Edward StMoritz

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This is how they get in…

So there I am at the half moon window in the Bohemia loft, Sunday morning, writing away with my trusty fountain pen, when a familiar feeling comes to me.

Tightness in the chest, building pressure into pain travelling up the neck into my ears.

Ah shit, not again. Third time’s a charm.

I try to continue writing but the pain renders my handwriting nearly illegible.

I wait for ten minutes, trying to breathe it away. Angina usually disappears in that time.

Half an hour later it’s still there.

Pack up, walk slowly downstairs, tell the servers what’s happening. I sit. Or rather I get told to to sit. One of them is a fourth year nursing student. She holds my hand and talks me through.

Call 911.

The ER nurse finds out I’m a musician. Her daughter is a jazz singer in Toronto. We talk about music and how she hates country music and its affected drawls. I said there should be a country song about an ER unit.

“Totally!” she says.

And I say,

“Yeah, something like, ‘Who’s boots are under your bed? And why are there feet in them?”

Good ol’ dark ER humour.

We laughed ourselves silly and highfived. “I’m so gonna remember that!” she said.

More tests, More waiting. It’s a patient time in all the senses of the word. I think people are so afraid of nothing happening that they fear the fear inside themselves of the unknown.

I sit – or lie down – with the unknown, with the dark, with the fear, offer them a glass of water and have conversations with them. Quiet ones. It’s totally useless to scream or complain to the unknown, fearful dark. It just listens and doesn’t answer. And the nurses and the staff and the doctors are doing their best in an increasingly tight situation.

So I wait. Listen to the beeps, the muffled voices, the complaints from the other rooms. I have my phone with me, and call family and friends. Blood taken. EKG and printouts – ticker tape, eh?

Victoria is there. My son and his wife come up from Toronto. I get a call from my other son in BC.

I call my former spouse. Sister. Brother.

The night is not good. Hospital beds are not made for sleeping. I get news the next morning that I am due, at the very least, for an angiogram, or quite possibly an angioplasty. Just to make sure. I get a heart ultrasound. I hear the whoosh and suck of that fist-sized pump in my chest.

I get my wrist shaved. I get my groin shaved. I refrain mightily from making jokes about that.

Just before I go to the procedure room, I hand my watch, my wedding ring, and my glasses to the nurse for Victoria to pick up. She already has my wallet, my journal, and my notes. I’m glad I didn’t bring my guitar. I am denuded of everything except my body as I am wheeled into the hallway next to the inner sanctum.

I am in an existential paradox of being utterly alone and surrounded by love.

The nurse tells me about the medications they use to calm the patients. Apparently the effect of one of them is,

“It makes the patient not care about what’s happening to them. They look around the room and say, ’Oh that’s a nice clock on the wall, or ceiling tile pattern.”

“I know the name of that drug.” I say.

She gives me a quizzical look.

“Oh?”

I say,

“Yup. It’s called Fuckitol.”

It’s a large room. A bed. Arm rests, foot rests. Robotic controlled x-ray machines. Huge video screens. The prep is quick and efficient. Everybody, including myself is covered in lead-lined protective sheets.

Pin pricks in the wrist. Insert the guide tube for the catheter. I see a bit of bright blood and I don’t faint. Good so far. And sure enough they find a blockage. Two of them. I can see them on the video screen. I am fascinated, not just at the technology and the skill of the surgeon and procedure room nurses, but at what my cardiac arteries look like.

Spiders. Monsters. Tree branches moving in the wind, back and forth with the beating of my heart.

And in just over a half an hour, it’s done. Two stents in. I don’t remember being wheeled back into recovery. The Fuckitol must have been really good. There is an inflatable pressure bandage on my wrist. I’m told in no uncertain terms not to move it, or pick anything up with that arm.

It’s a plastic hollow strap with a filling valve attached. A syringe-like pump adjusts the air pressure. It looks interesting enough to try it out, so I insert the pump into the valve. What I don’t know is that inserting the pump opens the valve, releasing the pressure.

Immediately I start leaking red stuff like a river. Silly me. I don’t know how to stop it. I say some words to the effect of, “Dear me.” the nurse hears, looks, rushes over and says, “Oh, don’t do that!”

Yes, that is what she said. Had I been in her position, I would have said something quite different.

There was blood all over the place. She pumps more air into the bandage, and cleans up. I am very careful from then on. I don’t faint. I’m getting better at this.

I’m in recovery, sending and getting messages of reassurance and support. Victoria is there. Johanne comes later with Elijah. One more overnight. And then I’m home.

