Musical Madeleine

A few weeks ago my elder daughter had her sixteenth birthday.

Sweet.

But bittersweet, too.

On that day seven years ago – on her ninth birthday – my mother (her grandmother) died.

This year we did not celebrate her birthday on the proper day. Why? Her youth orchestra was performing a concert. A piano virtuoso from Russia had been flown in. The piece to be played was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4.

“You’re going to like it, Daddy,” she said after emerging from the final rehearsal that morning. I was surprised, for she never hypes any of her performances. Usually, you can’t get even the shadow of a sneak preview.

So as I took my seat in the auditorium and the birthday girl took hers onstage, I was prepared to be transported.

And I was. Within the first few measures – the spectacular sprint of a beginning to the concerto – I was in Montreal, in the early 1960s. I was sitting in my shorts, playing with a red firetruck. I was the lone child in the house, as my older brothers now went to school. On the other side of room, standing at the ironing board, my mother, her coal-black hair swaying a little as she hummed along to Rachmaninoff.

The LP was Romantic Piano Concertos. She did housework to the strains of such pieces as Variations on a Theme by Paganini, as I studied and restudied the album cover on the floor, in my dad’s armchair, on the sofa (or chesterfield, as they called it). Slashing, vertical, black and white photographs of pianists in ecstasy.

The piece ended. My mother came back to herself, smiled at me from across the room, her lipstick scarlet.

I was on my feet, applauding my daughter.

Thank you, Sergei.

Medieval Pole Dance

For those of you who live near or close to the pulsing center of the universe, please be informed that you are cordially invited to a reading/lecture to be given by me in Providence at Books on the Square, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 20.

I will be talking about my new book “The Friar of Carcassonne: Revolt Against the Inquisition in the Last Days of the Cathars.” So far reaction has been fairly postive to this latest histo-excursion of mine; I invite you to visit my website – stephenosheaonline.com – for more information on the book.

Suffice to say that it’s a tale told by a fool for history, full of ephemeral victories and changes of fortunes, peopled by malevolent inquisitors, venomous courtiers, and one very very brave man: Brother Bernard Délicieux.

It ends badly. That’s because it’s a true story.

Today's Reading

"Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York."

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957.

Shock Treatment

Montreal’s left-winger is about to take a slap shot…

No, wait.

I feel a gentle breeze on my face.

Strange.

I open my eyes. Yes, there is a breeze.

Not again! I look out the window from my bed, expecting to see trees bending in the gale.

The darkness of 4 a.m. Nothing but silence, the glow of streetlights.

Streetlights?!

Then I hear it. A gentle whir.

I look up. In the dimness, the blades of an overhead fan turning and turning.

Electricity! For the first time since Sunday.

Thanks for nothing, Irene.

Portrait of a Lady 5

So, Lance Armstronglike, I mount my trusty metallic steed and wheel through the lazy summer heat.

I come to an intersection, a 4-way stop. I am the first vehicle there, the only other candidate is a small red car, with Mass plates, approaching from my right, still twenty feet away from its stop sign.

So I proceed, thinking idly about Eleanor of Aquitaine, for some reason.

Thank god for peripheral vision. And animal reflexes.

The red car guns it, sails through the stop. I slide to a violent halt, fall onto the pavement.

The woman in the car whizzes past, two feet away from me. The window is down. She yells.

“Fuckhead!”

Then drives on.

Oh Karmada!

So Canada is a safe, sorta William-n-Kate kind of place, right? Maybe not.

May:

I’m at a writers’ conference in Toronto. A friend and I decide to go visit a Very Famous Writer in Stratford, Ontario. We take the Gardiner Expressway, an elevated lakeside highway built too long ago to be safe. I tell my friend that I almost died there, when, in my mid-twenties, I was a courier and had a blow-out. Since there are no shoulders to speak of on the roadway, I had to go out for three-second periods to wield the tire iron and then rush back to safety in front of my car as the traffic whizzed past.

It took an hour to change the tire. I drove to my boss’s place (a print shop) and quit, right then and there. I had been terrified.

It’s curious, I say to my friend as we get off the Gardiner and onto the QEW expressway, I almost died here, in the same stretch of road where I was born.

The brown hulk of St. Joseph’s Hospital looms up on our right as we barrel onward.

Your story reminds me of Andre Dubus, my friend says. Dubus was an American writer of renown who was seriously injured when he pulled over to help someone and then was hit by a car. He was a mess, and died a few months afterwards.

We drive along talking about Dubus. We turn north, onto the mega-expressway that separates the city of Toronto from the mega-suburb of Mississauga. For those of you reading this who do not know Toronto, that city has a Brobdingnagian ring road, at one point encompassing up to 24 lanes of high-speed traffic. I’m not kidding. Heading north, we are on one of these beasts.

Blam!

A blow-out. We look at each other.

I slow miserably, and come to a halt in a tiny V-shaped piece of pavement, where two six-lane expressways come together. It is twenty yards long, at most.

We sit in silence. The car is rocked, literally rocked, by blasts of air from the transport-trailers hurtling beside us, less than than three feet away on either side.

