Polio had left him a garbled mess, wheelchair-borne, twisted and gnarled. But those ropy hands pushed faders, gain controls, EQ settings, among other things for a band I toured with in the mid-eighties, wait for it…Sonshine. Yup. No metaphor here. Just git ‘r done with classic cheesie Christianeasy. We spent most weekends traveling among the tiny wheat and cattle, grain elevator towns that dot the Alberta prairies. A dozen songs, a thousand laughs, and one almighty potluck at a time, Gerry guided us, gear and all, to wherever was next. He and his wife, Rose, hosted my fiancee and I for dinner, fellowship, Bible study, and prayer once a week. As is my pattern in everything I took copious notes, which I have to this day. I lost touch with Gerry many years ago.

I could use his voice these days.

1979. Halifax, Nova Scotia. I was on tour with Clan MacBain Pipe Band of Calgary. I’d been the youngest member in the band’s history, taking my place among the ranks at age twelve. My stage-parents, ever eager to secure my quickly expanding horizons, thought it a fine idea to let a twelve year old kid who looked nineteen sit among hardened whiskey ‘n beer maniacs in places too dark to see clearly the shenanigans of such ne’er do wells. Although unwise for personal reasons, it was one of the best opportunities afforded this pre-teen bagpiper for, on this particular day (I was then sixteen) I participated with the massed pipes and drums put in place to appropriately welcome Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother as she presented the colors to Canada’s Maritime Command. She later opened the International Gathering of the Clans of which our less than stellar collective proudly represented the MacBain Clan. I was barely sober enough to remember.

But I was there.

Later that same year I was on staff as bagpipe instructor for the Fort San Summer School of the Arts in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. The Fort as it is called is the closest thing Saskatchewan might boast as a “resort” village. It was my seventh consecutive summer at the camp and my second as instructor, the youngest they’d ever had (illegally so, since I was too young to receive a “salary”). What made this year so unique was that I had the honor to sit under the tutelage of one of the greatest bagpipers in history, the late Donald MacLeod, M.B.E. It was like taking voice lessons from Freddy Mercury but someone half his height and twice his age. A two pack a day guy and hard drinker, Donald was also a man of genteel demeanor and humble affectation, despite his cosmic reputation among highland bagpipers. To sit in the audience and listen to this little giant perform for us was akin to sitting on Santa’s lap as a kid.

But with much deeper rewards.

Even before we’d been married a year, my wife Rae and I spent a few months living and working among a hearty and devoted group of Scottish Baptists in Edinburgh, Scotland. The year was 1989. We had barely managed to figure out how to live together under one roof let alone successfully navigate the complexities of hormone-crazed teenagers beside a large body of water. For, on this cool, blustery afternoon we decided it would be fun to be outside rather than stuffed in our flat. A couple of suburban Calgary kids who grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains were no match for the beloved hooligans now under our charge. Things fell apart quickly as a deplorable lack of communication between Rae and I regarding game rules left us shouting “fuck you” at each other. So, while half of them refused to follow the confusing rules of a made up game, the other half were tossing each other into the ocean. What started as a delightful Baptist youth event quickly became a free for all wet t-shirt contest. Bouts of seawater-induced lung infections, allegations of inappropriate boy-girl interactions, and numerous angry phone calls later and…lesson learned.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Undue significance a starving man attaches

To food

Far off; he sighs, and therefore hopeless,

And therefore good.

 

Partaken, it relieves indeed, but proves us

That spices fly

In the receipt. It was the distance

Was savory.

These words of Emily Dickinson remind us that the longing for someone or something is often an experience even richer than the person or object of that longing. The college-age love affair forced to endure the insufferable distance of educational geography. The retired man or woman lost in a fog of non-identity yearns for earlier times when it was more clear who they were and why they were here. 

My mom used to tell me that as kids we were “full of piss and vinegar” around Christmas time. Although the exact nature of this chemical mixture is unknown to me, I think I get her point. Those of us fortunate enough to have access to Christmas morning consumer delights may recall the unbearable pangs of waiting for it when that certain item we’ve been harping about might just be waiting to greet us.  

Advent is the liturgical equivalent of communal yearning. It is a time when, together, we enter into the much deeper waiting experienced by our forebears in faith for the fulfillment of a promise; a promise made to those long dead and far removed from our present reality.

