A Word from Rumi

[image from houstonnuevavida.org]

Undressing

Learn the alchemy true human beings know.

The moment you accept what troubles

you've been given, the door will open.

Welcome difficulty, as a familiar comrade.

Joke with torment brought by the Friend.

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes

and jackets that serve to cover

and then are taken off.

That undressing,

and the naked body underneath,

is the sweetness that comes after grief.

—Rumi

SHINE

(Raymond Brian "Brick" Baker, my dad)

Music is part of my heritage. It's in my genes. I was conceived, marinated and raised in music, and from the time I was small, I wanted to be a singer. My father had begun as a classical violinist, but had then fallen in love with jazz. Still in his youth, he switched to alto sax and clarinet and joined a band, to the dismay of his parents. Ever after, they rued the day they bought him his first saxaphone, blaming the music scene for his subsequent alcoholism and the downhill turning of his life, which had begun so full of promise.

My dad was hugely talented, and he bitterly watched lesser musicians, with whom he had played as a young man, pass him by and rise to some measure of success and fame. He never made the connection between his drinking and his inability to hold a job for long, in the music field or out of it. He had a very hard time with the emergence of rock 'n roll, and used to sit snorting with disgust at the television. "That's not music!" When in his cups, he'd stick out his tongue at the set and make a blowing noise: "Phphphphphphphphphphphpht!" But he was too transfixed with rage to change the channel.

Because of him, and because all the other kids loved them and I wanted to be different, I didnt immediately swoon over Elvis and the Beatles. The music of the '40's serenaded my life: Pennies From Heaven, I'll Get By, Stardust, As Time Goes By. They still have the power to take me right back, to my parents' lives in Kelowna. It is the love songs of their era, not mine, that I remember best.

(My folks on the dock in Kelowna, late 40's)

My mother liked to tell how my dad taught me, at age fifteen months, to do the musician's backwards hand-clap, on the knee, to the beat: "choo-whish-te-choo, whish-te-choo", and how I had the tempo down pat. Nights when the party atmosphere had not yet degenerated into shouting and the crashing of fallen bodies in the living room, sometimes they would get me out of bed, in my ratty plaid dressing gown, to perform for the company. I'd wail winsomely "Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe", do a self-taught little dance routine with a big grin, then go back to bed, feeling like a star. It was only a matter of time until I'd be discovered.

I longed to play an instrument. I would stand beside friends as they played the piano, looking at the musical notes I could not decipher, with tears in my eyes. Music was a magical language and I uninitiated into its mystery. I ached with longing to sit at the keyboard and play, express all the music I felt so strongly inside me. I asked my mother for lessons. But we were poor; she said she didnt want to waste the money.

All I had was my battered little boxed record player. I would close my bedroom door, turn it on, leave the world of pain and confusion I lived in behind me, and enter a new one, filled with music, hope and the dream of a better life.

There was high excitement when my dad came home on the weekend with new albums; in those days they were 33 and a thirds. One time he bought five, a rare extravagance in our circumstances, then got drunk and sat on them, smashing them before he'd even played them all.

I was twelve when I bought my first record with my babysitting money. It was a 45: "Twilight Time". My dad hovered anxiously as I put it on the turntable. As its slow notes and pure tones sounded, he relaxed. "I guess I dont have to worry about your taste in music," he approved. High praise!

(My dad on the wharf on Okanagan Lake in Kelowna, likely in the late 40's)

Briefly, my mom did allow singing lessons when I was eleven. I was sent to an aged old nun, who sat at the keyboard resignedly plunking out the notes, bored and disinterested, as I stood in my school uniform and sang "There Was a Little Green Elf" without conviction. I even was entered into a singing competition and somehow managed to get through it without disgracing myself. Nor did I stun those assembled with an electrifying performance. I just couldnt get too worked up about a little green elf. (I can still remember that song today!) My mother and father sat in the audience, one of the only times I remember them attending an event of mine. The judges, bored, noted down my mark without enthusiasm. It was clear that this was not to be my fast track to fame. I stopped going to lessons and returned to my preferred music, about love and pain.

Also briefly, my mother enrolled me for ballroom dance lessons, to help me with the awkward passage from twelve to teen. There was one shining evening when I performed at the Stanley Park tea room, and stole the show from a roomful of adult performers. Somewhere there's a photograph of me groovin' to the beat, the instructor beaming down at me as I did the Swing, glowing and laughing into the camera.

But it was with my records, in the privacy of my room, where I unleashed my real voice, the voice of my longing, that no one but my long-suffering family ever heard.

I was in my Grandma's back room listening to the radio when I first heard Brenda Lee on the radio. I stood stock still with a shock of recognition. She was singing her big hit "I'm Sorry", and I recognized that her vocal range was exactly like mine. I could sing like her! I had to get her records! I was further excited when the announcer said she was only thirteen years old, like me: a little bitty girl with a great big voice, who was already a star.

