Part of the 70% or part of the 30%? I just don't know

Birkenhead Lake, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2004

As mentioned in my last post, I decided to read Paul Quarrington's King Leary even though it had been selected as this year's Canada Reads book. I'm a Quarrington fan from way back, and this is the third of his novels I've read. Home Game, as I recall, was hilarious, although it led me to confuse Pemberton and Penticton for quite a while (have I said, 'Don't bother me with details,' recently?). Residents of both communities would be understandably enraged* though - I get it now, having lived here for six years (although I've still never been to Penticton and Birkenhead Lake, pictured above, is the closest I've come to spending any time in Pemberton - we may have stopped for gas there). I read Civilization a couple of years ago and loved it.

I've been following the Hockey Night in Canada (HNiC) theme song controversy as CBC blew the negotiations to keep the song, and I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. There is nothing quite as Canadian as hockey (I'm not sure how the Russians feel about it, but it's hard to imagine a European of any nationality being quite so passionate about any single sport). In my research, I (somewhere) came across the statistic that 70% of all Canadians consider themselves hockey fans. I know my Taiwanese ESL students were hard pressed to figure out what was going on during the playoffs the year before last. They were much more interested in basketball, and the Canuck flag waving and the horns honking and just the getting in the cars and driving about to celebrate a sports team's victory were puzzling customs and ones I was hard-pressed to explain to them. For the best coverage I've encountered regarding the breakdown of negotiations for the HNiC theme song, here's the story from The Tyee re what went wrong and why. (I'd like to know how I'm supposed to know when to leave the room though if I don't hear the familiar 'doo do doo' doo doo' of the old song.)

Since yesterday was Father's Day, it seemed like the perfect time to delve into King Leary. My dad was the first hockey fan I met, and we had a little ritual for the Saturday night games when I was growing up. Dad and I would go to the corner store and pick up a package of Callard & Bowser toffee and we'd eat it with Mom while watching The Saint, which immediately preceded HNiC (that's almost pronounceable; more so if you have any Ukrainian friends and have been trained in the subtleties of pronouncing names that begin 'Hr' or 'Hn'). Given how highly censored my television watching was, I'm amazed I was allowed to watch The Saint. Roger Moore was totally irresistible in his youth though, and it was television in the 60s, so I suppose it was pretty tame (would love to see it in reruns just to see what I missed in terms of innuendo the first time around).

For a reason I never really understood, my father was a Boston Bruins fan. We lived in Ottawa, and of course Ottawa didn't have a team between 1934 and 1992 (although why I should take the word of some guy who lives in HAWAII on hockey history I'm not sure). He liked them because they were the underdogs, and for many years he viewed it as his personal mission to help them win the Stanley Cup through the sheer force of his devoted fandom.

HNiC, in those days before telephone ringers could be turned off or phones could be unplugged, was a 'no-call zone' for my father. It wasn't really okay to call between periods or during the post show either, as the selection of the three stars was almost as important as the game itself. Getting the recognition right was almost as important as skating, passing, foiling shots on goal, and playing like a gentleman. (Although it was kinda scary the way he'd get all worked up when the gloves came off. 'Fight!' he'd yell, really loudly. 'Fight! Fight! Fight!')

One of my uncles decided to be a pest one Saturday night and called repeatedly while the game was on. Dad answered the phone the first two times it rang and explained that the hockey game was on. The third time my uncle called Dad didn't bother to pick up the receiver - he just picked up the whole phone and threw it across the room. For a few days after that talking on the phone was an interesting experience - you had to lie on the floor in the dining room and gently hold the wires together as they fed into whatever the pre-cursors to jacks were called. Eventually he fixed the phone. In another twist on improved technology, you always used to be able, in the days before helmets and mouthguards, to spot a hockey player by his front teeth. They'd usually be capped by the time he was 16, and the thin blue line of the old tooth capping procedure was visible if you looked for it.

