Category Archives: Personal History

Jul 09 2015
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Personal History

Summer Reverie (Part 2)

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Not a moment flies by, anymore, without some youngster tweeting, facebooking, instagramming, blogging and otherwise making a nuisance of himself in the permanently switched-on digital world to grumpy, old gramps.

As a member of grey-haired contingent, I have a word for this peculiarly annoying and highly contagious condition of cyber-connectivity: “Internetitis”. The the symptoms are as recognizable as the latest app.

Do you begin to sweat profusely if you go without checking your social-media feeds for longer than 30 minutes? Do you become anxious and fidgety when your inbox fails to notify you of unread mail? Does the thought of actually having to wait to check your voice messages make you physically ill?

If you answered “yes” to any of the aforementioned, chances are you suffer from acute “Internetitis”, the cure for which scientists are assiduously working to discover.

In the meantime, abstinence appears to be the only reliable treatment. In fact, going cold-turkey is becoming a verifiable thing these days. And it ain’t easy. Just ask Flora Carr who wrote a piece about her week without the slipstream of silliness for the Guardian last fall.

“I decided to . . see how I’d cope. Would my social life suffer? How would I keep up-to-date with news and trends? And did this mean I’d have to find my real-life calculator?”

Indeed, she noted, “I began to think of my week ‘unplugged’ as a kind of retreat. In a world saturated with images, we feel a need to document our every action; just recently I caught myself Instagramming my bowl of morning porridge.

“As the week progressed I found myself sleeping far better – simply because I wasn’t lying in bed for hours double-checking my newsfeed. . . And while the week may have provided me an escape from both hypothermia and Kim Kardashian taking 1,200 selfies on holiday, it also proved to be a period of self-imposed social exile.”

That is, of course, the point.

I grew up at a time when rotary dial telephones were actually considered intrusive by many of my parents’ generation. The thought of any single household owning more than one of these contraptions was patently absurd. When you rang someone up, there was an even chance your call would go unanswered. You’d just have to try later or even (gasp!) the following day.

Somehow, though, we managed to muddle through without compromising the integrity of our circles of friends and associates. We actually looked forward to receiving a bone fide letter in the mail.

Then again, if you’ve never lived this way, the sudden withdrawal from the plugged in world can be jarring. That’s what American technology writer Paul Miller discovered a couple of years ago when he decided tune out for an entire year. In an interview with CNN, upon his return to the online universe, he described his experience as,“Existential and introspective. I really learned a lot about myself. I did have a lot of free time, but a lot of it was loneliness and boredom in ways that I hadn’t really experienced before.”

On the other hand, he said, “There were times I would realize my mind was in really cool places, having thought processes that are hard to have when you’re on the Internet.”

Would he do it again?

Something tells me the 20-something would rather be caught naked on a busy overpass than to be one more minute without his smartphone.

After all, Luddite Town is a nice place to visit, but, really gramps, who would want to live there?

Jul 09 2015
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Personal History

Summer reverie (Part 1)

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I refuse to remember what I ate for supper last Thursday, but, as I drift off to sleep, certain in my bedroll, I do recall with perfect clarity the summer between my 11th and 12th birthdays.

There, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia in a subdivision called Pinedale Park, just minutes away from the pretty promontory known as Prospect, my younger sister and I would gambol along the shoreline for hours, picking periwinkles from seaweed, diving headlong into the surf, spearing rock eels with straightened, sharpened clothes hangars.

In the spring of 1971, my father took me to the boat show in Halifax, just 45 minutes up the road. He was thinking about a sailing ship for himself. Not finding one that suited him, he set his sites on a double-hulled skiff, equipped with a tiller, rudder, centerboard and something that actually looked like a mainsail and mast.

He presented it to me as a gift even as the ice flows clogged the moorings in the bay; I took to it like a fish does to water. I was a better sailor then than I am now, having spent a good deal of time, since age three, tacking about in Toronto Harbour with my mother’s brother and, of course, dear, old Dad.

For two months in the summer of 1971, I would drive that skiff into the swells off the coast where the grumbling of the pounding water would tell me where to make landfall and where not to afford an attempt. I would take my tiny girlfriends right across the bay to the far shore, where, God knows, anything could happen away from prying, adult eyes – even a bubble-gum kiss or three.