There really is no better time than Advent to talk about the mystery of waiting. If we are willing, our connection with the Divine throbs most insistently at such times. Waiting can be nothing more than a feat of drudgery, accompanying oneself on the frustrating journey of unsatisfied desire. Or, it can be the mist-heavy pond upon which float, blindly but lightly, our lilies of longing. One leads to fear, hatred, anger, destruction. The other to patience, quiet devotion to duty and persons, to the delicate wonders of the unremarkable that grace our days.

Advent acts as a centuries long foreplay to the main event through which sweet relief is found. In that long foreplay we learn to live, move and have our being while often blind-folded or lost altogether. In it we learn to trust our silent dance partner whose subtleties on the dance floor leave us breathless but a little baffled at times.

Advent forces a kind of slowness to things. As it becomes clear that immediate satisfaction is nowhere on the horizon, we learn the joys of nuanced living; of faith in a person rather than facts and plans and possible outcomes. We learn journey more than destination.

With the advent of Jesus we learn that God remains annoyingly carefree in his use of timelines. They belong to God alone. However, in that same advent we learn just how good it can be to wait with the intentionality of longing – spiritual foreplay – than pacing the floors of our constantly incomplete lives. For, to miss even the tiniest detail of all the manger meant is to miss everything else as well.

1974. I remember Burkandt, my Turkish friend with legs that barely worked. His eyebrows, far too bushy for a kid of ten, swept upward in a wave, not unlike his thick, brown, curly hair. It was as though his facial hair just wanted to point us to God. The accent was only an obstacle if someone wasn’t really interested in talking to him. Despite his physical handicap, he was remarkably fast and shockingly strong. I laugh to myself as I recall the piss poor way he’d stumble through telling jokes. He never did understand that a joke is best told with the punch line at the end. At least he tried. He was fascinating. He was my friend.

Jamie-Lee Andrews (pseudonym) cowered in a smelly corner of the schoolyard. She thought herself safer there from the abuse she suffered at the hands of my schoolmates. An only child, she lived with her parents in a house even tinier than the 900 square foot bungalow we called home. Whenever an unholy hoard would surround her with arrowed words and painful jabs, I’d hide away like a coward so as to protect my “conscience” from involvement. If I hadn’t been so horrified of the potential social fallout, she too could have been my friend. Not a soul seemed to like, let alone befriend, her. I ached for her.

My sister’s First Nations friend, Olive Redfoot (also a pseudonym) lived between worlds, caught on an unenviable tightrope of a predominantly white professional community in which her father was a lawyer, and no life at all on the reservation where the other unmentionables were stowed. It was not uncommon for either natives or non-natives to egg their house, showering them in sticky disapproval. She was a beautiful girl with long double-braided hair that flowed, wild but disciplined, past her derrière. My sister loved her. I kind of did, too.

Saturday mornings were best. It was a time I looked forward to with stomach-rumbling anticipation every week. My parents would drive me the fifteen miles from our home for bagpipe lessons. At the time it was in the town of Midnapore, well beyond the extreme south end of my home town of Calgary, where we lived. Nowadays, the entire journey is one elongated shopping extravaganza with hardly a green space to be found. We would pass at least half a dozen grain elevators, innumerable cattle, and a train station (it used to run within a stone’s throw of our home). From 9:00 a.m. until noon, the smell of elk-hide pipe bags, cobbler’s wax, cane reeds, Mr. Reed’s coffee, and a room full of young boys would map themselves into my nasal memory.

Dana was my best friend. He lived four houses down from me. We used to pretend we were WWF wrestlers, dinosaurs or superheroes, and trade NHL hockey cards. Fights were inevitable given his insistence upon championing the Black Hawks when the Montreal Canadiens were the betting man’s choice. We’d walk to school with my other friend, Darrell, who lived across the street from us, and just be troublesome, generally speaking. One day we were lighting farts behind his house and a flame came out of Dana’s flaming air-trap that burned the paint off the side of his parent’s trailer. We were a classy lot.

I wish these were more than just a random collection of disparate memories in a middle-aged guy’s sketchy recall. Sometimes, they push their way to the front of a crowded reminiscence and I can still touch their faces, like bricks in my wall; walls not meant to guard, but to support and frame.

 

Picture found here