The Old and the Young

Sure, when you’re old you will recall the terrors. The waves of panic as you almost drowned. Or your foot, unruly appendage, slipping, leaving you breathless on the cold mountain ledge. Or colliding with a tree branch on a black diamond run at Slippery Slopes. Not to mention the many things you are sorry for doing or saying; that load of regrets that we carry.

But the residue of shock accompanying such ghost recollections will not subvert a mind packed with fragments of old happiness that bubble up like Yellowstone paint pots or laughter from a gilded heart.

The old have done much, seen much. They have loved and if they are lucky still love, if only those who went before.

The old paint, sculpt, sing. They play a mean guitar, a sultry sax. Knock, commandingly, a little dimpled sphere into a tin cup. Hit balls of various sizes and shapes back and forth, back and forth, on courts.

They have experienced life profoundly. Their wins and losses. The great loss that in the end no one escapes. Some write about it. Oh, how the old can write. Often grandparents understand the young better than their parents do. And they have compassion for them. They appreciate their wisdom and understand their dilemmas and fears.

The young are wary of the future. They know about plagues, about climate catastrophes. Some in their vivid imaginations visualize Earth as shaking us off like water drops from a dog after a swim.

They travel the world almost by instinct, subconsciously imitating outliers of ancient tribes who scattered in search of promising new territory. Old habits never die. They just take on different disguises.

I know seven of them. They are all in their twenties. Between them they have logged air miles from Korea to Mexico City, Iceland, Europe and the Emirates, South America, the U.S. and I don’t know where else. Who can keep up?

With gusto they take what the world has to offer and live with the contradiction, as older generations do as well: what they consume makes the world less healthy. The planet aches as it shoulders the burden of us.

What the young need is a common purpose. Greta writ large. Greta’s everywhere.

Left, right, center, politics does not divide the young as it does the older generations. They are too wise for that. They know catastrophes bring people together. And that catastrophes can happen anywhere.

For most of the twenty-somethings getting away from the daily grind is a daydream, as far from their grasp as the spy satellites overhead. For a few there is the endless supply of drugs that enrich corporations and cartels. Drugs drug. They mask pain but cause it too. Euphoria then the collapse of personality.

The threat of nuclear war, the rumblings of extremists, knifings and shooting of innocents, form part of the soundtrack to their lives.

The old recall the U.S. atom bomb tests. For protection against radiation that was expected to come north into Alberta from Nevada we practiced hiding under our desks. It was a strategy we all knew was useless.

The old recall the Cuban missile crisis. On the lip of destruction common sense saved us. Will it again? Common sense is not such a common commodity. I hope the young have more of it than their elders do.

My Texas

Born and bred in Canada, and thankful for it, my roots, which I am also thankful for, go back centuries in the U.S.

One of my most memorable experiences was a family trip to visit the American relatives. My mom organized the tour as a gift to my father’s parents.

Spreading from Boston and New York City, the family colonized the interior with the vigor and persistence of the imported English Sparrow.

Our itinerary included North Dakota, where my grandmother attended university, and Minnesota, where she was born; Iowa to visit my grandfather’s brother; Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas; Colorado and Wyoming. Then Idaho and Montana and north to where we started.

I was sixteen. With my precious, just earned license in my wallet, I shared the driving with my father. The distances were great but as a new driver I found them anything but tedious.

Most of the relatives were elderly, the visiting boring. But in Texas, after endless reminders of home, the immense farms and ranches, the oilfield pump jacks slavishly pushing and pulling sucker rods, I struck teenage gold.

I want to make certain things clear. There are fundamental aspects of the cliched Texan character that do not appeal to me. I am not a fan of rabid political conservatism or country music. Nor am I religious in the Southern Baptist sense.

But this is about what I like, not what displeases me.

At sixteen, I was a car freak and hyper aware of girls. So a ride in my cousin’s shiny yellow, chopped and channeled ’32 Ford coup, top down in the warm evening, produced a cache of memories that has lasted a lifetime.

I can almost feel the thrilling acceleration and drag strip speed reached on a highway from Fort Worth into Dallas, my left arm around Dan’s sixteen year old, extremely alluring sister who was squeezed between us on the narrow bench seat.

Jill’s dress was yellow, a shade lighter than the car to both match it and be distinct from it. With the air whipping past and the exhaust rumbling, the rod was not designed for chatting. (Did I say that at sixteen I was hyper-aware of girls? And, really, she was a second cousin, not a first.)

Dan dropped Jill and I off at a Tex-Mex restaurant. As we stepped from the vicious rogue masterpiece we were the coolest couple in Dallas.

Sitting face to face in the restaurant, sparks of attraction flying from my eyes to hers and from her eyes to mine, we forgot to be cool.

We giggled joyously at each other’s accent. That released some of our excitement and we settled in to talk spiritedly over the hottest, most punishing food I had ever eaten. (But I ate it. What the heck, I was enchanted. Would have walked through fire to prove my fearlessness.)

Oh, young love. So innocent yet fraught with adult fervor.

We knew we were fated never to see each other again so we compressed what became a life-long captivation into a burst of acutely lived moments.

Catching each other’s eye, holding the gaze a few beats longer than normal - a glance that could have told our parents everything - we talked about sixteen year old’s stuff. I don’t remember what. But our words expressed just one important thing: that with our swollen emotions and heightened awareness we were completely alive and enfolded in the moment.

Dan came for us. Reluctantly we left the table that had become our nest.

We drove back to Fort Worth, taking the highway through the dark green belt sedately. Under the sky’s narcotic rapture of stars, I sat beside her, my left arm in front of me but our shoulders and upper arms pressed together more tightly, more erotically, than the car’s dimensions made strictly necessary.

And that was it.

With Jill, her longish hair, comely face and teenage vivacity, with a hot rod of the kind I had only ever seen in car magazines, with insanely spiced food, even just the coddling summer air, how could I not still be in love with my Texas?

A poet is a tightrope walker in the circus of ideas

Bob Hogg

The literary world has lost an icon. Poet, teacher and friend to so many, Robert Hogg has died. We met over fifty years ago. I see us in our first conversation. We leaned on his car or mine: his a green Volvo, mine the same make, model and year but red. He was new to Carleton, just up from Buffalo. He soon had a clan in Ottawa. Fellow poets and students. We had great parties after readings by poets he brought in. Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, The Four Horsemen, from Toronto, among others. The party for Creeley was held at my place and went on far into the wee hours. With his grad students, his wife, Leslie, and mine, Laura, we had memorable nights of poker and refreshments. He was instrumental in having Coach House accept my first book. I owe him much but mostly I'm indebted to him for friendship that lasted until he died. Thanks, Bob.