Once, when my craft was docked, I jumped into an open-bodied ketch of nearly 20 feet, from stem to stern, that my father had finally managed to procure from a broker in England. We sailed into the North Atlantic, under mariner’s skies. I manned the jib. Dad handled the tiller and mainsail. We tacked and jibed until the sun told us that it was time to head into Prospect.

As we ran with the wind, my father began to fiddle with the centerboard’s main line, which held the heavy, lead cleaver that served as the boat’s moveable keel. When the bloody thing slammed down, it took half of the middle finger on his right hand with it.

It occurs to me now that had we been equipped with GPS and cell-phone technology, we might have been able to rescue ourselves from certain perdition. As it was, with no tech available in the early 1970s, five miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, it was clear we were on our own. Dad, his wrecked finger dangling from his mouth, somehow started the outboard engine. I grabbed the tiller and cruised that craft to port.

I don’t remember what I ate for supper that night. I do remember the bandage my father sported after his return from the Halifax Infirmary. And I remember something else.

I remember my 38-year-old pater, hail and hardy, standing on the stoop of our Pinedale Park ranch-style bungalow, waving to me with his good hand. “That was something,” he said through the pain and the painkillers. “You know, of course, you helped me.”

The next day, my sister and I headed down to the shore to hunt for periwinkles and eels.

Just in that fragile tissue of life, lived in a moment of summertime, when the days are longer than anyone deserves, we knew we could do anything.

Feb 27 2015
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Personal History

Farewell dear, old friend 

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I once wrote that my pal Marc Chouinard embodied the indelibly optimistic spirit of Greater Moncton. I now think that the Hub City embodied his.

We met in 1997, when we both maintained separate work bivouacs at a successful marketing and communications firm on Lutz Street. His first words of advice to me, as the only anglophone in the office recently relocated from Halifax, was: “Give everything you’ve got; accept everything they give; most importantly, never give up.”

Of course, “never give up” was Marc’s raison d’etre. And his various biographers have managed to convey this truth in predictably warm fashion.

“Marc Chouinard, originally from Campbellton, New Brunswick, has been involved professionally in the cultural sector since 1976,” reads the blurb on the 2013 Ideas Festival website. “He has worked (on) a variety of projects across Canada and Europe, including the Francophonie Summits (six editions), the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the East Coast Music Awards (Chair of the Board of Directors in 2005 and 2006) and the Brunswick Arts Board, (on) which he served as co-chair.

“Currently General Manager of the Capitol Theatre in Moncton (and director of the Capitol’s art gallery), he presents each year hundreds of artists on the two stages of this important cultural space in Atlantic Canada.

“In 2002, he was named to the Canada Music Council by the Minister of Canadian Heritage. The ECMA presented him with it’s Industry Builder of the Year Award in 2008. In 2009, his curriculum vitae was included in Canada Who’s Who at the University of Toronto and at the end of December 2010 Governor General David Johnston named him to the Order of Canada”.

As for New Brunswick Premier Gallant, he had this to say upon learning of Marc’s passing, after a short bout with cancer, at the age age of 62, earlier this week: “(He) was one of my closest confidantes and a friend. Marc’s accomplishments are an example for us all. He worked behind the scenes to support and mentor others, helping artists reveal their talents to our communities.

“He was also a steadfast promoter of Acadian culture thanks to his work with the FrancoFête en Acadie and the Sommet de la Francophonie. On behalf of the province, I offer my sincere condolences to Marc’s friends and family. As Marc’s life is celebrated, let us all remember the man he was and his commitment to his community.”

As for me, I knew Marc as an irascible, demanding, frequently annoying SOB whose laser-like ability to burn away the detritus of my own neurotic tendencies in the interest of revealing whatever broader truth I happened know (but was determined to keep hidden) was almost preternatural.

And for this, I loved him like a brother. His counsel and advice made me a better writer and, no small part, a better person.

Once, some years ago, Marc and I collaborated on a project (with Janice Goguen, then a public servant, now a Moncton businesswoman) designed to unite the cultural export industries of New Brunswick’s francophone and anglophone communities. I remember telling him that it was impossible; never the twain shall meet.

