The Filly

           

    They owned a small farm five miles up the river from the smelter. Just  a little place, five acres, nothing like the fox farm they’d owned in the Yukon, on Lake Kluane, nor the family farms in Ontario and Manitoba, and very small compared to his older brother’s ranch in Montana. But it was a farm, with a cow and a pony and room to grow food, enough to keep themselves fed and some left over to sell. They sold butter and eggs to the head man at the  smelter.

     Walter Skinner had carpenter’s skills, and because their land lay by the river, with a nice little bay where the river curled in and made a gentle circle, he would catch logs as they came down in the spring, with the high water melted from the snows in all the mountains from the Monashees to the west slope of the Rockies. He had a long pike pole, like the loggers, and he could hook the logs as they came in with the eddy, then drive a steel eye into the end of each log and rope it to the bank. When he had enough of a boom he would crank up the telephone and call the mill. They sent up a tug and brought the logs down to be used to shore up the river bank below the smelter and the houses of the town.

     One year the snow pack in the mountains was so deep that the run off brought down the ferry from Robson. The ferry turned  round and round in the eddy and finally came in close enough to the bank so he could jump on board with his rope. He got on the phone again and this time the tug came from upriver.

     They hadn’t been long on the five acres, just three or four years since the government ruined their fur farm in the Yukon by deciding that because of the war, and possible food shortages, it was no longer legal to use the big lake trout to feed foxes. No soldiers or civil servants ever showed up to fish the lake, and not one of the trout was ever sent to France or even the poor of Toronto. Nor did the Skinners get much money when they sold their place, because it could no longer be used as a fox farm. All their work could only buy them the little place on the Columbia, near a smelter that was killing everything green for miles around. But this was in mining country, and Walter, from his days in the Yukon, also knew about mines.

     Walter and Emilia had adopted two small children, a boy and a girl, young relatives, after their parents died, one from the influenza epidemic that came at the end of the war, the other from pneumonia after falling in a creek in Washington State. The children had been born in the Yukon, but the mother had come from Washington State and the father from Montana. The children were still small when the parents came back to Washington, near the  Coast, where the mother’s family owned a sawmill. The children’s grandfather had been Walter’s older brother, come out from Ontario and married in Montana, and he was killed when he got on a horse drunk and had the saddle horn driven into his chest.

    Because the smoke from the smelter poisoned the grass in the Skinner’s field, the pony died. The little boy saw it happen, watching the little horse stumble around in ever tightening circles until it fell over and lay still.

      Walter was a peaceful man and he kept a Bible by his bedside. There were stories of dancing shoes and fast horses when he was young, and they had  discovered natural gas under the fields of the farm in Ontario, but all that was long gone by the time he was settled on the river with the eddy that caught logs and the ferry in the high water of  the snow melt. Walter read his bible, and prayed, and forgave the government for ruining the fox farm. But when the pony died he decided he was not going to forgive the smelter until it gave him compensation. The Bible was very clear about what was owed from harm to a neighbour’s livestock.

    Walter went to town, riding with a neighbour because he had no pony to pull his own buggy, and walked straight into the head man’s office, where he usually delivered the butter and the eggs.

    The head man looked up from his desk. “Good morning, Walter. Good to see you. What can I do for you?”

    “Selwyn, the smoke from your smelter is poisoning the grass in my field. It’s killed my pony. The  boy saw him die. The pony walked around in a circle until he fell over.” Walter never used a lot of words to make a point.

    The head man nodded and tore a piece of paper from his note pad. He had met the boy once, when he came with his father and the butter and eggs. “Well, Walter, I’m not admitting anything. I don’t want to discuss it. But I can tell you that there’s three dozen horses just come in on the train from Alberta. They’ll be taking them out of the stock cars right now, down at the station.” He was writing on the piece of paper as he spoke. “You give this to the foreman. It’s telling him that you are to have any of those horses that you want. He’ll give it to you.” He handed Walter the piece of paper.

