"Then the dream ends..."

I grew up in a border town.  Essex, Ontario.  “The Hub Of The County”.  A shrinking, and greying spot, the majority of which is populated by past, present, and future workers of Windsor's auto industry looking for a cheaper place to sleep between commutes.  Shiny new homes piggy backing the last variation of shiny new homes, while those not as well off settle for what is deemed disposable.  You work your five days.  You say yes to overtime.  Friday is for pizza and a movie watched on your pirate satellite dish, and the latest oversized television your credit card will cover.  Saturday is for shopping in Windsor or Michigan.  Sunday is for football, NASCAR, barbecues, pool parties, or hey, maybe even more shopping, pizza, and movies?  On any Monday morning if you take yourself for a walk downtown while also ignoring the people on the roads sitting in their cars, you might ask, “Where is everyone?”  Scratch that.  Take a walk.  Day, afternoon, or night of any day of the week and witness the same thing.  While you’re out walking, say “Hello” to those too young to drive, or too financially stressed to own a car, because other than the occasional jogger, that is who you will see on the streets.  Then bypass the businesses the town does offer, because you don’t shop in town at the Foodland, or the No Frills for groceries.  You drive twenty kilometres into the city, where the “…selection is better…”, and the “…prices are cheaper…”, even when that isn’t the case.  You don’t live in Essex.  You park yourself there. 

Geographically, the map says Canada.  It's a suggestive line.  Within the parameters of that line there are guards and police on both sides enforcing the laws of their respective countries.  There are the contrasting accents, skin tones, currencies.  Two very different countries, both overtly proud of their identity, yet somehow oddly similar when you compare the county to what exists across that suggestive line.  As you enter "the county" the Detroit skyline will in fact grow on the horizon the further west you go.  The road signs could easily read, "Essex County, the gateway to America."  So, where does "Canada" start?  I can't even pretend to know, yet somehow I feel absolutely sure it is nowhere near Essex, where you’re trapped in a border corner, and the 401 is what you’ll drive to lead you deeper into “identity” and it’s various northern veins.  If you head west, your only option is America, better known as “The States”.  That is where you will shop when you’re bored with Canadian selection.  “The States” will mostly just sell the same products you can find in Canada, but with the slightest variations, and fantastic prices on goods produced in the Third World.  (ie. “Look what I bought in the States.  They don’t have that over here.”  Or, a very popular choice, “Guess how much I paid for this in The States?  Seriously, guess?” )  

In Essex, you probably won’t watch the CBC, and if you do “Coaches Corner” is most likely your largest dose of Canadiana.  You’ll watch the Detroit television stations, and the Detroit news broadcasts almost exclusively.  You’ll more than likely only listen to the Detroit radio, where you’ll notice Country Music popping up all over the dial.  The Canadian stations you DO listen too will bury any Canadian music that hasn’t been accepted by an American audience in a six hour block starting at 12:00AM Monday morning as the station loopholes their way into a CanCon quota.  

This is how my memory has painted where I grew up.  When I do make the trip home, it seems the gradual Americanization has intensified.  A city and county largely populated by CAW members has given more, and more votes to the Conservative Party in a place that was largely a Liberal/NDP stronghold for decades.  Even when employment, benefits, and opportunity were demolished after the auto bailouts in 2008, the map continued to take on a blueish hue.  With the exception of the city of Windsor, which has a growing minority population, the rest of the map remains that colour.  The unemployment rate is STILL one of the country’s highest.  Then, a couple of years ago, I started noticing talk of “…the Muslims.”  So, it's underway.  The invisible line has oozed further east under the river while everyone was out searching for the best deals, and the largest screens.

And so, I THINK I might be Canadian.

I’m going to assume the Tragically Hip were already starting to tuck themselves into the Canadian conscience well before I knew of them.  However, it was 1992 in Essex, so I have no way of knowing.  My conscience was almost exclusively made up by video games, music, and sports that were largely provided by America.  Consider this, I am Canadian, and back home I did not hear April Wine on the radio.  No Chilliwack, zero Lighthouse, not a lick of Triumph.  Then I hopped in a car and moved 280 kilometres away.  That was enough to direct me into a different country, the one I now associate as “Canada”.  All of the above was common knowledge in Guelph.  The Hip were a big deal here, and April Wine, Chilliwack, Lighthouse, and Triumph had already attained “punchline status” amongst the musically inclined.  So, in 1992, when I bought “Fully Completely”, I bought it because Much Music played better music than the radio.  I bought it because the band with the weird singer from the “Little Bones” video just put out a new video called, “Locked In The Trunk Of A Car”, and to my 14 year old ears, it was deemed worthy of the $15 investment.  I didn’t buy it because I heard it on the Canadian radio.