All he replied through that trademark Cheshire-cat smile of his was this: “Give everything you’ve got.”

He was right, of course.

I gave an hour-long speech before an audience of 200 touchy cultural types at the Delta Beausejour in downtown Moncton, not minutes on foot from Marc’s beloved Capitol Theatre, in late March 2006.

At the end, to my astonishment, most faces were smiling.

I ducked out to the cold, early spring for a smoke.

I bent my head to peer at the pavement and to thank God for getting me through what I feared most: public speaking.

Behind me, alone, the Cheshire Cat spoke: “So that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

It was Marc telling me, once again: Never give up.

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Dec 26 2014
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Humour, Personal History

Confessions of a mall-walking man

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I arrive each day, always determined to better my time. I stroll deliberately through the Sobeys’ entrance or, when the weather is inclement, the Wal-Mart doors (because that’s the closest anchor store to the coat closet my 15 bucks a year as a member of the Champlain Mall walking club buys me).

Over the past two-plus years I’ve nailed down this routine as fine science: Wake up, write a column about some absurdity in world affairs, check my time, review my weather app, ascertain which starting line makes most sense, and proceed to said launch point. And, then – having pulled up the stopwatch on my iPhone – I’m off.

On a good day, I can do four miles winding in and out of the mall’s main thoroughfares and minor egresses in just over 45 minutes (averaging 11 minutes and 30 seconds a circuit).

On a bad day, my time is more like 13 minutes a mile. Bad days invariably arrive during the high Christian holidays (Christmas and Easter). On those excursions, I am a canoeist in an unruly river, strewn with rocks, logs, drifting branches and sudden, unexpected eddies.

“Um,” my wife and walking partner often tells me as she senses that I am about to sprint through the rapids of humanity obstructing my straight shot adjacent to the food court, “please try not to knock anyone down.”

I sniff and snarl at the mere suggestion. After all, I have become a voyageur of the mall. I know, instinctively, where to duck and weave, when to zig and when to zag. My paddles are my arms; my vessel is my butt.

I can’t say the same about some of my fellow travellers in the “domed domicile”.

One guy in a motorized cart, festooned with flags of Canada, New Brunswick and, I think, the old American Confederacy, zooms by so fast, you’d think the cops were hot on his tail.

Beware ambulatory folks: Death by rocket-powered wheelchair is a distinct possibility in this place where most still walk, not run, to their final destination.

Postponing that last walk is, of course, the point of it all. And that makes the routine in the credenza of consumer delights – that most secular, coarse and crass of all places – almost sacred. How much more life can you squeeze for yourself from the simple act of staying active, regardless of the means and the venue you choose?

Then, of course, there’s the secret life of the mall, itself, when it’s quiet on, say, a Sunday afternoon, in mid-July, when no one’s around except the blessed night people who tend to the mechanical rooms and underground passageways – the ones who make the whole thing tick before the wallets and purses arrive, and long after they’ve gone. When you’re a serial walker, you get to know them, after a while and in a fashion. And they get to know you.

“How’s your time today?” a security guard asks.

“Not bad,” I yelp, “though the shin splints are acting up.”

“Yeah. . .That’s because the floors beneath the surface are solid concrete. Here. . .l’ll show you where you can stretch. . .”

And he does.

Here comes the UPS guy, just in front of Purolator man. I know them both (though not nearly as well as they know each other). Still, they seem to enjoy asking me for reports from the front lines of their regular routes – their time, in this mall, being more valuable than mine.

“So, where are the bottlenecks this morning,” the UPS guy asks me, as he hauls a lorry loaded with goods and merchandise for any number of retailers.

“Stay clear of the Sears-aisle bathrooms,” I advise. “Major water-works there. . .Lots of people milling around.”

“Good to know,” he barks congenially.

And I proceed, happily chugging away past the ladies’ apparel stores, the tea shack, my dentist’s office; past the cell-phone kiosks where the merry techs spend as much time solving luddite problems as they do pushing product; past the HMV, the quilt store and, finally, to the coat closet by the Wal-Mart, where I literally bump into my club’s president and indefatigable cheerleader.