    Walter went down to the station. He saw the horses, being haltered and led one by one out of the stock cars, and then tied up at the long rail in front of the station. They were all in good shape, strong and healthy, any one of them more than due compensation for the dead pony. His eyes lighted on a handful of sound prospects. He knew horses. He came from farming stock, that had always known horses. But then he noticed the filly, because she was not only a lean and pretty horse, but she was young, a bit skittish, giving some trouble to the lad bringing her down the ramp from the stock car. Chestnut brown, like the chestnuts on the farm back in Ontario, along the Erie shore, and she brought memories of the better life there, the life before he got adventurous over the gold fields and the mines out west. She was a beautiful horse, perhaps not best suited to the plow and general work about the farm, but still strong enough for the work on their little place and she’d look lovely between the shafts of the buggy when Emilia drove into town. Emilia had known dignity, back in Ontario and Manitoba, raised on a big farm, trained as a milliner, and good on a horse. The pony hadn’t been much for her to ride, although he’d been good for the children. He told the foreman he’d take the filly, and he rode her home, bareback, remembering his life in Ontario.

    The filly did her work, and was steady enough with the children on her back now and again, and Emilia agreed that she was a pretty horse and looked forward to the day there was a real excuse to hitch her to the buggy and drive into town. Emilia was not the sort of woman to dress up and get out on the road with a new horse just to show her off for no good reason. But when the day came, she put on her best hat for the ride, although she also really did need things for the kitchen they could not grow, and they had been told there was a parcel for them at the station.

    When they arrived, the train was there again, but this time the workmen were off-loading big planks from a flat car. The work was going on near the place were people parked their buggies or trucks or cars, and there was no where else to stand the buggy, so he pulled over to the edge of the slope created by the build up of the rail bed and gave the reins to Emilia while he went into the station for the parcel.

    He was just coming out of the building when he heard the racket. One of the workmen had dropped his end of the heavy plank. There was a loud crack as the plank landed on the pile, and the horse bolted, leaping so hard and fast down the slope that the buggy rolled. Emilia was thrown out, landing at the heels of the frightened mare. Her face caught the edge of a horse shoe, and after she rolled clear of the buggy she lay still on the ground as the horse kept moving, slowed down now by the drag of a buggy on its side, but the buggy had missed  Emilia. The men were yelling, chasing and catching the filly, and a couple of women standing outside the station were screaming.

    Walter ran to his wife. She lay face down and did not move. He thought she was dead and he had to accept that his folly over the chestnut mare had killed her. He rolled her over, his heart quite broken, his mind full of all the places they had struggled through in their life in the West,  wondering how  to tell the children, and praying for forgiveness for his foolish choice. There was a cut on her left cheek, right above the bone, and he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe away the blood.

    But just as the women reached them, Emilia opened her eyes. “Walter?”

She moved and started  to sit up.

     “Oh, thank God! You’re alive, Emmy! I thought I’d killed you.”

     She too had been raised on the farm and knew horses. “So did I. But you didn’t quite. But it was my fault too. I knew I should have made you take her back.” She moved so as to feel for broken bones, and poked herself here and there. “I’m all right. It helped to land in the dirt. Where’s my hat? It was my fault as much as yours, Walter. She was so much like home. But I knew I should have made you take her back.”

     And that is what Walter did. He took the filly to the horse barns and exchanged her for a nice safe plug that served them without incident till they sold him and moved to the Coast.