This genetic predisposition is irritating and life-threatening. It’s like living with a small bomb inside you, a constant and insistent reminder of the shortness, the unpredictability, the amazing preciousness of this thing we call life.

I’m grateful. That’s all I can say. Right now it’s all I need to say.

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(Warning: I use one swear word)

It’s one week and a bit into the new year. How are your resolutions going?

You know the ones I mean.

Lose weight. Eat better. Patch up fractious relationships. Some kind of self-improvement regimen gyms, health food stores, and therapists really like to see.

Be more environmentally conscious. That sort of thing.

A decision to change a behaviour or take up a new way of being-in-the-world.

And then the plastic Carrot to the south starts a war, and we all feel, “What is the fucking point?”

But enough about that. Let us resolve not to talk about the plastic Carrot.

For now. Politics will most assuredly come up in the near future.

And you see how I used the word, “resolve” in that sense of making a decision that leads to action.

The mindset of “This is what I am going to do.” The mind committing itself to an action.

There are so many variations of the understanding and meaning of this word:

Resolution: a formal opinion of a legislative body about a certain issue;

Resolution: the disintegration, physical or chemical, of an object or a substance into its component parts;

Resolution: the quality of an image, projected, screened, or printed – the higher the resolution, the smaller the component parts of the image, resulting in a sharper focus of the object seen or detected.

Resolution: the quality of a determined state of mind;

Resolution: solving a problem, a question, a doubt.

Resolution: the intention of an individual to undertake certain actions in order to lead a more virtuous life, commonly done on or before New Year’s Day;

That last one is the meaning I started out with.

Apparently, the ancient Babylonians made resolutions in their new year to return borrowed objects and pay off debt. (Is anyone thinking of anyone else at this point? You got their phone number?)

The definition of resolution being the separating of an object or a substance into its constituent parts reminds me of something I did when I was a wee lad.

I was fascinated by alarm clocks. You remember the kind that had two bells on top and a clapper in between, and the two keys in the back that wound up the two springs inside, one for the clockworks and the other for the alarm. The small knurled knobs to set the time. The small lever to adjust the time’s accuracy. The screws that held everything together.

Of course at my age then I knew nothing about what all that stuff was for. I just knew there was something inside I wanted to see. I figured how to unscrew the knobs. I figured out that I could use a table knife to untwist the screws. And when I opened the back, what a wonder to behold! All the different metal circles with teeth connected to each other in a metal frame of levers and pins. I saw the two springs. I saw things move, as if on their own. It was like a compact Meccano® set on steroids.

And then more screws to unscrew. And I did just that until there, on the kitchen table, spread out in the chaos of resolution, was the eviscerated alarm clock.

That resolution of separating the parts, however, needed a resolution, a solution to a certain problem.

I did not know how to put the thing back together. So there the parts lay until parents found out and yelled at me. No resolution there to be found. Childhood – good times, good times.

There is another resolution I am thinking of, being a musician.

Resolution: Musically speaking, it’s what a cadence does. It’s what a piece of music does usually at the end, and often various times in the middle, that brings a sense of finality, of coming home.

You can do this yourself, musical or not.

Sing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, but stop when you get to the words “What you.”

Just stop there. Don’t continue. Don’t sing the word “are”.

I said stop there. Thank you.

Ask yourself, “Am I finished?”

Sing it again, stopping at the same place, as if the piece actually ended there on the words “what you”. Take note of how you feel. Repeat.

It doesn’t feel quite done, does it? Sit there for a moment with that unresolved feeling, because what you are feeling is essentially the history of Western music. It is a constant journey from the unresolved to the…

Now sing the song again and complete it with the word “are” and its corresponding note.

There. That felt better, didn’t it?

You have arrived at a resolution. It’s called a cadence. Specifically a “Sol” – “Do” cadence. Or a 5 – 1. Or a V – I. Or a Perfect Cadence. It is the Great Attractor of Western musical language.

Listen to the final minute (starts at 11:02) of the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It is a whole series of Five – Ones. Sol – Do – Sol – Do – Sol – Do and so on. (You can listen to the whole movement – it’s a thrilling piece of music.)

But he ends on Do. On the one. Mr. Beethoven has arrived home.

I might even venture to say that our feeling of wanting to come home in music reflects a desire for our New Year’s resolutions to bring us to a place where we feel more at home in ourselves and in the world.

And that might be the best New Year’s resolution of all.

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December 30, 2019

Photo credit: Laura Frederick

Time passes. Tempus fugit and all that. The calendar turns yet another arbitrary number and we hear the cries of “Here we go again! This year will be the best of all!”

That and jokes about 2020 vision.