“Where’s your lovely other?” she asks, referring to my wife.

“She’s already done,” I laugh. “I’ll find her.”

I check my stopwatch and smile.

It’s been a good day.

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Dec 24 2014
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Humour, Personal History

Ode to the frigid joys of a frosty evening

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I must admit, I have never been a big fan of winter. Now that it is upon me, as inevitably as a snow plow in a nor’easter comes to wreck the foot of my driveway after solid hours of diligent shoveling, I am loathe to sing its praises even to my impossibly cheerful grandsons and granddaughters who need only toboggans and cups of hot chocolate to keep them deliriously happy.

I am more likely to cleave to Shakespeare (“Now is the winter of our discontent”) or Robert Byrne (“Winter is nature’s way of saying, ‘Up yours’”) than to Paul Theroux (“Winter is a season of recovery and preparation”) or, heaven forbid, William Blake (“In seed time, learn; in harvest, teach; in winter, enjoy”).

Yeah, well listen up Billy B., I ain’t half done me own learnin’, let alone harvesting. And don’t even talk to me about enjoying anything. I’m far too young for that fatuous folderol.

And yet. . .

A year ago to the day – this day – my wife and I were scheduled to fly into La Guardia and then commence what was to be a wonderful, middle-aged adventure exploring lower Manhattan on foot.

Only, winter got in the way. Flights from Calgary to Halifax were canceled. Every airport along the northeastern seaboard was, for days, shut down, covered under blankets of snow and sheets of frozen rain.

In fact, last winter turned out to be the longest, coldest, most intractable in 50 years (or so the cab drivers in Moncton reliably informed us as they rushed, almost daily, to our rescue).

I cursed the fools who boasted about their snow mobiles and blowers – the ones who couldn’t stop chattering about the next, big blow from the polar vortex, the ones who took perverse delight in the worst possible weather.

I steeled myself to the unavoidable, grittily clearing my walkways and paths of ice and crunch, believing that my labours would somehow presage an early and blessedly warm spring, full of green shoots and buds.

Then, one atypically bright day, my eldest grandson arrived with his father for a visit. They surveyed the product of my efforts and concluded that the banks I had created around the house were sufficiently high to embark on a classically Canadian wintertime project.

“Poppy,” the young one said with the fearless certitude of every five-year-old on the planet, “We need to make a snow fort.”

“Well,” I moaned, slightly, “maybe later, okay?”

“Oh no,” he insisted. “We have to do it now, before it all melts.”

I looked at the outdoor thermometer. It read 10-below. But I also knew I wasn’t going to win this argument.

And so we began with shovels and buckets and breaks for juice and water. We dug and plowed and burrowed until the sun went down and long after.

His Dad helped with big, lurching heaves of icy boulders and fine, craftsmanlike carvings into the walls of the forming network of latticed snow caves.

When we were done, long after everyone’s bedtime, we lay there for a piece under the ceiling our efforts, hope and imagination had created under the great black bowl of the Milky Way.

Then, it all came down on us in one great, calamitous bump. Snow, once the enemy, had become the blanket that covered us all as we joyfully shoved chunks of it down the fronts and backs of our parkas and ran like wild animals, screaming into the dark, suddenly soft and warm night.

It’s 2 am as I write this, and I am looking at the spot where we built Casa Bruce last year. The ground is frozen, but snow is conspicuously absent. I check my weather app, which tells me that Christmas, this year, might well be green.

Still, I don’t mind, as I wait to welcome my grandchildren for the holidays. We’ll make do. We’ll have fun. That’s what they always manage to teach me.

After all, as Anton Chekov once said, “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”

As for me and Albert Camus, “In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

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Dec 17 2014
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Humour, Personal History

Diamonds on our souls, as we dream and wonder

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“You know, Poppy, I love Grandma’s sausages and syrup,” Dingleberry Number One informed me as I prepared the wieners and warmed the local tree sap.

“Of course you do,” I replied while inadvertently flipping flapjacks into a soapy sink. “Grandma knows how to do everything,” I growled.

Still, Dingleberry Number Two chimed in from his illegal peanut-gallery perch on the kitchen counter: “You know how to do some things, too, Pops, don’t you?”

