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.

ROSE-LIP'D MAIDENS, LIGHTFOOT LADS*

LaVergne in France during the War.

In my grandma's hand: LaVergne's Company, 1939, marching past 619 Lorne, Saskatoon.

2008
*from Housman's poem With Rue My Heart Is Laden

When I was twelve, freckled and awkward, all the aunts and uncles seemed glamorous as movie stars, sophisticated with their cigarettes and glasses of amber liquid and tinkling ice cubes. But the uncle I admired most was LaVergne, tall, handsome, gallant. His grand name suited his thin moustache, Clark Gable looks and dreamy, faraway eyes.

He was my Ideal Man. I have never met another that measured up to his example.

The oldest of my grandma's five children, he was raised through the Depression. When he left home to make his own way, my grandparents took him to the train station. "I'll never forget seeing him off," my grandma told me. "All we could give him was ten dollars. That's all he had to make his way in the world."

He worked his way over to England on a freighter. When World War II broke out, he joined the RAF, eventually becoming an officer. There is a photograph in one of our old family albums of him as a flag-bearer, on bended knee before the Queen, during a presentation. In that same scrapbook, photos of Greta, his future wife, appeared, with the words "the most beautiful girl in the world" written in his elegant script under the picture of her piquant face. On one of his trips home, they were married.

He was dashing in uniform, as you can see, his handsome face smiling out with brave and steady eyes. He sent home a piece he wrote about landing in Sicily, walking through vineyards, picking grapes. "Dusty, but that can be washed off," he wrote. The only thing he wrote about the war, and war was no where in it. He returned home partially deaf from gunfire. He never spoke of the things he saw there, but I could tell it hurt his heart to have witnessed such raw suffering.

My uncle was a romantic, with a dreamy, thoughtful, introspective nature. He enjoyed watching, didn't need to be the center of attention.

Through the war, his wife Greta waited for him with their infant daughter, Jeanette. Greta was his match in movie star glamour. She was thin with a pretty face and short curled hair. "Vergne called their family, with satisfaction, "The Three Bears." "Ready to go, Mama Bear?" he'd ask. He adored her, was utterly attentive to her. All Greta had to do was take a cigarette out of the package, and he'd leap across the room to light it for her, her gallant knight to the end of his days.

The three of them lived nost of their marriage in Saskatoon, where my grandparents had raised their family. When LaVergne was in his forties, we heard he was having trouble with his legs. For a time, they feared MS, and he visited Mayo Clinic. Luckily it wasn't MS, but I never did find out what the trouble was. Grandma told me that sometimes Greta would find him downstairs in the family room crying from the pain.

There was talk in the family that the company he had devoted his career to had treated him badly. He was bitterly disappointed. He had such ethics, did his best, could not fathom that being returned with unfairness. Plus he felt shamed by their financial downturn. They had to sell their big house, and Greta was not happy. Their lives had been Technicolor perfect. She was not accustomed to hard times, not up to life in the trenches. We felt she blamed him.

My grandparents had moved to Kelowna in the '40's. When my grandfather was dying, in the '70's, my sister and I caught the bus to be with him, and it was LaVergne who met us at the bus depot. He put his arm around me, smiling kindly as he looked down at me. "He couldn't wait for you," he said. "He's gone." He had suffered a cerebral hemhorrage.

The family was most concerned about how my grandma would manage after his death. She had never been alone, never written out a cheque or paid a bill. LaVergne and Greta moved from Saskatoon to live near her. My uncle started a business as an accountant and they white-knuckled it, hoping it would succeed.

My uncle dropped by my grandma's apartment faithfully twice a day. "He gave me hugs," my grandma told me later. "He was always smiling, always cheerful, and he cared how I was feeling. My friend told me later that she would see him on the street and he would be limping, his legs were in so much pain. But he hid that from me, he never complained - about anything - so I didn't know he was suffering."

Greta had not taken the move to Kelowna well. They had a small cottage on the outskirts, looking out on dry brown hills. She mourned her big house, her life in Saskatoon. She missed their daughter who was raising the grandbabies so far away from her. And the business was not doing well. She was visibly unhappy. LaVergne's eyes were stricken and sad. Mama Bear was unsmiling and Papa Bear couldn't make things right. The fairy tale was ending sadly and he felt less of a man because of it. I think he felt he had let Greta down.

But the family felt she had let him down by not loving him through the hard times. His eyes betrayed his disappointment, his understanding that her love was conditional. He kept on smiling, doing the best he could. There were whispers he was drinking more than usual. But he was an elegant man who never lost control of himself. He would never allow himself to not meet his own high standards for civilized behavior. I never saw him to be anything but dignified.

One night Greta heard a thump and found him lying on the floor in the living room. Unthinkably, by the time the ambulance came, he was dead, just eighteen months after my grandfather. He had phlebitis, and a blood clot in his leg had broken loose.

I remember my grandma's stoicism at the funeral, as she sprinkled holy water on the casket, standing beside me as strong as an oak tree, blessing his coffin as if with leaves. She didn't shed a tear, but her mourning doubled. She carried it silently with her for the rest of her life.

The family muttered about how Greta had let him down in his last years, how she should have known he was in such distress. But grandma would hear none of it. "He loved her," she said firmly. And that was the end of it.

Greta moved back to Saskatoon, to be near her daughter. Some years later she died of cancer.

When I remember my gallant uncle, I recall him in his glory years, tramping the hills with his big black dog Smoke, or leaping across the room with a flourish to light his beautiful wife's cigarette. So happy to have the woman he adored as his wife.

He was gallant, a romantic figure, with a wistful look in his eyes I recognized. I imagine him, handsome, tall and slender, leaning back against a fence, ankles crossed. And those smiling eyes lighting up when Greta arrived in the spirit world. That secret half-smile he reserved just for her, his hand reaching out.

"Ready to go, Mama Bear? Been waiting for you."