Daniel Lanois at The Great Hall

A couple of weeks ago we attended the Daniel Lanois concert. You might not know his name but you probably at least know his production work. He put on a special concert to celebrate his induction into The Canadian Music Hall of Fame the day before. This was also a big deal because he grew up in nearby Hamilton and started his first studios there, actually working out of his parent's basement at first. His mother and other family were in the audience.

The concert was at The Great Hall. This was significant to us as Toni and I went to a concert there exactly thirty years ago and this was our first time back. The room had been totally reconfigured over the years. This particular show was in the round and the stage area simply was an old Oriental carpet in the middle of the floor jam packed with his equipment and Brian Blade's drum kit. There was also a small toy HO scale railroad track running around the drum kit. The train carried two video cameras. These were part of the documentation of the show. There were several other cameras set up along with one cameraman. All the film footage was edited into the videos below.

The show was set up in three segments. The first was Lanois as a DJ using his own tape loops and sounds with art films projected on two large screens. The second part was the concert itself with just Lanois on guitar and pedal steel and Blade on drums. For a few of the later songs he brought out a bass player but I didn't catch his name. The final part of the evening was a meet and greet and he just hung out until everyone had their face time and photos. It really felt like he was throwing a party at home for his selected friends. It was very intimate, almost like sitting around a campfire. You might be able to see that there were only a couple hundred people about three rows deep around the perimeter of his stage area.

You should view the videos at full screen as they are high quality.

Uncle Ralph 1940-2012

Friday evening my Uncle lost his quick fight with lung cancer and today he was laid to rest. I was able to share these memories with him a few weeks earlier.

One of my cousins said how she will miss the twinkle in his eye. She was right. Check the photo at the bottom and see for yourself.

Uncle Ralph

Naturally I have been thinking about you a lot these last few weeks. Most of these memories go back to the late 1950s when we were all living on West 53rd Place in Mission. I thought I would share them with you here. I hope you enjoy them.

My family moved there in 1956 and Grandma and Grandpa Lavery moved into their new house across the street the following year. I still have vague memories of it being built. I grew up immersed in lots of family. For a brief period I had in my house at 6023, my parents, my brothers, my maternal grandparents, and one uncle. My paternal grandparents, two aunts, and four more uncles were living directly across at 6024. Whew !! The two houses were practically extensions of each other. Going from one to the other was totally fluid. Doors were never locked and no one ever knocked. There was always someone around and I was never lonely. In those days no one had more than one television set and only three channels to choose from. If the adults were watching something we didn’t like at our house we would go to Grandma’s to see what was on over there. I can only think of one time going into Grandma’s house when it was empty. I was probably seven or eight years old. I let myself in as usual and eventually went through every corner of every room of the house on all floors calling out, “Is anybody home?” As if someone would have been unaware I was there.

Somehow with all this family around Ralph still stood out to me. For one thing he was my godfather. Not that I had any idea what that really meant but that fact was always mentioned. “You know, Ralph is your godfather”. I am not sure how the selection process went or if anyone else was even considered. He must have been the first sibling with the godparent designation at the ripe old age of fifteen. Anyway I guess that gave me some special claim to him. I thought that he gave me a little extra attention and always made me laugh.

It seemed that there was always something going on and all of us had lots of fun all the time. But when Ralph got involved things were ramped up a bit. For one thing he was a shutterbug. He always had a little Kodak camera around to chronicle everything. It used pop in flash bulbs about the size of your thumb that looked like pretty blue cotton candy under glass when they were new. After they were used they would go dirty grey and be white hot and we were cautioned not to touch them. We would also have spontaneous ‘chicken fights’ in Grandma’s back yard. My brothers and I would be hoisted up on the uncle’s shoulders to make teams and ram and tug at the other teams until just one was left standing. It was pretty exciting to feel so tall and strong. The game was mostly a giggle fest as we would fall slow motion like a giant tree into a dog pile.

Even after Ralph and Patty married and moved to their tiny doll house in Roeland Park he was still around a lot. There were long games of catch with Frisbees every evening in the summer. Often a couple of dozen neighbor kids and the aunts and uncles just gathering in the street to mindlessly toss the new toy back and forth for hours. There were intense bouts of shuffleboard in the basement years before it was replaced with the pool table. There were marathon Tripoli games that would carry on until the morning hours or sometimes for days. There were huge piles of pennies stacked overnight waiting for the play to resume.