I thought about this as I ran warm water against the pancakes, turned down the stove-top, so as not to reduce the sausages to charred pencil ends, and blew my nose into the the only dish towel my two, fine young cannibals (AKA, grandsons) hadn’t earlier claimed for identical purposes. “Yes, me boys,” I bravely ventured, “For one thing, I can make stuff up.”

Number One: “Grandma says you tell stories.”

Number Two: “Yeah, and sometimes they’re not even true.”

Oh, oh, oh. . .perish that thought. “They are always true,” I insisted. “It’s just that sometimes they’re not factual.”

Consider, I said, the story of the big, rock-candy mountain cave.

Number One: “I used to like candy.”

Number Two: “Uh. . .well. . .I used to like candy, too.”

Well, then, I announced, “you’re sure to like this story.”

Number Two: “Then, um, do you think we could have some candy. . .or, maybe, a cookie. That would be okay.”

No time for any of that, I declared. “Attend to Poppy, for he – who is I – is about to pontificate.”

As all eyes rolled in breathless anticipation, no doubt, of their grandfather’s preternaturally gifted story-telling, I commenced:

“Once upon a time in a land far away, a bunch of people lived in a cave. But not just any cave. Its walls were studded with diamonds and its floors were paved with good intentions; so much so, in fact, that every time a worthy resident of Spelunkertown trod upon its main thoroughfares, the ground would gurgle happily, “thank you for walking all over me,” before asking, “would you like a diamond to keep you company as you go along your way?”

Number Two: “What’s a diamond?”

Number One: “It’s like a cookie, only it sparkles.”

Number Two: “Pops, I’ve changed my mind. . .Could I have a diamond, please?”

All in good time, my eager chap, I said, “but first a song. . .Who, here, knows the chord structure to Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’? . . .No?. . .No one?. . .Okay, then, back to the story.”

Number One: “So, Grandma’s just out getting groceries, right?”

Number Two: “I think she keeps the cookies in the pantry.”

Enough, I cajoled: “Do you want to hear the end of this story, or not?”

Number One: “Not really.”

Number Two: “I could eat.”

Grandma will be back soon enough, I sputtered.

Meanwhile, where was I?. . .Oh yes. . .

“After a while, the good people of Spelunkertown had taken so many diamonds from the walls of their shared cave that it ceased to be interesting. No one came to see it anymore or walk along its broad, compliant streets. No one cared whether the hole in the earth they once loved together might inspire the excavation of new and even better grottos where people could gather in glittering conviviality and companionship.

“No one thought of their neighbours, because their neighbours had taken their diamonds to lands far away, across the horizon. People, once close, had become distant memories to one another.”

Number Two: “I’m confused.”

About what?

“You said the story was about a “big rock-candy mountain cave”.

Uh-huh.

“So, where’s the candy. . .I was waiting for the candy.”

It’s a metaphor. When all you’re interested in is satisfying your own appetites, then you’re always going to be alone in the world.

Number One: “I’m hungry. . .Are you done?”

Indeed, I was.

Number Two: “Okay, Pops, sit next to me.”

Number One: “Poppy, you sit next to me.”

Funny, that. I can sit next to both of you for as long as you want.

And with that, we sat together and ate together a glorious meal of soapy pancakes and charred sausages on the big couch that Number One, thinking of Number Two, had picked for Grandma’s house.

And, together, we fell asleep in our own, dazzling cave of dreams and wonders.

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Oct 25 2014
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Personal History

In the world of enterprise, nothing beats the bold

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The joke is as old as it is bad, but it’s also apt.

Set-up: How do you know you’re an entrepreneur?

Punchline: When the Government of Canada won’t let you claim EI.

Certainly, 25 years ago, on a late August morning dripping with hope and heat, I wasn’t thinking about this when I toddled out of Toronto in a U-Haul with sticks of furniture, my nose pointing due East towards a land of old dreams and, if I was fortunate, new chances.

To be clear, I was born in Hog Town, but I was raised in Halifax. And I had always claimed a form of dual citizenship with all the conflicting emotions that this implied: Ontario arrogance; Maritime pride (misplaced perhaps?); bluster and bravado; and just an insouciance of Nova Scotian humour and generosity.