   

   

    

           

                           

Essay June 1957

    I am not normally inclined to write essays. I was never fluent at the art as a student, and I do not strive to become fluent as an adult. I could never be Alexander Woolcott. But occasionally an author realizes that a more poetically framed piece of information misses its target. How many times has a playwrite, aiming an attack at a certain kind of mother-in-law, risen in disgust as an elderly matron fails to realize the import of his work? I refuse to take the chance, for I find I am becoming too often pushed into a classification in which, I have no wish to fit.
    Recently - perhaps I am more sensitive now than before, but I doubt it - I have been accused of wanting to "dominate" my girlfriend. The accusation has been made by that girlfriend, by a friend of hers, and by other woman I have known. Have I not heard, they as, of the age of equality? Do I not know that women have the vote, are working as hard as men, in men's jobs, and, in fact in Russia that a woman has every right a man could have? These are not all the questions. There are others. But summed up they imply that I rate, in my attitude to women, somewhere between Brigham Young and a White Slaver.
    Now, I bristle at this. I was brought up in the sort of home where it was often left to me to do the housework, cooking, baby-watching, and so on; and I became quite versatile in performing most of the chores to which the modern housewife is subjected. I do not brag, but state a fact. I am a damned good housekeeper. Only my natural good manners prevent me from outdoing woman at their own game. With this knowledge of housewife arts has come a sympathy for their lot. You see? Already I am sympathetic towards women. And yet I am still accused of wanting to dominate.
    Ah, you reply, if you are a woman, K.B. is only trying to prove his superiority. This is just Bulls....!

Two Meditations April 1975

   Meditation One
    In the past few years, in this area as in many others, there has been much discussion and practice of a form of spiritual activity known as transcendental meditation. There has also been much attempt at the practice of charismatic renewal, and also a good deal of controversy; this too has occurred in this locality as well as many others.
    As those who have come to wisdom understand, the world that tried to interfere along the way has a perverted version of every real virtue, of every true sentiment or passion. The world, of course, is not alone in this distortion; the flesh and the devil outdo themselves keeping it company. Thus it is no easy task to come to a pure and perfect comprehension of each virtue and of each good feeling and some habits, because of this inimical distortion, though they might seem good on the first inspiration, we are tempted to put away from us unless we are fully and confidently instructed as to their worth.


Meditation Two
    My friend said something to me last night about the writings on purgatory of a certain St Catherine. I was too tired then, it being late, to ponder much on purgatory, but as I have been going through certain memories, sometimes with joy, sometimes with much agony of spirit, the force of what she said stayed with me until it connected up with some previous discoveries I had made about purgatory, that it was a state in which we behold, with something of God's vision, the effect of our sins of omission and negligence.
    John of the Cross tells us that an hour of purgation here is worth many in the actual state of purgatory. Such an hour - or hours, for they have come to me usually as a series of lessons rather than one or two - are therefore a great blessing, not only because they cut short or eliminate (in the case of some) the sentence of the real purgatory, but because they present to us the possibilities of the state of beatitude and perfection that can become ours.
    There is no question of their agony and humiliation. Within one of these times we see ourself as nothing more than an ungrateful wretch, abusive of the choices of God's graces, outrageously ignorant, and constantly tottering on the brink of innumerable nasty sins with no tenderness for our  neighbour and nothing to love in ourselves. But when the trial is over, of course, and our memory and understanding a little better adjusted, Our Lord comes to us with such tender concern and enlightenment that we can almost forget that the hour ever existed.
    Blessed be God, who always gives us exactly what we need at the time we need it.

On Judging Others July 16, 1975

    God knows what weak vessels we are and thus in very few cases does He allow any one soul to suffer all temptations to an extreme degree. It is my opinion that most souls are allowed exposure to only part of the spectrum and may pass through their entire life ignorant of the trials of the parts they were not subjected to, except so far as they can subject themselves with genuine attention to another's account of his battles and of course make comparisons with their own.
    We know by faith, if not by our own comprehension, that Christ knew all the temptations, and certain contemplatives are given much to endure, but as for individual men, especially those leading an active life, what can they know beyond the challenges to their temperament and talents and duties of state?

