Editor:
I am sure many, many Canadians, including, of course, Coasters, reacted as I have to Stuart McLean’s death. Because his imaginings, his distinctive voice, his essential goodness suffused Canadian life for so long, it is as if some benign, life-enhancing force of nature has stopped working. Millions who never met him can feel they have lost a very dear friend.
Here is a tribute in the form of a family memory. Knowing that the Vinyl Café show was to appear in Maple Ridge in a few weeks’ time, I bought tickets for my wife Barbara and me and our grandson Liam who was about 10 at the time. I then wrote to Stuart McLean to tell him how our grandson and I both listened to his Saturday morning radio broadcasts in our separate residences (his in Roberts Creek, ours in either North Van or beside Lillooet Lake), how we both loved his stories, how we bonded through sharing appreciations of/delight in them when we got together. When Liam (now graduated from Elphinstone Secondary two years ago) visited us at our cabin on Lake Lillooet, he would join me for my Saturday morning excursions into Pemberton for the weekend papers and liquor store offerings, among other things (“the news and the booze,” as a dear neighbour termed such runs). Because the cabin would not receive the CBC radio signal, I/we had to time things so we got to the paved road at the head of the lake just as Vinyl Café was beginning and reception was good. These were special occasions, of course, because grandson and papa could share laughs and responses in real time.
I mentioned in my note to McLean that I would be driving especially carefully from our home in North Vancouver to the Maple Ridge show, because we would have the grandson along as precious “cargo.”
The one specific McLean story I mentioned is the one in which Dave and Morley impulsively take themselves to skate on the wintry canals of Holland. The story has a sentimental, but nevertheless touching, conclusion in which Morley on one end of a ball of yarn and Dave on the other becomes a metaphor of two people going through life together, separately and yet bound together. I told him I would read Barbara the story once again in a few days as a now regular part of marking our anniversary.
So here’s the thing. Sitting in the Maple Ridge audience that evening, savouring the delight of all three of us seeing our “hero” in the flesh, we hear Stuart McLean mentioning a letter he recently received and would like to read out. As he began to read, I listened with no heightened attention until Barbara elbowed me in the ribs and said, “That is your letter about you and grandson.” After reading the letter (omitting some flattering words about his writing), he asked if the papa and grandson team would stand up and identify themselves. Now, on the way to Maple Ridge, I had been whingeing about how my recurrent back pain was acting up so that I was hoping I could sit quietly for as long as necessary. But, hearing that mellifluous voice, I instantly stood up, scooped up dear grandson and held him aloft as if he were the Stanley Cup and we had just won game 7. People applauded, someone took a sequence of photos which McLean later very kindly sent us back in the city, and an audience member nearby identified herself as a school teacher from the Sunshine Coast who asked which school grandson attended (Roberts Creek). We would love to hear from that woman now we live here in Sechelt.
Stuart McLean wished Barbara and me happy anniversary, and invited the lad of the moment to come up after the performance to choose either a CD of the piano music played by one of the evening’s featured musicians or a Vinyl Café T-shirt. In the event, the youngie chose the CD, and papa bought us each a T-shirt, mine being still around here somewhere, Liam’s long outgrown.
For us, as for so many, loss of this wonderful Canadian treasure is sorrowful, indeed. Samuel Johnson contended that “the only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or to endure it.” Stuart McLean will be doing both kinds of “enabling” as long as his stories are accessible.
David Evans, Sechelt