And then, after nursing the Bruins to their Stanley Cup victory in 1970, the creation of the WHA in 1972, and NHL expansion, Dad seemed to lose interest in hockey. We must have watched a few WHA games, because I know we snickered at Bobby Hull's hair plugs. Dad was tolerant of my crush on Derek Sanderson (was he really the first professional hockey player with facial hair? If so, why isn't this considered worthy of mention? Ah, because there was a player in the 40s named Garth Boesch who had a mustache - never heard it referred to as 'lip dressing' before though). He preferred the Mahovolich brothers and Phil Esposito, although he always had a lot of respect for Gordie Howe, Eddie Shack, and Maurice Richard.

To say that hockey is our national obsession is not an overstatement. The commentary on the loss of the rights to the theme song has apparently inspired 500+ comments on some news articles detailing the fiasco. And it has been a bit of a fiasco. CBC should have bought it outright after about the second season. I'd rather focus on the things the CBC does right than on what it does wrong though, which is actually a planned post for some time in the fairly near future.

Before he lost his passion for hockey, Dad would go to the occasional game in either Montreal or Toronto. I'm not sure how he got tickets for the Montreal games, but when he wanted to see a game in Toronto, he would pick up the phone and call King Clancy's office and arrange his tickets that way. It's going to be just one of those unsolved mysteries why he did this - to the best of my knowledge, my father didn't know the King and there was no reason to believe he'd get better seats doing it his way. Nevertheless, that's how it worked for him.

And having just finished King Leary, it couldn't have been a better choice for Father's Day reading. It is, in so many ways, a tender novel, and an accomplished one. It has many of Quarrington's comedic moments, particularly when Leary free associates between his glory days and the present. His final execution of his 'patented' St. Louis Whirligig on Carlton Street in Toronto is just so easy to imagine, as is the young pup's (whom Leary anoints as the new 'King') calm statement that he has six 'airborne manoeuvres.' I'm not entirely sure why Quarrington's changed all the names while so thinly disguising the very real characters. If King Leary isn't King Clancy I'm a - well - something I'm not.

Under all the hilarity though, there are some pretty tender messages about life and love and forgiveness. Before he croaks (because, at his advanced age, it could be any day), Leary is able to actually learn some of the lessons his elders have been trying to teach him for seven decades or so, and apply them. Unable to do anything for the son who killed himself, and not wise enough to help his best friend from his hockey days get sober, Leary is able to finally put it all together and reach out to his surviving son, granting him the grace of a reconciliation before his father dies.

So for me, Quarrington's King Leary was a huge voyage down memory lane. It was also a reminder of a couple of things. First, that one of the reasons hockey is so important in our culture is that it represented a way out for the poorest of the poor from the smallest of small towns (or not even towns, as the King says). The Manny Oz portion of the story, which deals with an aboriginal player whose NHL salary probably supports all of his siblings and both his parents, is heart rending, every bit as much so as the current aspirations of African Americans seeking to end generations of crushing poverty with basketball scholarships.

We once visited a childhood friend of my father's who had made the NHL draft. Not sure if he was from my father's own hamlet in New Brunswick or not, but he only lasted a year and it must have been on one of the farm teams as I can't find him listed as an NHL player. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, by the time I met him, when my father was in his late 30s, he could barely walk with the help of two canes. Second, it reminded me of the poetry in motion that is men skating well - men who can't thread a needle and look odd holding tea cups in their big hands, men who can't dance to save their souls and aren't at ease socially, but whose souls shine through when they cover the ice so apparently effortlessly. And finally, its message of redemptive love - for a sport played superlatively, for a friend, for a child - well, it made me cry a bit.

* For those of you not familiar with British Columbia: Pemberton is located about half an hour north of Whistler by car and was a sleepy farming community until it became Whistler's bedroom community. Penticton, in the Okanagan Valley, lies in what I will not so politely describe as 'wacky religious cult' territory. Not, of course, that everyone who lives in Penticton is a member of a wacky cult. Oh never mind, I'm going to give offense no matter what I say now. I'll make a point of visiting Penticton soon so I have a more informed opinion. :)

Recently read and in progress

Wrinkled pink poppy with raindrops, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008. These gorgeous poppies are at the corner of Third and Fourth in New Westminster.