Music and Fear: the conclusion

    Yet there is a Muse, there is an exemplary Teacher, there is a Creator who made the reality of sound, and there is an omnipresence of music which provokes some of us to realize we have an appetite for a creative - and even in the totally untrained an analytical - response. "How do they do that?" And "Is it possible I could do it too?" "Am I only a listener, or might I join the team of producers? "Do I have a sound worth making?"
    The fact that we enjoy listening to music, or dancing to it, does not necessarily oblige us to become musicians, anymore then a fondness for potatoes requires us to become farmers. Musicians, like farmers, like customers, and often enough they do not welcome competition, which may be part of the reason, as I have found from long experience, that a large percentage of excellent musicians are inadequate as teachers.
    They can and will impart some particular information, but not the basic step-by-step analytical approach required of all true instruction.
    This is not necessarily a criticism of musicians, but the acknowledgement of the particular vocation of the teacher, basically a condition of mind that is, at least for the duration of the lesson, much more interested in the performance of the student than of the self. The teacher's intellectual passion actually goes deeper than the performer's, is a higher order metaphysically, recognizing the power, the freedom, the sense of self-worth that comes from knowledge. He who is ignorant has no capacity for performance, thus, before the question - if it affects him - no freedom; he is powerless. But if he knows, he has the freedom to perform, or not. And the choice to not perform, in certain contexts, can have more moral authority than the performance could have, more infusion of self-respect than playing or singing would have given.
    I am considering knowledge in the broadest sense that it applies to music, not just to technical information, although without a hold on theory and practise, the musician will not have the key to put the other aspects of this knowledge into operation.
    The performer needs to know himself, his musical accompaniment, -if any - his audience, his reasons for combining himself with co-workers and an audience.
    Ultimately, the musician, even the most uninstructed and beginning of musicians, needs to know where his talent come from that is, he needs to know the Muse, to understand, what the Muse intends of music as well as of himself. Music comes out of the thin air, as it were, it comes from intelligible even tangible, occasion of inspiration, but it also comes from the very regularity and discernible order of the basic fundamentals of creation. It cannot be without this ordinary simplicity; it must take from the obvious, and it must give back to the obvious.
   Ah, says the reader, why all this philosophy? I would just like to plunk some keys, or agitate some strings, or play around with the holes in a woodwind. What does all this verbiage got to do with the mechanics and the numbers of making music? Why the sound of words, of language, indeed of the sound of music?
    The answer is neither more nor less the difference between man and the chimpanzee. My personal history as an animal trainer is none too profound, but I suspect that there actually are a few musical skills that could be taught to an intelligent chimp. Some aspects of music are that mechanical that time, patience and the appropriate rigging of the piano keys might get a few bars of something simple out of the animal that is said to have the brain closest to the human.
    But eventually the progress of the music would require an idea: a variation in tempo, an increased complication in melody, contradiction in movements of left hand against right, and perhaps the most impossible of all for the chimp, expressions of emotion and philosophical intentions that the animals simply cannot share with the race that gave them their names in the first place.
    It could be that I am overestimation the chimpanzee, of course, when I grant it a musical intelligence, that goes beyond simple rhythm. Can it really distinguish between the notes of the scale? Would the chimp have any ability at all, once the teacher and the learning climate were removed - to reproduce anything at all that vaguely resemble the structure of a genuine melody? If the answer is no, then we should not feel sorry for the animal, we should feel even more grateful for ourselves. Animals may be able to run faster, swim deeper, and fly but their otherwise magnificent sense structures do not have what it takes to enable them to engage in anything so intellectually complex as music. Still, I would in no way discourage any qualified researcher from trying to find out just what musical skills a chimpanzee might acquire. At the point where we begin to learn any skill that requires repeated exercises of physical faculties, we are much like the animals, so much like them that any human attempt to get too quickly to the abstract, to the province where the intellect supposedly predominates, is a pedagogical error. Whatever are the senses that require instruction, the instruction itself requires a seemingly endless series of repetitions, with directions given as simply and clearly, as monosyllabic as possible. And the directions have to be given over and over again, for every different movement of the sense skill required has the capacity for going the wrong direction, or the wrong distance, or both.
    Yes, the teacher of beginners, be they children, dogs, or adults, require the maximum in orderly simplicity, and an infinity of patience. They must have a great affection, in fact, not only for all they know, but for all that their pupils do not know, and be fully prepared to delight, exult, and triumph with their charges over every step that moves them from the darkness into light. That is the joy of real teaching, to understand, transmit, and to see absorbed, practiced, and ultimately performed, the power and freedom that comes from the grasp of the fundamentals of an art or science.
    Is there a human skill which does not require some, at least, basic skill with numbers? Yet mathematics is the second degree of abstraction, as the philosophers tell us, and abstraction is a function not of sense, which we share with the animals, but of intellect, which we do not. So even is a chimp could be taught rhythm, or discovered to have some ability to distinguish one note's pitch from another, he would collapse at the first requirements of reading music, the habit of dealing with each scale in terms of its degrees, or numbers.
    The child or beginner, on the other hand, given the virtually universal appetite for making music of one kind or another, is ignited by the realization that simple counting is part of the key to unlocking what would otherwise be an unsolvable puzzle. And, unless the numbers are continually employed in a logical fashion, the puzzle will not unravel right through to the end. Numbers have a way of affecting everything we do, and no part of the study of music is free of some degree of numerical consideration. Perhaps no one is so ignorant of music that he is not aware of the counting factor. But lack of understanding of the measurement factor is generally common, much more than it need to be. Generally, the uninformed subscribe too much to talent, and too little to sound instruction.