I am reminded of someone simpler. Her name is Billie. It’s the name of one of my guitars. I named it after, yes, THAT Billie.

Billie Holiday.

My Billie is a Gibson guitar. Let me tell you a story.

Some years ago I found myself in the Halifax Folklore Centre. It is a dangerous place for me. I was on the hunt for a tenor guitar when I spied with my little eye a lovely specimen hanging from the ceiling beam.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a Gibson L3. Wanna try it?”

Do I like ice cream?

He brought it down for me. Small, parlour size. Carved top and back. “The Gibson” inlaid on the headstock. Narrow frets, almost wires. An ancient manufacturer’s sticker on the inside with the model and serial number written in pencil. Black varnish worn from the first to third position on a “V” shaped neck – no truss rod, then.

This was an old guitar. I played it. Beautiful, bold, brassy. Lead licks sounded, oh, so sweet. Rhythm could cut through damn near anything.

How old?

“1914” the man at the counter said. “Previous owner couldn’t play anymore because of arthritis. He’d had it for a very long time.”

Long story short, I took her home with me. I christened her Billie.

And she’s been with me ever since. She is 106 years and wears her age well.

She was born when the first world war began in Europe, one year before the real Billie Holiday came to this earth. When Ernest Shackleton survived his Antarctic expedition without losing a man in his crew. Not even twenty years had passed since Louis Riel was tried, convicted and hanged in a five day, trumped-up trial in Winnipeg. The great depression. The Winnipeg General Strike. Lived through second war, the Korean war, the cold war, the Cuban missile crisis. She was born before amplifiers. When 78’s were all the rage with the Charleston and the Flappers, and Prohibition. When Al Capone did business in the backwoods of Eastern Ontario.

Open tunings on her sound magical, harplike. I have had her re-fretted, made some changes so she could be plugged into a sound system.

And I can already hear the purists say, “Ohmigawd, why are you doing that to a collector’s item?”

I will tell you why.

Billie is meant to be played, to make music, to bring joy to a desperate world. I refuse to hang her on a wall and show her off like some hoarder’s trinket, to value her worth as an appraised resale item.

No, sir. Billie is meant to make music. Billie Holiday, “Lady Day”, one of the most influential musicians in vocal jazz and pop culture in the mid-twentieth century, died when she was only 44 from her demons, both the ones inside her and the ones who mistreated her.

My Gibson has outlived her two and a half times. I call her Billie to honour the memory. To keep the music going.

(The recording you hear on this blog edition is an original song, “Boogie with the Reaper” played on the Gibson. It will appear on my upcoming CD, “Caught” (c) 2017 Edward St Moritz)

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December 18, 2019

It is snow squally out there. I am thinking of this day way back when. I am also thinking that the picture of me in that photo is when I was about six years younger than the present age of the boy who in that picture is much more interested in the cake.

Three days ago was our oldest son’s birthday. Thirty-five years ago, Monday, December 17, 1984, mom’s water broke and we made a hair-raising, mid-winter, sixty kilometre trip from a small eastern Ontario village north to the hospital in Renfrew.

They examined mom and ready-to-go child and told us that we needed to go another hour and a half to Ottawa Civic. Her by ambulance and me following in the car. This was unexpected. And to us the inexperienced first to be parents, it was confusing. Was something wrong? Why was the umbilical cord lower than the baby about to see the world?

I had just started my post as a United Church clergy that summer. Elaine was pregnant and we were excited on both counts. As the days came closer we realized that we might have a Christmas kid. Sorta like Jesus?

Well not quite.

At least it was snowing lightly.

We arrived, and upon further examination, Elaine had to make the difficult but necessary decision to have a Caesarean. At the time I was not permitted to be in the room. Good thing too, I would have had to have some extra care, having passed out on the floor

Simon introduced himself to the world the following day. He was in an incubator while mom was recovering from the surgery.

There, behind the glass, was a piece of Elaine, a piece of me, and an entirely whole new burgeoning consciousness. Simon Edward. I felt awestruck, realizing that there was a living, breathing, and entirely helpless representation of past, present, and future, lying there.

Elaine was doing well after the surgery. Friends in Ottawa said we could use their apartment for a week as a staging place to recover and prepare our homeward trip while they were away. I phoned the church to tell them the news, and they were so happy for us. Was I going to take the service that following Sunday? Elaine and I had talked about that, it was Wednesday, and yes, but only for the services, I’d be taking the rest of the week off.

I think that’s what I said. It was thirty-five years ago.

I phoned Elaine’s family, and they were ecstatic.

And then I phoned my father.

“So why did you make me a grandfather?”

It was a short, awkward conversation.

Sigh. Some people take aging so hard.