Frankly, I suspect that this had been the cause of my restlessness since arriving in Toronto for a “good job” some five years earlier. What I know is that, in 1989, my bones ached to move down the road again, much to the consternation of my small, close circle of friends.

“You must be mad,” one exclaimed at hearing the news of my pending departure. “Why would you want to throw your career in the toilet to go hibernate in some East Coast outport?”

Others evinced similar displays of shock and dismay. After all, they insisted, the Maritimes was over, a victim of its dependence on federal transfer payments, a have-not region that absolutely will not pull itself up by the bootstraps and do what better regions do: Quit complaining and get to work.

They had a point. At 28, I was far too young to take such a risk (My God, my eldest son-in-law is now five years older than I was then!) But I didn’t have a choice. I had a notion, and that was to be my own boss.

Nowadays, my wife likes to observe slyly that I am utterly unemployable. Of course, she is correct.

Whatever devotion to a bi-weekly pay-pouch I once had – whatever willingness I had to blindly adhere to the prescriptions of a buffoonish boss (apart from me goodself, naturally) – was gone. And the bug that bit me those many years ago keeps biting, though the world threatens to tumble into economic disarray all over again.

Happily, I’m not alone on this, the last day of small business month in Canada.

The box scores on entrepreneurship have been in for some time.

According to Industry Canada, 98 per cent of businesses in this country employ fewer than 100 people. Between 2002 and 2008, roughly 100,000 small businesses emerged (and this doesn’t include the plentitude of “Mom and Pop” operations of the self-employed kind).

In 2011, small enterprises gainfully employed about five million individuals – roughly 48 per cent of the national labour force – and accounted for more than 30 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. In fact, between 2001 and 2010, little companies were responsible for creating a disproportionate number of jobs in the economy, given their commercial might: just over 43 per cent of the total.

As for people like me and my wife, the perpetually self-employed, we are the canaries in the national coal mine. The cohort to which we belong account for 15 per cent of all workers; we are far more vulnerable to the ups and downs in the economy than just about everybody else; and, of course, we don’t get EI (though we pay into it) when our adventures in entrepreneurship inevitable fade and die away.

But, again, that’s okay with me. Of all the bromides about enterprise to which I actually subscribe is the late, American management guru Peter Drucker’s: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

I’m also fond of Mark Twain’s: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from from the dafe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. . .Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

And the joke will always be on them.

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Oct 25 2014
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Personal History

The paradisiacal perils of entrepreneurship

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Over the past 40 years of a reasonably successful span in the world of work, I’ve held hundreds of jobs; but only six of them have been salaried or, perhaps more accurately, indentured. Throughout, I demanded my freedom.

The first found me as a “copy-boy” for The Canadian Press, working the weekend graveyard shift amid hard-smoking deskers who knew more about the affairs of mid-1970s porn stars than they did about their own jobs, let alone the terror of the 15-year-old boy they sent to the local pool hall for 2 am supplies of instant coffee.

The second saw me as a Pepsi-sponsored “junior sports reporter” for a Dartmouth AM radio station, where the best salary among on-air talent was $14,000 a year, and the best digs anyone there could afford was a bachelor-basement apartment, replete with hot plate, on the Halifax side of the harbour.

The third elevated me to “box-boy” for a major women’s apparel retailer at the Halifax Shopping Centre, where for $3.55 an hour I unpacked garments, organized hangers, swept floors, vacuumed carpets, and otherwise ducked the grandmotherly purpose of the elderly ladies who peddled the merchandise I placed in their parchment-white hands to pinch my cheeks whenever they were on break.

The fourth brought me to Toronto, where I laboured (mostly happily) to become the best “trencher” (i.e., novice reporter) the Globe and Mail had ever seen. As it happened, that didn’t.

Still, I managed to keep the job, despite the fact that I knew virtually nothing about the businesses and politicians I was assigned to cover. As my boss said at the time: “Bruce, justice demands that all of us have our buckets of shit to carry every once in a while. Just make sure you’re not one of mine.”

My fifth is hardly worth mentioning, if a nest of vipers is hardly worth remembering.