Music and Fear, Part Two

    Anyone who has gone to the trouble of learning how to play an instrument properly, that is, throughout all its possibilities, either by ear or by written notes, and who has at least a reasonable grasp of musical theory, appreciates what a complicated business music is. I had done none of this on any instrument accept the voice, and that only by ear, but even in my inexperience I knew something of what would have to be accomplished before I could think of myself as a musician, when I came to the guitar or to the piano, for example.
    What I had no sense of at all was the number of people who played instruments partially, - particularly the guitar and its cousins or the piano, by the chord method, for the purpose of providing accompaniment for singing. My father had played the harmonica for family singing, and I had joined in many a happy and riotous Scout campfire, but never had a guitar, banjo, ukelele or mandolin been brought in so I could lay my eyes on the relatively simple operation of strummed chords.
    It was a Friday afternoon, and it was possible that I came upon my first instruction in the power of chording because I had cut an English class. In my first three months of college I had realized that half-time attendance in all my subjects would pull me through nicely, and I had also found that I thoroughly enjoyed using the North Brock basement as my own private retreat centre, going down there at times when I knew there would be few or even no students about. The surroundings were utterly dingy - only the people brought beauty - but the silence was magnificent. The young monk - and I was more of this, by the grace of God  then I had the education up to that point to know - simply adored the quiet of his cell.
    This particular Friday, however, it was not quiet. As I came down the stairs, along the hall past the Totem office and into the Ubyssey corridor I was aware of the presence of live music once again, but the first I'd heard in the Pub office, except for my own whistling or some musical person's utterance of a line or two in the course of the day's work. What was that instrument, and who was singing?
    It was quite an era for talents that would go on to become accomplished and well know on the national and even international level. I have mentioned Allan Fotheringham, the man who taught us to read McLean's backwards. So it would be illogical to identify the lad with his foot up on the U- desk -  the place the paper is put together -  whaling away on a tenor ukelele, and singing his lungs out.
    Alexander "Sandy" Ross, future writer of several books and magazine editor, unlike myself, had not shown up in the Pub basement at the beginning of the school year, and I never did learn his reasons for dawdling. As he was much more bent on journalism as a career than I was, you would have thought he would have shown right away. But then I was slow to take up a musical instrument, and even slower to finalized my studies of such. Life is mysterious indeed.
    But thanks to Sandy, music was suddenly no long an unsolvable riddle. He had a great affection for the tunes of the 20's and 30's so the song was from that era, but simple enough that his accompaniment was limited to three or four chords. I thoroughly enjoyed the noise he was making and told myself I could surely learn a few chords.
    And so I did, though not from Sandy. I had an infinite trust in the books - what else for a writer - and Sandy told me he had learned from a book. Before long I made my way down to Western Music, on Vancouver's Seymour Street, and for five dollars picked up a plastic ukelele. a felt pick, and an instruction book. Had I not been able to sing, this particular kind of book is of little use, because where there is no voice, the instrument must sing, and for that kind of song one needs to know the scales and intervals, and mastering these, although physically not more difficult than chords, - and much easier in some aspects - it is nonetheless quite a lot more mental work, or at least I seem to have found it so.
    Again, fear gets in. What if I actually had no ear for an instrument, and could not tune the strings? An odd question about himself from a lad who had always sung, and habitually in pitch, but it illustrates how ignorant of the basics that I was. So these first few minutes after supper, when I took my equipment into my own room - and firmly shut the door - were some of the most anxious I'd known since I first realized that I was born for the writing trade. But I'd heard Sandy tuning his uke, to the universally valid 4 note tune "My Dog Has Fleas" and I discovered that I could do the same. I had the basics, I could be confident, and thus I set out to follow instructions.
