother seemed delighted to make for us (even on a finicky wood stove that, we learned years later, she had secretly detested). And those reeds along the shore were rife with fat, leopard-spotted frogs, which—imprisoned in sandcastles or similarly restrained aboard driftwood pirate ships—became the unhappy protagonists of our play scenarios.
But Blind River's deepest magic abided in two activities.
The first was the gathering, every Sunday evening, of the entire community. Some came by boat, but most by the footpath that encircled the lake (with flashlights in tow for the journey home). Assembled in a log building atop a huge treeless boulder that emerged from the lake like a blue whale's back, and which contained a lending library of random, tattered volumes, a ping pong table, an ancient, seldom-played pump organ, and an assortment of rude wooden benches, upon which perched a jean-and-corduroy-clad throng perhaps a hundred strong. And the meeting—following the public airing of important, if sometimes whimsical announcements ("Our dog Daisy had six puppies!”)—concluded with something called a "community sing."
The selections were all from a battered turn-of-the-20th-century songbook, full of obscure, once-traditional rounds ("Little Tommy Tinker," "White Coral Bells"), and in the improvised program, cobbled together on the spot, one sensed decades of evolved tradition. Certain things were de rigeur: leaping to one's feet, in "Little Tommy Tinker" while crying out "Oh Ma! Oh Ma!," and quietly marching in place during "My Grandfather's Clock" (without which no evening was complete) to the rhythmic chanting of "Tick tock, tick tock." And the plaintive strains of the invariable final song—
"Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh;
Shadows of the evening steal across the sky..."
—lent the whole secular ritual a hushed and sacred overtone.
But the most glorious of Blind River experiences (for me and my brothers) took place not once a week but every evening, when our grandmother read to us. My brothers and I gathered before the fire, Grandma holding some old yellowed tome in the circle of light cast by a kerosene lantern, Grandpa reclining in an easy chair with his own book (and pretending not to listen) as she read aloud. As books are meant to be read aloud: acting all the parts, pacing her delivery, making the story come magically alive.
Were my brothers and I even aware that what our grandmother taught at that small Ohio college was speech and drama? An awe-inspiring painting of Grandpa dressed as Falstaff (our mother's senior art project at that same college) dominated their living room at home, so we were vaguely aware he'd done some acting, and directed the college plays. But Grandma's penchant for dropping Shakespearean couplets into casual conversation we considered only interestingly eccentric, and we accepted her ability to recite long epoch poems like “Enoch Arden" and "Evangeline" by memory with equally childish equanimity; only later did we learn she had won speech competitions at summer Chautauqua's as a teenager, and been a celebrated Rosalind in college.
What did she read to us? When I was eight (and my brothers even younger), Grandma condescended to apply her rhetorical skills to one of the lending library's tattered volumes, and I can still recall how she savored the name of a tribe in "Tarzan and the Ant Men" (one of Edgar Rice Burroughs's more fevered inventions), the "Veltopismakusians." But as our ages increased, so did the quality of the fare Grandma selected for us. And entire summers were later devoted to readings of "Huckleberry Finn," "The Yearling," and "Ivanhoe."
All of these offered ample opportunity for Grandma to display her facility with accent and dialect. They provided as well a release from her extreme prudery, result of a severely Victorian upbringing (many years later one of my brothers found his Christmas gift to her of "The Color Purple" elicited not a "Thank You" card, but a scorching missive about the “filth” he'd forced her to read). But certified Great Authors like Twain and Walter Scott could do no wrong in Grandma's eyes. And though she must have pruned the more suggestive parts of "Ivanhoe" (many scenes of which—I was later nonplussed to learn—revolved around threats of rape) for our tender ears, she clearly enjoyed, in "The Yearling," impersonating a clutch of moonshine-addled hillbillies. And I'll never forget the scene where those two con-artists in
"Huckleberry Finn," the King and the Duke, lure the credulous menfolk of a small river town to a tent show with a poster disallowing the attendance of women and children—and with what relish our prudish grandmother declaimed the immortal line, “and the next minute the king come a-prancing out on all fours, naked… “
Who can possibly disentangle the disparate stands of childhood experience that are braided together to form an adult human being? And yet I’m certain those magical summers were founts of not just mundane nostalgia, but the very essences of my brothers and myself. For all three of us are accomplished musicians, all three voracious readers, and I for one can't help but find a source of my intense love of multiple simultaneous melodies (which goes by the name "counterpoint, and fueled my learning Bach's "Goldberg Variations") in those wonderful rounds.
And I know that I owe something of my late reinvention as a writer to the vividness of our grandmother's storytelling.
PD Quaver