So how to compress thirty-five years into a couple of hundred words?

You don’t even try. All I can do is think of Simon and his partner and her daughter living and working in Halifax. All grown up now. I tell him about my writing stuff and he refers me to an early twentieth-century literary theorist. When I talk with him it’s like he’s cradling my spirit. He tells me that my time as clergy and the way I treated people was a major influence in the way he is in the world. He’s not Christian, and I’m no longer one, but somehow that makes no difference anymore.

In a world that steadfastly refuses to humanize damn near everything, we are trying to be good humans.

Sorta like Jesus.

Maybe we did have a Christmas baby.

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So what happens when the body wants to collapse in the throes of a confusing mix of memory, grief, and the sheer horror of existence?

At work?

My day job is a receiver for a local health food and supplement store. One of my regular drivers (Let’s call him Brian, of course not his real name) came in the other day with his product and a long face. I was in the middle of processing an order, so I looked up, nodded, and finished up.

As I was doing so, he said, “Good move.”

I said, “How so?”

He said, “You didn’t ask me how I am.”

Well, now, of course, I’m going to. After six years of working with my drivers, I get to know them. Treat them well. You know, like human beings. One of them described the receiving bay as a sanctuary, a place of calm in the middle of a gale of daily shitstorms.

So I look at him, and say, “You realize that is a perfect opening.”

“I suppose so,” he replied.

Brian told me a relative died of a fentanyl overdose. He had chronic health problems and all the associated issues with addiction, drugs, alcohol and such.

And no matter how they tried this time, those close to him couldn’t save him. Even the ones who gave the drug to him.

“I could never understand that nyou know.” Brian was truly puzzled. Not a tone of judgment in his voice. “Isn’t there a point where you could say no, a point where you refuse because you know it’s going to harm you? And then why you keep on doing it?”

Yes, it’s supremely difficult to understand, I told him. But addiction doesn’t work with a simple yes or no. The comfort you get from the drug or the alcohol or whatever you choose (or whatever chooses you) overrides the capacity for a reasonable argument against it.

And the roots of that search for comfort are deeper than you know. (See the link below for an interview with Dr. Gabor Maté.)

In most cases that search begins with childhood trauma. And when I told him that, he pointed his finger at me and said, “That’s it.”

I waited.

“His grandparents raised him. His father burned down their house with his mother still in it.”

And that was when the grief of the whole thing overwhelmed me, that combination of horror and sadness, coupled with my own memories and stories of my family: my mother’s memories of the Japanese concentration camps, my father’s stories about the Great Hunger in the last year of the German occupation of Holland, and how that trauma played out as they raised me, my sister, and brother when they tried to make their life in Canada.

More than half a century in the space of a few seconds. The weight of all that nearly drove me to my knees. Add to that Brian’s story.

I found myself trying to support my body by leaning into the top of the chest freezer.

I heard his voice to me, “Ed, come back. Come back, Ed. Back to receiving.”

He knew what was happening.

“Are you okay?”

“Give me a moment,” I said.

And he did.

And I did return.

As I write this in a local café, I am hearing a song by Dan Mangan with the words “What is this sorrow?”

Indeed.

For an excellent overview of what this sorrow is and what addiction is and does, listen to Dr. Gabor Maté here.

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What are you? Who are you? These are questions I would rather ask than “What do you do?” at cocktail parties.

Mind you, I can count on one hand the number of cocktail parties I have been to. Sad, sordid affairs, they were. Little groups bunched together trying to make conversation before the drink or boredom renders them inarticulate, belligerent or both.

I am a musician. I am a father. And I am a son. I am a husband, twice. I consider myself to have had the privilege of partaking of this province’s mental health facilities.

On my business card I describe myself as a singer songwriter, among other things, and a darkside navigator.

That last one always raises eyebrows and questions. Without fail.

“What is that?”

Let me sing you the song of my people.

The description does what I want it to do: makes people ask that question so I can answer it like this:

I am a darkside navigator, because, at least for my part of the world, I have been sailing the deep, grey, featureless waters of depression, melancholy, and anxiety for a very long time. Some of it medicated, most of it without.

I have an idea where the shoals are. I narrowly miss the rocks and the breakers that can send me to an unreachable bottom. I have been in the flat waters of windless weeks and the motor out of gas. I have been a resident of the Slough of Despond.

This familiarity has given me a paradoxical gift. I have learned to name names, the markers, the landmarks, the lighthouses. I can see the way the wind flows over the water, I can sometimes use the way the currents take my vessel and navigate it out of dangerous places. I always see other sailors on these waters. We wave and signal. Sometimes we are close enough to speak.