    I think that the opportunity of learning a skill entirely on my own - with the aid of the book, of course - was as attractive as the fact of learning music itself. I had no idea at that point that I would eventually become a school teacher, but I took mental notes on the psychological security of my study methods. These were simple enough: I played at whatever song took my fancy and I rhythmically plunked at my chords as repetitiously as I felt necessary. I worked as long as I was inspired. I quit when I was bored or tired, and I reported to no-one by myself. The process was so satisfying and absorbing, and I was so eager to master the rudimentary chords, and the songs that went with them, that I gave up the novel until the following autumn. I was half done a book. but I was by no means half-way through all there was to learn about music. And it was also to turn out most absolutely that in spite of my personal confidence and energy for writing volumes only, it was to be a very long time before I would publish any significant body of literature. The music was to give me an art, of sorts, and an audience to exchange it with, thus helping me in no small way to continue to discover, through my self-expression, just who I was and where my thinking fit into the universal truth.
    Possibly it is this long friendship with my "second art" that is the first reason  why I am writing this essay. We all love to talk about our friends, and in fact truly good people are usually comfortable talking about themselves only when they are also talking of their friends. Our friends define us - as of course, in part, so do our enemies - and it is through our friends that we best fulfill our obligation to live in faith, hope and charity. Our friends also challenge us, if they are true and wholesome in their love, and music I have always found challenging for every time I learned something about it, as soon as it had let me have my pleasure and satisfaction, it questioned me about some large or small area of itself of which I was still in ignorance.
    But then music takes its name from the Muse, and the Muse, at least to me, being God's Holy Spirit, is by nature infinite. In this relationship, it follows, those who love music, especially if they are working at learning it, are gradually being drawn up into, or participation of, that infinity. Do we not say that Gabriel blows a horn? The trumpet blast at my first Pub Board party was a sign of, I hope, a thereafter happier judgement day.
    Thus every principle of music, as it is assimilated, understood, and put into effect, is significant of the greater study and execution of life, and not only life here, but in the hereafter as well. This rule is analogously valid for all fields of learning, of course, but nowhere more discernibly, to a discerning mind at least, than in the arts and in no art more vividly then in music. This school of analogy and wisdom is a sign of God's overwhelming generosity, is it not, for who is so fortunate to have no music whatsoever in him, even if it is only in the rhythm of his walking from one place to another?
    Yet as we walk, especially if we do so by ourselves, we also hum or whistle or even break into a line or two of song. And many a soul is content with just this degree of self-created music, yet what of those who feel entitled to more, and from time to time are moved to wish they could find a way to whatever that more may be? 
    At that point, the only steps forward is some kind of instruction. The occasional and private performer finally decided to become somewhat more formalized, more structured in his or her approach and has discovered not heretofore discerned, even if it is only to a certain pedagogical tone that comes entirely from within and suggests at least for the time being, that no other teacher is required.
    In music, perhaps more then in many of the arts, or sciences, the desire to be self-taught is not all that radical. Music is sound, a personal, subjective, give - and - take with reality, hopefully a solid little corner on the beauty of reality and nothing can put a beginning music student on the wrong track, perhaps even a derailment, faster than a teacher's insensitivity to the particular learning needs of the particular student. And the history of music is filled with examples of the self-taught. After all, any instrument - including the human voice - is also a technical reality, and anything technical, given time and practise, is analyzable.
    Yet as we all know, the vast majority of us were taught the basic skills through which I write, and the reader reads, these pages. And for all that we studied our fingers and toes, the natural bases of mathematics, yet we went to school to learn the fundamental skills of arithmetic. Even with tests and other learning packages available, governments or religious in cultural societies went to the extra expense of training and paying teachers to practise the classroom art. A good teacher knows how to put order into the questions, show the students what to practise, provide motivation. And where there is more than one student, he rejoices. Ever since the Fall, as Cain and Abel proved, two souls in a common situation can easily produce rivalry. The necessary balance of confidence and docility, a true measure of self-respect combined with humility, takes time to acquire and not a little coaching, and rare is the student who can give these basics to himself without teachers, even with the help of the best textbooks and teaching aids.
To be continued.