My sixth was for this newspaper as a writer and editor (for about ten minutes) in the first decade of the current century. Unlike my earlier experiences in the salary mills of this industry, it was an almost uniformly enjoyable experience. Lots of license. Plenty of authority. A multitude of talented writers from which to draw. And a not-bad salary to boot.

So why, after three months, was I itching to get out from under that efficacious boulder?

The only answer I’ve been able to credit with any degree of verisimilitude is that I had been ruined by the 90 per cent of my working life spent in various degrees of productive entrepreneurship.

To be clear, this has not meant that I have invented anything, or improved a manufacturing process in any way, or even inspired another to follow in my footsteps. It has just meant that, on balance, I have been happier working for myself than anyone else.

Why this is, is anyone in my own family’s guess. Some there say I am an unreconstructed narcissist. Some believe that I am a lazy ox, unwilling to hold down a “real job” and pull the plough till death do us part. Others simply don’t care. Oddly enough, neither do I.

The essence of entrepreneurship is freedom. Freedom to succeed. Freedom to fail. Freedom to begin again, over and over, just as you did when you were ten years old, and the world was a boat you floated in an icy May bay on the south shore of Nova Scotia, as you looked for a good wind to take you to the far shore – somewhere you had seen, coveted and had never visited, until, of course, you did.

Make no mistake, the darkness is coming. The good jobs have all gone. The salaried positions are winnowing. We, in this place, in this fine and decent plain on the planet, must rebuild the entrepreneurial culture that made this country possible.

We are the true heroes of our futures in this roundly, friendly, lovely, exquisitely elegant community that is New Brunswick.

Let us all be entrepreneurs. Let us all scratch that itch to be free.

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Sep 29 2014
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Humour, Personal History

Pearls of wisdom from the Buddha of showmen

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A casual acquaintance of mine (I’ll call him Cal Tripken), who makes a good living on the motivational speaking circuit in Toronto, sits across the table from me, picking calamari out of his teeth with a dessert fork.

“Sorry, dude,” he says. “I still don’t see what your problem is.”

Lunch is over and the cheque has arrived. I have a column to write, but I reckon I still have enough time to reiterate my predicament once more.

I have been asked to give a keynote address at business convention, I explain. I can say anything I want as long as it’s not scatological, pornographic or racist. My problem is that, in recent years, I have developed a morbid fear of public speaking.

Oh sure, I can write a screed for my city’s daily newspaper or for CBC radio that would, and often does, make a politician’s blood churn cold with rage, or an anti-shale gas activist’s dander jump like fleas from his overheated scalp. It doesn’t bother me at all; I sleep great.

But when faced with the prospect of speaking before a live audience of more than 20 people, my throat constricts, my palms sweat, and I cast a frantic glance over at the baby barn at the back of my garden and seriously wonder whether, with a few last-minute renovations, it might serve me well as a hermitage, where I might hole up for the rest of my life.

The curious thing about all of this is that when I was much younger, I was a professional stage actor who had no trouble – indeed, I relished – holding the attention of a theatre packed with between 500 and 1,000 patrons at a time.

So, I ask Cal, what gives. . .dude?

“Well,” he says, putting down the fork, “Let’s parse this. . .You are chiefly a political commentator. . .Correct?”

Correct.

“So, that means that you presumably know something about the subjects that interest you. . .Right?”

Right.

“Bro, there you have it. That’s the problem in a nutshell.”

He still has a little strand of squid stuck between his lateral incisor and canine teeth, which I decide to ignore.

“What are you talking about?” I say as I check my watch and hand my credit card to the sever, as her several, earlier attempts with Tripken’s plastic produced inconclusive results.

“It’s as clear as the frog in your throat. . .You’re too authentic. Your audience doesn’t want to hear what you really think. They want to hear what they think, in your voice. That lets them off them off the hook from actually having to think for themselves.”

Dear Buddha, do go on.

“Deep down, you know this; you’re just not admitting it to yourself. You can write a speech in the privacy of your own boudoir and rehearse it until the cows come home. But if it actually comes from you, what is really you, it’s always going to sound hollow to you when you’re giving it in front of a live audience. . .Frankly, my friend, you’ve forgotten your theatre training. Nowadays, it’s all about the show, baby.”