Then, I bought “Up To Here” from the bargain bin at The Bay.  “Road Apples” from Music World.  Again, not because I heard it on the radio.  I feel like it was during summer vacation when I saw them perform on Much Music shortly before “Day For Night” came out.  They played “Nautical Disaster”.  It wasn’t on any of the albums I owned, and I loved it, so of course I needed it immediately.  “Grace, Too” and it’s monumentally uneventful video was released, and I needed no more convincing that I was going to have to spend more of my rare teenage dollars on a new album.  THAT’S when I heard them on the radio.  88.7 FM in Windsor played “Grace, Too”.  A band some might consider the most “Canadian” band of all time appeared on Windsor radio ten years, and five releases into their career.  Then they would disappear again until “Ahead By A Century”, followed by sparse playings of “Gift Shop”, even sparser appearances by “Poets” until I can only remember Our Lady Peace, Sum-41, and foggy disinterest.  In 2002, I moved to Guelph, where the Windsor radio turned itself inside out.  CanCon was played all the time, and while that wasn’t always a great thing, it was a new thing.  I started to feel a little more “Canadian”…I think.  

Shortly before that, The Hip faded from interest, and it was largely because Gord Downie's own albums were so damn good.  In 2001, he released “Coke Machine Glow”, his first solo project.  I loved it.  I clung to it while the world spun around me in too many ways.  It’s one of those “important albums” people talk about.  To this day, it means a lot to me, and literally “…got me through some tough times.”  I saw Gord solo twice.  The Hip?  Zero.  His second album, “Battle Of The Nudes” was released, I bought it, and then I bought less, and less music period, and The Hip and Gord lived in my periphery until the sucker punch.

When it was revealed Gord Downie was terminally ill, I didn’t talk about it.  Not with my partner.  Not with friends.  Not a word on social media.  Not even on my radio show, two hours in which I am always looking for something to fill some time with. Why?  Maybe my on-air David Bowie blubbering deterred me from speaking about Gord.  I was embarrassed that I allowed myself to do such a thing, and I also didn’t quite understand where my grief was coming from.  Bowie wasn’t an idol for me.  He was an artist who made music I enjoyed, some music I loved, but never someone I would expect to break down about.  I don’t allow myself to show such emotion because it has to mean that somebody else is winning.

Then Saturday happened, and I forced myself to watch the last Tragically Hip show at the venue Silence.  Forced.  I promise that is not too strong a word.  I didn’t want to.  I wanted to stay home, and pretend it wasn’t happening.  I could easily read about it the next day.  Avoidance is very easy.  I’m into easy.  

Instead, I did something I wasn’t expecting to do.  I made myself go.  My pre-show mood read as, “Alright, let’s get this over with.”  I passed hundreds of people in front of city hall waiting to watch the last show, and genuinely tried not to notice.  I entered Silence aiming to quickly disappear and immediately started drinking.  I found a dark place against the wall, and there I waited by myself.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone.  I just wanted to rip off the band-aid.  

Then it started.  Both the show, and my resistance.  Five guys getting ready to do something in front of millions of people for the last time, not because they chose to, but because almost everything in life is determined by the dice roll of cellular development.  A man who was once sure, present, and in command on stage glancing at a teleprompter because the powerful words his brain created, committed to memory, and then misplaced were no longer a part of his person.  The head nods of “now” from Paul.  The occasional misty eyed looks into the distance from four guys who were once kids behind a giant, and who where now learning the hard way what it means to be four adults behind a man.  All this was going through my head for the first couple of songs.  I wasn’t even paying attention to the music, or singing along.  It was just ten solid minutes of considering the awful.  

“…I remember every single f@#king thing I know.”  Except he didn’t, and that was a hard thing for myself to witness. 

Grace, Too.

Before I get to “Grace, Too”, and everything that was it’s desperate end there is this.  First, Gord Downie physically resembles my grandfather.  A grandfather who I was especially fond of, and who I unfortunately didn't spend a great deal of time with in my younger years.  That’s part one of why it was tough.  Second, Gord Downie moves like my Mother.  I know that seems like a weird thing to say, but he does, and after thousands of dollars in therapy, I do believe that’s what they call a “trigger”.  In fact, I now realize that the main reason I have never really been receptive to Gord’s on stage antics is because they remind me of a person that I was once very scared of.  So yes, Gord Downie moves like my Mother.  When I say “…that weird singer from the ‘Little Bones’ video”, what I’m really saying is “that crazy guy”, and I am almost always wary of “the crazy guy”.  My Mother was “crazy”.  Not in a, “Martin, you so craz-ay” kind of way.  In a diagnosed but untreated schizophrenic way. 