Music and Fear October 4, 1997

    Before I'm through, this essay will have been about many things. After all, the author is an old man, has studied much and thought even more, and already written a great deal, not a little of which is either music or about music, in the form of fiction. But in order to begin well, it seems necessary for me to say that at first and for some pages to come, this essay is about music and fear, and especially about the fear of not being musical. Anyone who has ever conquered a fear, or had it conquered for them - is ever after anxious to help anyone he finds with the same fear. Fear is the opposite to hope, as St. Augustine taught long ago, and while fear can be useful - I am writing this essay this late and rainy afternoon in early October, partly in fear of being not only bored but wasting inspiration if I don't get going - hope is what we really want to acquire, and what we so delight to share, unless we are arrogant or perverse.
    Once upon at time, I was very much afraid of not being very musical, even though I sang anything at the drop of several species of invisible batons and I was quite convinced that the study of music was neither possible for me - even though I had a gift for mathematics - nor interesting, even though I generally loved the sound of musical instruments. The once-upon-a-time fear was actually much upon-a-time being with me throughout my elementary and high school years, and not being sent away until I went to university. And this fear was sent away rather quickly. My hope is that wherever this essay falls into receptive hands, it will have the same effect. When I enrolled at the University of British Columbia in September 1953 I was, instrumentally speaking a complete duffer. By February or so, this personal conviction had been swept away. I was hardly ready for Carnegie Hall, but I was no longer convinced I was unteachable.
    I do not mean that I enrolled in a music course , UBC had the tiniest of music departments then and for some time and I was, anyway, on fire with the knowledge by then some eighteen months old - that I was a writer, a novelist. With this vocation in mind I was utterly involved with the campus newspaper, the thrice-weekly published Ubyssey, learning to hunt and peck my little assignments on ancient typewriters and discovering that finding the most efficient words to write in the most insignificant story for a real live audience was much more interesting than working on a paragraph or essay for a single teacher. The Ubyssey published three thousand copies per edition, and for years - because I was born for the long labours of making fiction out of the doctrine of Catholic mysticism, the students of UBC were the largest regular audience I was to know. I was delighted with my campus situation and thus it made life even fuller, by the time I had settled into my classes I began to work on my first attempt at a novel. That too was all consuming and the last thing I would have expected was to be curious about developing musical skills as well. But then, in the course of following my literary inspirations, both with the Ubyssey and the novel, I ran into a profound inability to ignore instrumental music.
    In the early days, I kept no writer's diary so I may not list the order of events in precisely the order of their occurrences. But the effect was precise enough and that is what really matters, and I will try to get the order as good as I can.
    I'm pretty sure that the party at the Kerrisdale Lawn Bowling Club was the first link in the silver chain of discovery. I'm going to dwell on it at some length because it illustrates some of the enemies of our development of our abilities. Never before that night had I had scruples about going to a party held by friends or associates and off hand neither can I remember having them again, but that night they landed hard and heavy in the hour before it was time to leave, and I think it was for the sole purpose of keeping me away from what was to be a profound musical experience. I lay down after supper - I was living with my family not in residence - before the long bus trip to Kerrisdale and immediately became filled with nagging spirits trying to tell me I should spend Friday evening at home with my text books. These petty Nazguls must have lingered for half-an-hour before I finally shook them off and headed for the bus. Well, buses. It took thrice of them to get me where I was going, as did my daily travels to and from the university for my first two years before I was able to buy a car. Once I was up and moving the enemy vanished as if it had never come, but I probably pondered the event. After all, Friday night is everybody's holiday, and I in particular had gone out on Friday night ever since grade eight, when I had joined a scout troup.