“Where are you from?”

“Where are you going?”

“Do you have enough to eat and drink to make the voyage?”

I know what it is like to feel terribly alone when I awake in the morning and lie staring at the way the bedsheet folds in front of my eyes and wonder if I should get up at all today.

I cannot drift. That is why I navigate. If I drift I will sink. I have to navigate, to use what is in front of me and inside me to get me to wherever today’s destination is. It could be work. It could be the guitar I am using to write or play a song. It could be with friends I trust with nothing else but my heart. It could be dinner tonight with my bride.

It could be getting my feet on the bedroom floor and getting dressed.

This is not an exercise in positive thinking. Being positive is less of a solution than a slow-acting poison of denial.

So when people ask, “What is a darkside navigator?” I tell them.

It’s who I am.

It’s the beginning of a conversation.

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We called it the lurgie, from a hilariously wacky British radio comedy called the “Goon Show”. (link goes to their last show on BBC)

It was a cold, really. Or any kind of upper respiratory viral nastiness that made me sick enough to be up in the wee hours of the morning singing the song of its people.

That and a week of hard physical and mental labour at a job that does not provide sick days because of a provincial fiat removing that particular requirement from employers in the guise of “efficiencies”, I was essentially working sick because I could not afford to take the time off to get better.

Which meant that the weekend of Thanksgiving and my Queen Schweetie’s birthday had me a trainwreck of body and mood.

Nevertheless, I did put out the news of my discomfort on the electrons of social media, and my lovely friends offered many remedies.

I list them below in no particular order or efficacy:

A juice glass of Napoleon Brandy just before bed. Drink it like water. (I liked this one);

Vicks Vaporub® on the soles of my feet and socks over them, again just before retiring. (This brings back memories of the Vicks on my chest and throat and under the nose as a child);

Gargling warm salt water. (this one, too);

A Chinese cough syrup that is sweet enough to double as pancake syrup;

Oil of Oregano. (I can attest that this is a good thing. The taste is bloody awful – think of a distillation into a dropper of every spaghetti dinner with tomato sauce you’ve ever had, into the back of your throat. But it really, really works!);

Honey and fresh ginger tea. Laced with cayenne and diced raw onion. (This is good, too. I like to slice fresh turmeric and ground black pepper into the mix);

Hot bath with a cup of tea with rum. Or cup of rum with tea. (I don’t have a bath tub. Drinking tea and/or rum in the shower doesn’t seem to do it for me);

Natural honey and cinnamon (Always good for what ails you).

The kindness of friends knows no bounds. My thanks to you – you know who you are.

As of this writing I am feeling a bit better. The night cough has lessened and doesn’t sound as if I’m horking a lung out on the pillow.

And the brandy tasted good. I bought a Bowmore single malt for reinforcement.

I believe the Lurgie is leaving the building

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And here’s the thing.

I finished a gig at the Haliburton Highlands brewery about a month ago. It’s in an area of the province where I served as a United Church Minister for five years back in 1987 – 1992.

It was the place that when scarce years after I had been ordained I started to doubt my calling to the ministry.

There were friends I had made outside the church, because, at the time, it was not a good idea to make too many within the walls of the sanctuary.

The long and short of it was some ten years after I moved on from that place, the initial doubts about my calling turned into a full-fledged crisis of faith and sanity. I became seriously mentally unfit to do the work that hitherto I thought I had been called to. I quit the church and the Christian faith.

More than a decade and a half later I return as someone different, but the same.

Besh, an old friend of mine, had written in a post commenting on a picture of me in dog-collared finery, staring out at the camera, glasses slightly askew, a deer in the headlights of Jesus.

This is what he said:

“Thank you for your service, Ed.”

That was it.

Besh had never been a member of my congregation, indeed never been in any area where I had served.

Somehow he understood on a level far deeper than what I was able to perceive at the time, that what I had done in the years as minister was serve in a strange way comparable to what he had done in the Armed Forces.

And he identified with that action in such a way so as to thank me for that service.

We met a few weeks later for breakfast in the town where I live. When I mentioned this to him, he pointed out, “You never know how many hundreds or even thousands of people you touched and changed because of your time in that capacity.”

Indeed I don’t. People shared with me their grief, celebration, perplexity, doubt, joy, frustration, accomplishment, courage, and vulnerability. I listened and did what I could. And I tried to interpret the teachings of a first-century Palestinian rabbi to a twentieth-century mind. Sometimes I was clear. Most times I was as confused as the rest of us human beings.

And now, no longer in that arena, I play in another one. Sometimes clear, most times still confused.

Still amazed, humbled, and grateful.