Of course, Ralph always had the best fireworks. One time my brother and I went with Dad and Ralph to a fireworks tent. It was after dark but the tent was lit up and busy. They were off to the side talking with some man as I wandered through the aisles lusting for all the bright packages and odd spinning and flying contraptions. The next thing I knew we were behind the tent and the man opened the trunk of some old Chevy. Boxes were filled and money exchanged and we were on our way home. In those days all the kids would be shooting off firecrackers in the street for days. We would be blowing up little safe stuff like Lady Fingers and Black Cats and the smell of smoldering punks filled the air. The ‘kids not playing with matches’ rule was suspended. Occasionally Ralph would march out to the street from Grandma’s house with a coffee can of water and a soup can. All of us kids would stop and stand back while he set things up in the middle of the street. The can of water went down first then a cherry bomb with a water proof fuse was lit and in one quick movement put into the smaller can and place upside down in the water. A few seconds later the explosion would shoot the soup can straight up and we would scream with approval and beg for more. More would eventually follow but he would only do one at a time. I think that he spaced them out so that Mrs. Woodward would come storming out of her house and give him hell.

Then there were the wonderful summer weekends at Lake Annette. What a playground that was. I am sure that had a huge influence on my buying a house at Lake Quivira and that turned out to be the second biggest decision of my life.

Maybe someone would like to step up and tell the story of Ed Schranz and the bat or share the many legends of the great Fourth of July parties in De Soto.

There are lots of fun memories. Nothing was ever planned or scheduled. It just happened. Eventually things changed though. Everyone got married and spread out and had families, a whole lot more cousins. Life got complicated. Invitations started to precede events, doors were no longer left unlocked, we called ahead to make sure someone was home, and we started ringing doorbells. I am not sure when I got too big for a chicken fight. Of course we had no way of knowing when we had played our last chicken fight and all the other things. I don’t think it would have mattered anyway. We couldn’t possibly have had any more fun at it than we did.

Thanks Uncle Ralph.

Mission Impossible

The Holiday Season was a little more hectic than usual this year. Less than two weeks before Christmas Toni received a notification from Canadian Immigration that they were still waiting to receive her FBI clearance and that she had until January 17^th to get it in. This is a crucial component to getting Permanent Resident status or PR card (like a Green Card in the States). Toni had sent the application in eleven months earlier when we were still in New York. The FBI clearance was sent in separately because her fingerprints were unreadable the first couple of times and took a third effort to get good ones. She had every reason to think the FBI form would be matched up with the rest of the application. The notification was delayed additionally because Immigration had failed to update our address and it went to New York first. Argghh!!

So here we were with about four weeks to react with Christmas and New Years looming in the middle. The letter said that if she missed the deadline the application would be returned and she would have to start over. This could mean having to take another medical exam and yet another FBI clearance and all the fees to go with those. To make matters worse without her PR status Toni’s temporary Ontario Health coverage (OHIP) was going to expire soon.

We spent much of the rest of the day scrambling to put together contingency plans. Toni found a nearby immigration lawyer and getting quotes for health insurance. We also gathered up all the paperwork we could for a visit to our local MP, Member of Parliament, Bob Rae. This would be like going to your Congressman in the States.

The first thing the next morning we grabbed a cab to the MP’s office and we were prepared to camp there to get some help. Fortunately it was only a five minute ride away. We went in and briefly explained our situation and were directed to a small office where we were seen right away. We expected to have to go into a long drawn out explanation but the woman understood the issues right away and sent some emails and copied a few documents. The woman, Denise, assured us it would be okay and gave us confidence that she would get this straightened out and we should stay in touch if we didn’t have our answers in a couple of weeks. Fifteen minutes later we were on our way back home.

Indeed, the next morning we received an email confirming our address had finally been updated and they were clear that we did not want to abandon Toni’s application. Meanwhile, Toni continued exploring lawyer contacts, just in case. However, we were told that we would only need to go that route if her application got totally rejected.

After a few more weeks of being in limbo Toni contacted the MP’s office again in mid-January. Denise said they would help get an extension on her health card and a committee was deciding if they would accept the copy of the FBI clearance form in lieu of the original.

January, Friday the 13th turned out to be Toni’s lucky day! After working with our MP's office (Bob Rae's Assistant) and MPP's office (Member of Provincial Parliament Glen Murray's Assistant) by phone, online, and in person this week, they hooked her up with the Ontario Ministry of Health. Toni showed them her updated resume and a good letter of recommendation from her volunteer position in Toronto. Although never requested in any instructions, this seemed to help the situation the way a greased palm does with a maitre d'. In the span of about four hours by phone and email, an analyst from the Ministry resolved all her problems. Toni gave her the documentation regarding the PR application and signed a release for her by scanning and emailing back and forth. She was then able to plead Toni’s case to a representative at the Federal level in Immigration so that she could have access to her file and see that everything was done right for them to process the application. She then decided to extend her OHIP through mid-Sept. of 2012 and beyond should there be further delays.