So, I venture, maybe I should put a pillow under my jacket and prance around the stage like an ersatz Richard III sounding fury and melancholia during speech. Or, perhaps, I should channel Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and scream “Stella!” at the top of my lungs before I segue into a dissertation about how a higher HST rate in New Brunswick will pay for. . .well, streetcars.

“Whatever, dude,” Cal says as he grabs a toothpick. “How do you think Ronald Reagan became the most beloved President of the United States in 50 years. It wasn’t because he was a policy genius. It was because he was an actor. . .And what about our very own Stephen Harper? Do you actually think that hard-talking Steverino means half the things he says. The guy plays soft rock on the piano. . .And in a sweater-vest, no less.

Tripken gets up to leave. “Now, I really gotta go and brush my teeth.”

I smile and, as I retrieve my credit card, say: “Oddly enough, so do I.”

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Aug 08 2014
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Personal History

Ode to a summertime moment

Beyond the headland, off to meet the horizon

Beyond the headland, off to meet the horizon

The view from the base of the old Ash that hangs precariously over the equally ancient woodshed at the edge of the family property on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore hasn’t changed in 75 years. Not, at least, in any way that you’d notice.

A ten-acre field of high grass stretches down to a spruce and fir tree line. A jumble of broken trunks and scrub give way to a tidal pond which nearly encircles a drumlin of scrappy forest that overlooks the mighty Chedabucto Bay.

You could walk a straight path from the shed to the shore, and do that all day, back and forth, and never meet another soul. This is, after all, a part of the world for the leaving of things, not for the returning.

According to a Statistics Canada survey, Guysborough is the least populous and prosperous county in Nova Scotia. The number of residents three years ago was just over 8,000, or roughly two for every square kilometer, earning $20,000 less in any given year than the average Haligonian.

In fact, the population has been shrinking (along with wages) since 1871, from a high of 16,555 to a low three years ago of 8,143, which was, itself, a 10 per cent drop since 2006.

What’s happened to Guysborough is now happening all across the Maritimes. This eastern district was merely among the first to send the flower of its youth to points west. Of course, the restless, generational search for work is bred in virtually all rural bones down here.

“Wave after wave of Maritimers have left their beloved homeland, rolling westward again and again to seek jobs up and down the Atlantic seaboard, in the American midwest and far west, in Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, British Columbia, and the northern territories,” my father, the writer Harry Bruce, penned in his lengthy love letter to the region, “Down Home”, in 1988. “Leaving Home has long outlasted the  golden age of sail as part of their heritage.”

Indeed, it has. But sometimes on a soft, mid-summer afternoon, when the view of the bay from the base of the old Ash is clear and bright, you get a rousing sense of alternatives. History need not always repeat itself in exactly the same nauseating way.

You cock your ear to the merry squeals of your three-year-old grandson robustly engaging a soccer ball and his substantially older (and vastly more patient) cousins on the field beside the main house.

Meanwhile, your sister and her husband are attempting to dislodge a toy airplane made of balsa wood from the lower canopy of a maple tree into which it has careened.

Evident experts on such matters, they take turns hurling various items, purloined from the woodshed, at the flyer, until a garden rake becomes firmly wedged in the elbow  of a large branch. Now airplane and rake appear determined to remain where they are until at least the first nor’easter blows through.

You could solve their problem in an instant. There’s a ladder in the shed next to the winter wood. But you wonder. . .

“Leave this to me,” you shout, as you leap from your perch and start bounding towards the maple.

You gaze straight up and with one determined leap wrap your arms and legs around the trunk and commence to shimmy in a manner that’s both workable and undistinguished.

Stepping nimbly among the branches, you manage to guide a homemade contraption from the sibling ground crew to their quarries and, eventually, shake loose both rake and flyer.

Safely back on the ground, you cheerfully accept the applause of your family and marvel at the sheer effort it has taken to coordinate this reunion – harder than climbing a tree at age 53 – in this most out-of-the-way spot in the backwoods of Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore, where the population has, nevertheless, if only for a summertime moment, spiked by eight.

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