was, of course, more my fault than anybody else’s) “. . . so maybe this health scare is God’s way of saying, ‘Hey, fat-boy, you should appreciate what you’ve got.’”
And that was the attitude with which I, accompanied by Martin Worthy, my dear friend and a founding member of the musical group Porkbelly Futures, went to attend my consultation with Dr. Frazier on May 11, 2009.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.
“I feel terrific,” I said.
“Great, just great.” Dr. Frazier picked up a file. “Well, we’ve got some answers for you. It’s cancer. It’s lung cancer—”
(“Hold on, hold on!” I wanted to shout. “Didn’t you just hear me tell you I felt terrific?”)
“It’s the non-small cell type of cancer. You have what we call a ‘sessile’ tumour. It’s not what we’d call an operable cancer it’s a you’re a and think in terms of months andjkghghjgkkljhjkghjkghghjghjlshgjhkasjhkjashdjkn . . .”
SO—WHERE DO we go from here? Well, like I said, I had just finished a little memoir about my life in music. That word, “memoir,” suddenly acquired holy heft. The phrase “months to live” fires up all sorts of engines, most of them a little selfish (I’ve got to get laid a lot, I have to eat a forty-dollar Kobe beef hamburger), some of them a little more lofty. Namely, I wanted to write some of this down. So, I had this memoir, and my Publisher had asked for a rewrite, and he really liked the personal stuff, hmmm . . .
“I’ll need a couple of months with that second draft,” I told the Publisher. “I’m just going to add a new thematic concern.”
“Umm . . . sure.”
If I do my job well, this won’t be quite the motley pastiche you might imagine. I’ve become very interested in the process of songwriting. Writing songs is a way to interact with the world, to take it in as experience (employment, job dismissals, hopeful first dates, clumsy hand-jobs, bad whisky, rejected marriage proposals, accepted marriage proposals, bad love, true love, long road trips, and pronouncements of fatal disease) and spit it out in three- to four-minute units of airborne beauty and grace. And at this point in my life—way closer to the end than I thought I’d be at the age of fifty-six—music has acquired more importance than it ever had.
When I was a small child, my favourite recording was something called “The Cigar Box Banjo.” I summarized the story in The Ravine, but assuming you haven’t read that novel—a reasonable assumption—I’m going to do so again here.
A boy makes a banjo out of a cigar box. (How, exactly, I didn’t know at the time, and I won’t detail here. These days, there are blueprints and schematics aplenty available at the click of a key. But it was a long-standing source of frustration for me as a kid that much of what excited me in the realm of fiction was impossible to duplicate in real life. I did get my hands on a cigar box, away back when, but that only made things worse, since I couldn’t see how to attach a neck or strings.)
Anyway: this boy hears of a contest, a banjo-playing contest, taking place in the next town, some ten miles away. Despite the fact that the kid has nothing like a show piece, he decides he will go compete. So (without informing his parents, I remember, simply heading off) he begins to walk the dusty road. As he goes along, the lad hears things—a bluebird’s song, for instance, the whine of truck tires, the lowing of a cow— and he imitates these things on his cigar box banjo, layering one upon another. By the time he reaches the contest site, he has an entire song. He plays this, and he wins.3
I loved that story, and I think it stands as a reasonable template for the creative process.4 As songwriters and novelists and musicians travel through their lives, they collect little themes and motifs and whistles and airs, and they string them together to fashion their wares. This book follows my travels down the musical road, and I intend to commence that forthwith.
1 I actually have nothing more to say about Mr. Lanois at this moment. I just wanted to introduce the notion of footnotes, and I thought his name afforded a good opportunity to get people to glance downwards. Thank you.
2 I learned later the technician was reacting to the fact that when he checked the X-ray, there was only a huge white cloud where the left lung should have appeared.
3 Ira Gershwin wrote in his diary: “Heard in a day: An elevator’s purr, telephone’s ring, telephone’s buzz, a baby’s moans, a shout of delight, a screech from a ‘flat wheel,’ hoarse honks, a hoarse voice, a tinkle, a match scratch on sandpaper, a deep resounding boom of dynamiting in the impending subway, iron hooks on the gutter.”
4 I have one small quibble with the recording: the prize is a brand-new, store-bought banjo, which the kid happily accepts. I pictured him tossing away his jerry-rigged trash with disdain. This has always struck me as a poor choice, story-wise. It would have been much better if the kid had danced with the one that brought him, if you see what I mean—if he’d politely declined the grand prize.
ON MY father’s side of the family, everyone is either a teacher or a musician, except for those hopelessly indecisive sorts—my cousin Doug is an example—who have opted to become music teachers. My great-uncles, my grandfather’s brothers, were all musicians, and that included Rance Quarrington, who was apparently a star of the radio waves, the possessor of wondrously mellow windpipes. (My brother Anthony B. Quarrington—Tony— claims that Rance starred in a movie entitled The Man from Toronto, but I have no evidence to support that. No evidence suggesting he didn’t star in such a film, mind you.)
My grandfather himself had a long succession of careers. He was a travelling salesman for a while, back in the days when that vocation was conducted mostly by rail. He accumulated years and years of bumpy seat-time, and during this period he learned to walk a coin across his knuckles. As a child, I was greatly impressed with this little piece of legerdemain, constantly inveighing the elderly Jewish fellow who was my grandfather to walk a nickel or a quarter back and forth atop his fist. (No, I’m not Jewish, but I’m pretty sure my grandfather was. If you saw a photograph of Joe Quarrington, you would be convinced.) He was also a photographer, and set up shop as a portraitist. This was in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and those times being what they were—every bit as strange as these times—my grandfather attracted many customers who were interested in having their Kirlian auras captured on film. “Please take my portrait,” they would say, “but not before I meditate for a few minutes.” I imagine these people concentrating so hard that their faces coloured and steam shot out of their nostrils, but when my grandfather emerged later from the darkroom, there was never any evidence of Kirlian auras. I like to believe it was because he could not abide their disappointment that my grandfather took to dusting cornstarch onto the negatives before slipping them into the chemical bath. The resulting image showed the subject surrounded by a halo of feathery cloud, the air pregnant with luminous parhelions. Business picked up quite a bit.
I write of these things—the coin-knuckle thimbleriggery and the photographic flummery—because they both, to me, indicate personality traits common to musicians. Let’s say, the willingness to invest thousands of hours toward a small, inconsequential end and the desire to please people. And indeed my grandfather could play many instruments and was a violinist in the no longer extant Ottawa