Brenda Lee saw me through my teens. My mother called what I did up in my room "coon shouting", as I balefully sang with all the dramatic anguish of my teens. I thought a coon was an animal, and didnt get the connection. I vaguely pictured some men out in the bush, hollering for raccoons. It was only later that I realised, with a start, that it was a racial slur, intended to diminish that heartfelt singing that expressed all the pain I had no words for, all those bright dreams that one day I would lose the acute self-consciousness that prevented me from being the person I knew I was meant to be. One day I would spread my wings and fly beyond this life of pain and limitation. As long as I could sing like this in my room, the possibility existed that one day I would sing before an audience, and they would like it. They would like me. One day I would shine.

It didnt happen. My stronger need was to provide myself with the kind of home and family I hadnt yet experienced, the story book life promised by all the books and movies and the songs that fed my dreams. Marriage, babies and heartbreak claimed the next two decades of my life.

I didnt sing at all during my marriage. But after it, music once again claimed my soul and rode along with me. My children remember me singing. I sang along with Abba, with Joan Baez, with Stevie Knicks, with The Bells, the Beatles and Elton John. In my little house full of children, I sang for the joy of living, for the morning breaking, for the dream of a love that had not yet come. I sang for happiness and hope. I sang the song that was mine.

I have become a great appreciater and encourager of musicians, of anyone with talent. I want them to not be held back by what had held me back. "Go for it!" I tell them. "You're terrific! Shine on!" I encourage them to throw off all the self-consciousness I had not been able to conquer, to feel "good enough", to assume the confidence I was unable to muster. To believe in themselves as I had not been able to, and to go for their dreams. Part of my encouragement is vicarious; they can do what I did not, can live that part of the dream for me, that alternate reality, that road untaken, due to the circumstances that shaped my early world.

Years when I worked in a coffeehouse, I was the most rapt of listeners, the music inside me still aching for release, but this time flying along on the fingers and voices of others. The musicians always said they didnt need a big audience as long as they had me to listen to them :)

Music is still a passion, and I still cant play a single instrument, still am too inhibited to leap about at dances and release the beat pounding within me, to set it free. I stopped singing some years back; I lost my voice when I got ill. It is enough now to listen, to applaud others in their golden moments, to join my being with its music to the All That Is, the great song of life.

Acceptance finally comes that it is too late to be a young star rising; too late to be the youngest published author in Canada; too late to be the person I once dreamed that I would be.

But it isnt too late, it is never too late, to shine.

BROCK AND FRIENDS

The original coffeehouse with Lea-Ann's clothes hung out to dry :)

There are wounds that leave no scars, and I'm sure there isnt a person living on the planet who doesnt carry a fair share of them. My psyche bears the imprint of my beginnings in a violent, alcoholic household. It took years for the scar tissue to form around my numb and frightened heart, decades more to scrape away the layers and rediscover its beating presence within.

My childhood had been followed by a soul-crushing marriage, and then an affair with a man who time revealed to be a con man and an alcoholic. Now I was alone. For years I lived only for and with my four children. I felt safe only with them, beating a path between the library, grocery store and home. We did everything together. We hiked up Knox Mountain to fly kites on the grassy slopes, we went to the lake, or for bike rides, me leading the way on my big bike, the kids trailing behind me on their smaller ones like a brood of ducklings. My entertainment was their all-night sleepovers, when they danced and played and had popcorn fights, and I was their audience.

When I found Brock and Friends coffeehouse in Kelowna in 1980, there was a fozen Siberian wasteland living in my chest. I looked out at the world through frightened eyes. But something drew me through that door - something that wanted me to live.

I was shy, self-conscious almost to the point of muteness. But the minute I stepped through the door, something in my spirit knew I had come home. Here was the other side of life I had been searching for, here were dreamers and seekers, people who lived gently on the earth and with each other. Here people were accepted as they were; people gave freely, unafraid, unconditionally. Here people who felt they didnt fit in anywhere else, fit in. I watched people come in the door and be greeted warmly, by name, and wondered: Could there ever be a day when I'll be one of those people?

Brock and I in the new bigger coffeehouse. I preferred the old one.

In this little old house full of plants and stained glass and glorious music, my life turned down another pathway. Out of their abiding kindness, they offered me acceptance and safety and space just to be. My life as I now know it could never have been, had I not walked through that door.

The coffeehouse was run by volunteers, so I pushed through my shyness and put my name down for some shifts. Local musicians signed on for evening performances and, irresistably, the music drew me forth.

Brock loved the stage :)

At first, I was afraid to come out of the kitchen. I prepared the food, served it, then scuttled back to wipe down the counters, over and over. People were kind to me. They never pushed. They were the same to me whether I was happy or sad, mute or awkward. Still, if a man came into the kitchen and walked up too close to me, I froze completely. It was easier with the women.

Brock often said, "Come out and enjoy the music, Sherry. You dont have to stay in the kitchen."

Brock was a true clown. I never laughed so much in my life as I did with him.

In time I crept as far as the doorway, to watch and listen. Finally, I leaned up against an old treadle sewing machine just inside the door, and let the music take me away. I listened with an ache that was almost physical. All my life, I had wanted tp sing. Buit my self-conscious "not good enough" inner self held me back. I sang in private. Once, thinking I was alone, I was singing along with the tape deck as I chopped vegetables in the kitchen. Brock came out of his office and said "Sherry, you should be singing here with the others. You have such a beautiful voice."