I have to get out and see which tire had blown. The way I stopped makes the driver’s side almost flush with the inside lane of one of the expressways. I check the mirror. Not enough time, not enough time… now! I jump out of my seat, slam the door shut and race to the back of the car. A huge truck honks loudly, insistently, foghorn-like, as it whizzes past at 70 mph.

The flat is the right front tire. On the right-hand side, there is a bit more breathing room, perhaps two feet from the roadway, so I get in the back seat on that side and call CAA, telling them I am a member of AAA.

Sure, they say, we’ll have someone over in a sec.

Fifteen minutes pass. We are rocking in the wash of trucks.

Suddenly, a flashing of lights. A towtruck has maneuvered behind us.

A south Asian man approaches. We have a conversation near the trunk of my car.

CAA will take hours to come. For one hundred dollars I will tow you to a garage.

I demur. Say that CAA promised to come.

Okay, he says, you’ll see.

Forty-five more minutes. Whoosh. Whoosh.

Another truck, another south Asian.

For forty dollars I change your tire.

Deal.

The man squats down, takes out the VW key I’ve given him. Then the tire iron. The bolts have been machine tightened. He strains at them, strains.

He loses his balance, staggers back two paces, into the roadway. I grab his sleeve and pull him toward me.

A transport-trailer opens its foghorn and barrels past an instant later.

The man smiles. Then changes the tire.

I give him eighty bucks, then after waiting ten minutes for an opening, gun the car back onto the roadway.

June:

Celsius or Fahrenheit, it is unbelievably hot. I crawl out of Montreal at rush hour. At last the traffic thins, and progress is made toward the international frontier between Quebec and Ontario.

At the town of Rigaud, on the Quebec side, I stop for gas. The wind whips up suddenly, operatically. I look to the west, the direction in which I will be driving.

The sky is gun-metal green, riven with jagged bolts of lightning.

Scary.

I get back on the road, but the wind builds, with gusts buffeting the car. At times I feel as if I’m driving on two wheels.

Ten feet above the roadway, a tree branch flies past. Not a twig, not a few leaves, an entire, mature branch. I see a sign for an exit one kilometer distant.

But then the rain comes. It is so heavy that you cannot distinguish drops. It’s as if someone is dumping out a bucket from the sky. The volume of water is so great that the curtain of white lightning ahead is extinguished.

Ten miles an hour, five… I inch the car toward the promised exit. Cars have pulled over onto the shoulder, but I want to get into a building, where the wind can’t pick me up and toss me away like a rag doll.

The rain relents, then stops. Good news, yes, but the surrounding sky is now black, green… and yellow and white with constant discharges of thunderbolts. The wind screams.

At last I make the exit. Down the ramp and into a parking lot full of rocking vehicles. A Tim Horton’s donut shop.

I put my shoulder into the car door to open it. I step outside. The wind slams the door shut.

I can hear nothing as I bend into the fury and cross the lot. I stagger, almost lose my balance.

At last I am inside… Where is everybody?

At the back of the shop, employees and customers. White-faced. They are as far away as possible from the big picture windows. Someone beckons me to join them.

Later I read that the funnel touched down about three miles away from us. And headed the other way.

July:

It’s late and I have the munchies. On my walk back to my hotel in Ottawa I decide to spring for a slice at Pizza Pizza. It’s about midnight.

As I am pointing to the slice I want, a scream. Yelling.

Something has happened outside.

The clerk and I go out the door.

A junkie chick is wailing, a man with a backpack is squatting. Before the pair, prone on the pavement, a man.

He is bald, in his late twenties. His shirt begins to swell slightly, then it wells out. Blood. Lots of it.

“Stabbed,” the clerk says.

The crouching figures gently presses his hand on the reddening shirt, as if to staunch the flow. Hopeless.

I take a step forward. There is an open wound in his neck, too. The man is soundless.

A cop car, then another. Sirens. More cops, paramedics, ambulance.

One cop tells us not to leave the scene. He herds us, strangely, even closer to the body as the medics whale away at the victim’s chest in an effort to revive him. We all stand together in a blizzard of police misery lights… blue, red, white, yellow, red, blue…

The man dies.

He is strapped on a gurney and wheeled away.

The police question us. The clerk, who is known to the police (there are drunken late-night brawls at Pizza Pizza every now and then), at last convinces Ottawa’s finest that neither of us could be the assailant nor could have seen the assailant. I was ordering a slice at the time of the incident, inside the shop.

Back in my hotel room, sitting on the bed. I look down.

I get up and go into the bathroom to wash the blood off my sneakers.

Portrait of a Lady 4

Early this morning, in this Al Gore of a summer, I was, as usual, cooking up some green eggs and ham on the sidewalk outside my building.

It was hot.

On the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, a woman in shorts and a tank top was walking her dog. It was a small, malevolent thing, a roll of elastic bands covered with hair.

It stopped, squatted and -- kerplooey! -- had a poop.

When it was finished, dog and owner walked on. Then, about a half-block away, they stopped.

The woman extracted a tissue from her pocket, bent down and wiped the dog's rear end. Then she straightened up and threw the tissue to the ground.

They rounded the corner and disappeared.

I think I'll stop cooking on the sidewalk.