Toni was also given instructions of how to leave and return to Canada without a hassle at the border if she still doesn't have her PR card...just bring her proof of address, health card, and any letters from OHIP and Canadian Immigration with her US passport.

The next day we received an email from Buffalo saying Toni was in the final stages of PR approval with instructions to send them a copy of her passport and two PR photos. She carefully followed the detailed mailing directions and now the requested items have been delivered to the Fort Erie address and she was told to expect her final PR documents by February 1. We did in fact receive the promised paperwork. That left one more big step.

Saturday, February 4^th mission involved the culmination of 18 months of intense planning, two inches of paperwork, border crossings, customs agents, multiple passports, a rented car, all with Niagara Falls in the background. It could be a Hitchcock scene with Cary Grant but it is really rather mundane. We had to drive an hour and a half to the border, leave Canada, and reenter to go through the immigration station and get Toni’s paperwork stamped and entered into the system.

The conventional wisdom is to enter the States with your US passport but at the last minute I changed my mind and showed my Canadian one. This turned out to be the right decision as we were waved through after only two questions instead of the barrage that would have come with the US one. We pulled through past the gate, made a U-turn and we were back in Canada. Thirty minutes later Toni was a Permanent Resident. We drove home, returned the car, and cracked open the champagne as soon as we got inside the apartment.

Mission accomplished.

This document stapled into my passport arrived on Thursday, Feb 2, 2012. I filled out the application to get it in Sept. 2010, completed that in January 2011, and it took 12 months to get it approved. I signed this document today, Feb 4, 2012 at the border in order to receive in 6 to 8 weeks a laminated Permanent Resident wallet card. Now I can have a Canadian bank account and credit card in my name, work or go to school if I wish, and my gov't health care will be permanent.

On February 6th with this document in hand I successfully obtained all my benefits by visiting several downtown offices. Coming in the post I have my PR Card (6-8 weeks), my Social Insurance Number (SIN) Card (2-4 weeks), and my new Health Card (4-6 weeks)....meanwhile I use the paper documents I got today at banks and doctors offices. I scanned them in case disaster strikes while waiting.

Holidays In Canada

Canadian Boxing Day crowd at Toronto's Eaton Centre just a few blocks from our apartment.

Yes, there has been a huge gap since my last posting. It is not for lack of interesting things happening here. I just seem to have misplaced my reporter’s hat.

I will try to give a quick overview of the last few months. As you read the following try to imagine the calendar pages flipping over and flying off in the background as in the old black and white movies.

October 10th
We celebrated our first Canadian Thanksgiving with Toni’s sister and her family at our apartment. The menu was the usual turkey and dressing.

October 15th
Occupy Toronto started their protest in the Financial District a couple of blocks west of our apartment. Later that evening we learned they were camping in St. James Park across from our apartment. Weeks of speeches, tents, and drumming followed. Every Toronto television station opened their broadcasts here every night. With our proximity we felt involved in a way. Toni goes through the park to get groceries and would often pick up a few extra items to drop off on the way back.

November 23rd
Occupy Toronto encampment was dismantled peacefully after 40 days of protests. The grounds were essentially ruined but a week later new soil and sod was installed from a donation by a local landscaper. Our park is back better than before.


November 24th
We celebrated our first American Thanksgiving away from America. We had another traditional turkey and dressing dinner. This time we were at a nearby restaurant with a group of expat friends. It was fun to compare notes about Toronto and Canada and linguistic differences. Other popular topics were immigration dos and don’ts and red tape horror stories. Basically we shared our common backgrounds and current situations that only expats would truly understand.

December 26th
Our first Boxing Day. This has become the biggest shopping day of the year, not unlike the day after Thanksgiving in the States. We enjoyed the extra holiday with our nephew, Jesse, at lunch at a small vegetarian restaurant on Queen Street West and then he and Toni went on for a movie later.

Gracey

Earlier this week I learned that my friend, Joe Gracey, lost his battle with cancer and I wept. It was not entirely unexpected. It was his third strike. I had wished him happy birthday on Monday and on Wednesday he was gone. I scrolled through his birthday wishes on Facebook. They went straight from belated wishes on Tuesday evening to condolences on Wednesday. You should read the article linked HERE before going on. It is from September as Joe was going through his last rounds of treatment in Houston.