Untreated.  That’s another story.

A summary of living life with an untreated schizophrenic during your formative years?  Almost always unpredictable behaviour that is sometimes violent and terrifyingly threatening, and at best, almost always anxiety inducing.  My Mother died fourteen years ago.  I still trust almost no one.

Then one day, she started screaming.  

Not an “Ow, I stubbed my toe” scream, but a throat wrenching call for help that could never quite be satisfied.  Near the end of her life when her physical deterioration gained speed, she took to intermittent screaming for no discernible reason.  I remember exactly when it happened for the first time.  It was startling, and I was frightened, assuming she was in some sort of distress.  Then silence.  There was never an answer provided to the question, "Are you alright?"  I remember the first scream.  After that, I tried to forget.  One night, the screaming didn’t sound like the thousand other screams, and I ran upstairs to find my Mother at the kitchen table with her hands covered in blood, and her face turned towards the wall.  “Go away!”  She was guarding the large quantity of blood that covered her mouth and chin that she was forced to cough out of her lungs.  Eventually, her screams started to become sleep, and I fled.  I moved to Canada.

Two months later I came home for Christmas.  My Mother stayed in bed the entire day, only to get up to have her coffee and cigarettes, and whatever overcooked food her three teeth allowed her to swallow.  On the day I was to return to Guelph, she got out of bed to wave goodbye to me through the front door, and I sat in the passenger seat of my friends car embarrassed.  That was my mom.  I had no explanations for her.  I felt like I needed one because I was frightened of her even when she was trying to show that she cared, which at that time for her, was far from easy.  Heart disease had weakened her circulation, and her blood had started to settle in the tautness of her purple feet, which caused her great pain when she walked.  She had difficulty breathing if she wasn’t bent over with her face downward.  She walked from the back of the house to say goodbye, and I rode away wishing it had never happened. The next time I saw her, she was a piece of a bed operated by tubes and wires.

…then, “Grace, Too” happened.  Gord’s face broke.  Gord screamed.  Gord dropped his mic, hugged himself, and then cried.  That’s when the door opened and the lights turned on in the ugliest room of memory.  Ghosts made themselves at home.  Until Gord screamed, I forgot.  I forgot about my Mother’s screaming.   The screaming that stalled my life for two unpleasant years.  I was fifty pounds heavier than I am now.  My blood pressure was “…too high…” for my age.  I didn’t sleep.  I laid in bed with my eyes closed for shifts, shifts that added up to about three to four hours a night.  I had an eye twitch.  I was able to focus on nothing.  When I look back at that time, I don’t even recognize it as something that happened to me.  I took that person, and I parcelled him with the screams that line the shelves with the other things I have chosen to forget.  I fictionalized my Mother.  She was safer that way.

When Gord screamed, I remembered a person who changed only when they were too weak to fight.  Who showed love, and humour, and conscience. I don’t know if schizophrenia dies before it’s container, but during my Mother’s last few months her screaming became minimal until all that remained was the person I remembered from my childhood.  The person who I had never even considered attaching fear to.  In the hospital she often communicated by writing on a notepad because speaking was too difficult.  On the day they removed her respirator, she wrote on a piece of paper, “Love each other.”  That was the last day she was conscious.

It’s Wednesday.  Gord’s scream, it’s still here.  If I were to choose to allow myself to do such a thing, I could instantly start crying.  It would be that simple.  I would allow myself to lose.

Gord is non-fiction and terrifying, and it’s important I choose to learn this story.  That was a real person screaming and crying, and just like my Mother, he is trapped in a failing vessel he will have to pilot no matter where it steers.

I am Canadian.  I still don't know what that means, or if I have any sort of pride about it.  I do know this.  If I were a product of a different geographical placement, Saturday could easily have been shopping, and pizza. Instead, I forced myself to be part of something real, inside invisible lines with people not speaking, but instead experiencing and most definitely feeling.  Silence.  Up until “Grace, Too”, that’s something I did not do in front of people I did not trust.

Screaming is the sound of humanity that can no longer hide.

Thank you Gord.  I love you.  You can sleep now.

Love each other.