Too shy. Too self-conscious. One part of me trying to break and fly free, the other holding me to the earth.

Lea-Ann with the voice of an angel

Magical evenings happened in that coffeehouse. Once after a public performance, some musicians from a symphony orchestra came to the coffeehouse and jammed with the local musicians. One of the regulars, Roger Sparks, had written a song called Gentle Jonathan about his brother's suicide. It was one of our favorite numbers. The musicians took that melody and improvised a fifteen minute riff on it that was utterly magical. Everyone was blown away.

At the end of the evening, as we were closing up, Brock came up to me and, for the first time, gave me a hug. "What a magical evening this was!" he said.

Lea-Ann, Brock and Roger, tuning up

I walked home under the stars with an awakening heart. Other than my children, this was the first hug anyone had given me in many years. I woke up the next morning in tears. I was coming alive, and it was painful.

I called Brock. "It hurts to feel! It was easier to be frozen!"

"No, dont ever say that," Brock chided. "It is always better to feel, to be alive. If you dont feel the pain, you cant feel the joy either."

It was while Brock and I were chopping vegetables side by side in the kitchen one afternoon, giggling and joking, that I realized I was standing next to a man and that I trusted him. I had never trusted a man vefore. But Brock was as safe as a brother. He had given me space and acceptance and time to heal from the traumas of the past and, unforced, the bud of my being slowly began to unfurl.

I realized I was giving of myself, and getting back something I never had, the sunshine of others' joy, and a reflection of myself I had never seen before, in all of my friends' eyes. What I gained in those years was so much more than what I gave. I gained back my life there, the life I was meant to live as the person I was meant to be. No small gift.

Here, I found my true home, and a family.

Myself, my dear friend Jeane and Guy, the "regulars"

Now, when I walked in the door, other faces lit up and called happily to me. One day while I was cleaning the toilet, down on my knees, scrubbing away, feeling satisfied that I was tending those I loved so caringly, the realization hit me: "THIS is the love I've been seeking all my life." I had thought I longed for a partner to give love to me and fill the empty places that had lived in me unfilled my whole life. Instead, it was in giving love, that I was filled. It was a revelation.

I began to write again, and to flower, and my shyness fell away. The coffeehouse marked a turning point in my life, set me on a kinder path than the walkways I had traveled, pointed me in the direction of my dreams. From that time on, I was on my own journey. I was on my way.

We had poetry nights. One evening the little Suzuki violin players came and played for us. Musicians both famous and not famous played for us, many of the undiscovered with surpassing talent. I adored the music and was expressive in my appreciation. Strangely, while the local bars were packed, most evenings we had only a scattered handful of people to enjoy the amazing offerings. Bu the musicians used to say "We dont need an audience when we have Sherry," because I loved it all so much.

One day Brock told me, "You must know you're a healer, Sherry, dont you?" I did not know. I only knew I was happiest in giving. I took home and housed one or another of the young girls who found the coffeehouse, until they found somewhere of their own to live. At the cofeehouse, as we prepared the food, there was so much laughter, there were times I could hardly stand up from laughing so hard.

Jeff with his face painted. Lisa and Steph were around there somewhere

One glorious afternoon, we had an outdoor musicfest in a huge grassy field outside of town. As a Celtic band called Mullingar began to fiddle their lively jigs, spontaneously most of the audience leaped up and began to dance and whirl all over the field in a glorious circle, against the setting sun. A moment that will live in memory forever.

Four year old Stephanie is on Guy's shoulders

I longed to join them, envied their joy and abandon, remained stalk-still at the edge of the field, imprinting the sight on my retina.

By the time the coffeehouse closed, a few years later, I stood on the stage and addressed eight hundred people, telling them of my gratitude for the years we had shared. One of the women came up to me later with tears in her eyes and said "Your power and your beauty made me cry."

Brock and Friends healed the inner wounds, and gave me wings to fly. With music and kindness and time and gentleness, they raveled a warm cloak of love around me that I carried with me forever after. I tip my hat to the universe for those golden years, when I burst out of my shell of pain and emerged into the land of the living, assisted by the kind folk at Brock and Friends, my family for all time.

My time there had been al about following one's heart and so, the next leap was a huge, trusting move to Tofino, the home of my dreams. Tofino was like one big coffeehouse, full of the alternative lifestyle folk with whom I feel most at home. I came out of myself even more, but still sang and danced only when I was alone.

In Tofino, at every musical event, the entire crowd became a palpitating, writing mass of ecstatic gyration. I was far more open now, much braver. But still not liberated from my self-consciousness enough to get out of my seat and gyrate with the crowd. I thrummed with the beat of the drums all through my being, but could not leave my chair.

All this lifetime, one part of me longed to be Out There while the other held me fast. I could reflect on so many wasted chances to fully participate in life, many missed opportunities to fully savor joy - and yet, still, all those times, inside my heart, I danced.

Thanks, Big B :)