I first encountered Joe around 1998. His wife, Kimmie Rhodes, had just released her compilation album, “Jackalopes, Moons and Angels”, on their own label. I reached out to Joe in order to get stock for Village Records and over the course of several emails made the arrangements and developed a rapport. I knew nothing about Joe’s background at all. I remember mentioning this to my friend, Jack, who quickly filled me in. If you read the attached article you will see that he was instrumental in promoting what would become known as “progressive country” when he was a deejay at KOKE in Austin. Later he was the first talent coordinator for the PBS program “Live From Austin City Limits”. I don’t know if Austin would be the music center it is without Gracey, and perhaps South By Southwest might not have come to be. I also learned the he was the producer of my favourite Willie Nelson album, “Spirit”, in 1996. Had I known all these things I might have been a bit intimidated to even approach him.

Later that summer Toni and I went to Twangfest 2 in St. Louis. It was three consecutive nights of music with five bands playing one hour sets each night at Off Broadway. Kimmie Rhodes was on the lineup for the final night and Joe was along playing bass in her band. Kimmie was doing a short set instore at Vintage Vinyl that afternoon. It was a great set of four songs or so. Afterwards we met Joe face to face for the first time. He had his ever present Magic Slate®. You know the little kid’s toy that you write on with a stylus and then peel up the plastic sheet to erase your scribbles and write again on the freshen “slate”. They always have some cartoon character at the top. I still remember that day it was Batman and Robin. He scribbled furiously and flipped the sheet in the blink of an eye. He gave me another box of Kimmie’s CDs to take back to Kansas City for the store. Later we reconnected at the show. After their great set the crowd gathered around the couple. Everyone in the room knew Joe and he knew them. Things settled down for the remaining two sets and suddenly Joe came over to where I was seated and sidled up next to me. He pulled out his slate and we jotted notes silently back and forth the rest of the evening while the music played. We were laughing and joking without disturbing anyone around us.

We stayed in touch over the years with the email chatter increasing whenever there was a new release from Kimmie. But it was always more than just business. He would always interject some extra bit. Sometimes it would be a chilli recipe. Cooking was a huge passion. We would also discuss our love for wine, our common desire to one day retire to France, and our shared knowledge that there was only one car on the road that was worth owning, the Miata. We both loved our Mazdas. Driving them with the top down was like nothing else that was a place where disabilities did not exist for the moment.

He also shared stories. My favourite involved Stevie Ray Vaughan. Joe was producing SRV’s first album (which to this day remains unreleased) in his Electric Graceyland Recording Studio. I don’t recall the exact details but at some point Stevie disappeared for a few days. I think there were some drugs or other intoxicants involved. Up to this point he was dressing much the same as his fellow Austin musicians and pretty much blending in with the scene. However, when he resurfaced he had “become” the Stevie Ray Vaughan we eventually came to know, the hat and all the draping clothing, buckles and bangles. I don’t believe any explanation was ever offered. It almost seems like one of those fantastic superhero origin stories complete with the costume.
Out next meeting took place in London 2008. We had tickets to see Emmylou Harris the Hammersmith Odeon. When I found out that Kimmie was the opening act I immediately fired off an email to Joe to see if we could hook up. Their schedule was extremely tight but we were able to arrange to get together backstage after the concert. It took a little while but we finally managed to get to the meet and greet area. I looked around but no Gracey to be seen. I tracked down their road manager and she told me he was down in lobby looking for us! She quickly found him and we finally had our reunion half way across the world. We were there ostensibly to meet Emmylou but all I cared about then was reconnecting with Joe and Kimmie. Again the worn Magic Slate was getting a big workout. We were comparing notes on our UK travels. I told him about our following week when we would be renting a car and driving in Northern Scotland. Joe was giving me tips on how to maneuver through the roundabouts. I can still see his crazy diagram on his slate with the curved arrows going off every which way.

There we were: the guy who couldn’t talk and the guy who couldn’t walk, betrayed by our bodies, living some great adventures and interacting. This was all due to the worlds opened up to both of us by the internet and email. But even before that Joe had given me the inspiration to get out and not be embarrassed and self conscious about not being able to do all the things that were once taken for granted. He never let his illnesses define him. There are workarounds. It would so much easier to give up, stay in the comfort zone, stop pushing the envelope, and cave in to the frustrations of no longer doing things like everyone else. I think of all the experiences I have had the last few years and I could have easily missed out on all of them if I had not had Gracey’s example to get me to the right frame of mind to successfully ignore what I can’t do and to focus on what I can do.

ADDENDUM:
The KOKE FM studios were renamed the “Joe Gracey Memorial Broadcast Radio Studios” Thursday, August 2, 2012.