    At first, the lawn bowling club gathering was low key, affable and chatty, no doubt with some anxieties for it to go well because it was the first party of the year and was not in the more comforting warmth of someone's home. Most Publication Board parties that I remember were in private homes, some of them quite impressive. As souls trickled in we sat around chatting, and the older lad that I had decided to cultivate as a friend offered me a beer, which I happily accepted. I suspect it was my first bottle of commercial beer, as up to then I had drunk only my father's home brew, and that -except for one occasion - sparingly. Neither the other lad nor I had brought girl friends, and of course one of the utterly marvellous features of the North Brock basement crowd was that unless you happened to be seriously in love there was no need to bring a girl. There were already lots of them on the publication staffs - The Ubyssey, the Totem (Annual) and the Raven, the literary magazine. They were good looking and lively as any group of girls I'd known and of course, rather well read, although at this point I knew none of the girls very well and the freshman's distant worship were of young ladies in other settings.
    I had been accepted professionally, with my stories getting printed and my editor-in-chief - Allan Fotheringham - soon to appoint me to a small but educating responsibility, that of Canadian University Press editor, and now I was testing the choices of friendship. Writers can be a prickly lot in general and in principal, and my simultaneous membership in the Canadian Officer's Training Corps at UBC was a contradiction to the common ethos of my fellow scribblers.
    But the beer was friendly, and the older lad and I were getting along well. We were in fact to become fast friends over the next years and he finally gave me the banjo I used for some time, in part as the result of what happened next. This was the arrival of some young men who had some association with the Pub Board and were also musicians. I think there were three of them including a string bass player, but what affected me the most were the pianist and the trumpeter. They were an intense and fiery combination and seemed capable - to my none too experienced ear - of improvising on any tune they agreed on.
    The next provocative encounter with a live player came at the next Ubyssey party. He was a guitarist, with an electric guitar, not a staff member but brought by someone who was. Again I was quite overwhelmed, especially as I was sitting in a chair right in front of him.
    It was probably between these parties that I started the novel - The Yacht Novel - as I was to call it for the decades it took to assume its final text - and at some point not too far along in the plot I not only invented a character who played the guitar but I found myself somewhat lamenting the fact that this character's creator did not share this skill.
    In the Christmas season I had two more contacts with live music that I found left me feeling regret that I did not know how to play an instrument. Both instances were in the United Church settings and had to do with people my own age who could play the piano to accompany hymns, one of them being a rousing version of "Good King Wenceslas." That was by a girl, before Christmas, the second performance came after Christmas, at the Older Boy's Parliament conference at UBC, and featured therefore, a young male artist. If I'd had suspicions that making music was somehow unmasculine, these were now all swept away.
    It was early into the second semester that I received my final inspiration, - in this series - and this time a challenge that was not out of the reach of my immediate possibilities.
To be continued.