Grandpa's 1936 Indian

This is a photo I took at Boxhill in Surrey UK. Part of the song takes place here. It is still a biker hangout and lover's lane.

One of my favourite songs is Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”. It is a tragic romance story song that revolves around the singer’s love for both his redheaded girlfriend and also that of his motorcycle. Whenever I hear the song I think of my Canadian grandparents for a couple of different reasons. They first met in the 1930s when she asked him to give her a ride on his motorcycle. The characters in the song, James and Molly, met in a similar way when she gets a ride on his Vincent motorcycle. The song contains a line about the superiority of the Vincent over other makes, Nortons, Indians, or Greeves, won’t do. Grandpa’s motorcycle was an Indian and he would often fondly reminisce about it thirty or forty years later.

The week before his wedding my grandfather had a minor accident with his bike. Nothing serious, he was dinged up but no broken bones and nothing so bad as to postpone his marriage. However, his new bride insisted that he get rid of the Indian immediately. The motorcycle must have been hard for Grandpa to part with. I am sure it was his first vehicle and it surely represented some incredible freedom for a young man in the midst of the Great Depression. He managed to hold a job the whole time and he was helping to support his mother and younger siblings since his father had abandoned the family. Somehow he still managed to put away enough to buy the Indian. However, it must not have been the most practical mode of transportation in Montreal winters.

In the late 1960s Grandpa bought a brand new 307 Camaro and drove it for twenty years. I guess he never completely got over his love for sporty machines.

This is not a photo of his bike but it is a restoration of one from that era.

Grigsbys' Visit

This is our lunchtime view of Niagara Falls from the restaurant.

Keith and Barb at a restaurant just off Yonge Street after a long day of sightseeing.
They look like they are ready for more.

That is the Holiday Inn on the right and our apartment building on the left.
Temporarily we were neighbours once again.

Wow! Here it is November and I am just now getting around to writing about our visitors from September! No excuses.

Barb and Keith were great neighbours from our Lake Quivira days. They have been practically members of our extended Lavery family for a very long time. Barb went to Bishop Miege High School with my youngest aunt, Theresa Boydston, and they have maintained their friendship over the years. In addition Barb and Keith lived a couple of doors over from my Uncle Frank and Aunt Ann for a very long time and were frequently included in many family parties. They moved to Quivira a couple of years after we did and Keith and I immediately started golfing together on a weekly basis. It worked out well as we both had pretty high handicaps but we shared a tremendous enthusiasm for playing. We were also both flexible enough to call each other up at the last minute and arrange to be teeing up on the course in thirty minutes or so.

The Grigsbys stayed at the Holiday Inn immediately to the east of our building. This was incredibly handy for our daily excursions. Keith could still get his morning jogging in and still be ready to roll when the rest of us got our acts together. Barb and Toni had put their heads together for an extremely full itinerary for the week. It was a nice mix of places we had been to before and others that we had not experienced yet.

We were lucky to have dry weather that was just a touch on the warm side so we wound up going on foot the whole time. A walking tour of the University of Toronto campus was first. From there we went on up to Bloor and the Royal Ontario Museum or ROM. We spent most of the day there and hardly saw half of the exhibits. Since we were in the area I suggested that Barb, who is a librarian at the Johnson County Central Resource Library that we go a couple of blocks over to see the Toronto Reference Library. Barb managed to get a behind doors tour and learned that this is the second busiest reference library in the world. When she was asked to guess the busiest library Barb did not hesitate to say Hong Kong and of course she was correct as she has also been to that location.

We rented a car one day and returned to Niagara Falls. Although Toni had been there just a few weeks earlier she was just as entranced as the rest of the group. Again, on the way back we detoured to Niagara on the Lake where we had drinks at the Cork Winebar and later for dinner went to The Shaw Café where Keith and I both had fish and chips. We agreed it was the best either of us ever tasted. You should check the link to see how beautiful this place is.

We spent most of another day returning to Toronto Islands to see the cottages and to finally check out The Rectory Café on Wards Island where we enjoyed the back patio setting.

No trip would be complete without the big splurge dining experience. For us this time it was Canoe. We had heard great things about it and we knew the view would be spectacular as it is situated some 50+ floors up at the top of one the downtown bank buildings. From there you can see most of the western end of Lake Ontario and the CN Tower looks like you could just reach out and touch it.

More photos: HERE

It was over four years ago that Toni and I shared our long term plan with the Grigsbys. That was our plan of selling our house and moving to Canada. They were the very first people we told about it so it only seems fitting that they should also be our first visitors from the States and in a way complete the circle.