I've been on a book buying binge recently. It seems nowhere is safe - there are books everywhere (yay!). At London Drugs I encountered Laurie Viera Rigler's Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and kicked myself for not buying it there, until I remembered I spend quite enough money at London Drugs as is and that I want to support the local Black Bond Books in the Royal City Centre (if only to ensure the mall retains a bookstore). It's already made me giggle several times and I'm only on page 30. The premise is basically the same as that of the Diana Gabaldon books: a modern young woman (this one hales from 21st Century LA) is transported back in time to the Regency period, having just ended her engagement. So far she's had to use the chamber pot, flirted with a footman and submitted to being bled. Good thing it's not the Victorian era or she'd be having her insides squished by a variety of corseting devices as well.

I reread Nancy Friday's My Mother, My Self over the course of two long and painful months. How a book I've alread read with only thirteen chapters being read theoretically at the rate of one chapter a day could have taken eight weeks and incurred almost $5 in library fines I'll never know. But can you and Dr. Freud say resistance? I had such mixed feelings when I finally got to the end of it. For one very interval shortly after my mother died last summer I felt I had been reborn. That faded so quickly. While there are numerous criticisms to make of Friday's book (including that her perspective is not really broad enough to be convincing - by focusing on only two generations of women, those who came to adulthood during World War II and their offspring, and by limiting herself pretty much to North America), there is such great sadness in the acknowledgement that we seem predestined to be so much more critical of our own sex than we are of the opposite sex, and that, no matter how highly skilled or highly trained we are, we can only rarely set aside our own emotional needs during the separation and individuation process.

Having read Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air in and around the Nancy Friday, I was impressed by her description of Justice Tom Berger's extensive community and stakeholder consultation regarding the proposed construction of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Late Nights on Air is not the book A Student of Weather is, but it's a good read nonetheless. Wanting to learn more about Berger, I got a copy of A Long and Terrible Shadow from the library, Berger's thin discourse about five centuries (1492 to 1992) of European atrocities committed in the name of progress in the Americas. I only read about half of it - the numbers were too much for me, the stories of betrayal, slavery, the decimation of entire peoples and the sad realization that superior technology can be more seductive than either wealth or beauty.

I've plunged into Michael Redhill's Consolation, a novel set in dual time (late 1990s and mid-1850s). Hailed as 'the' book about Toronto (I've always thought of Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and Life Before Man as being the definitive Toronto books, but I was curious), I'm loving it and am having to ration myself to one part per day. The segments alternate between the two time periods as a widow and her family attempt to prove her late husband's theory that some of the ships that sank in the Toronto Harbour have been covered by landfill and that one, in particular, contains an amazing photographic archive of Hogtown in its earliest days. Redhill has an uncanny gift for describing some very subtle familial interplay - the things we say and do that set each other off. He's worth reading for that alone.

I picked up a copy of Sherwin B. Nuland's The Art of Aging one day. One of my pet peeves is that we are forced to take health classes as part of our participation in the public education system, and yet those classes focus on puberty and our burgeoning sexuality. I know all I need to know about those things, thank you very much. It would have been nice to know that one starts to lose to muscle tone in one's 40s. I realize that's a mere statistic and that the odds can be beaten, but knowing what to look out for is helpful. (A simple truth such as, as you age, you will find you need to pace yourself and if you don't want damaged body parts to ache you really do need to get upwards of six hours' sleep a night would have been most useful, for instance.) It wasn't the Nuland book that made me buy the new collection of Nora Ephron essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck. It was my sentimental fondness for her witty titles and my remembrance of the brilliant how to fake an orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally that sold me. I have been vainly hunting for my copy of Wallflower at the Orgy to see if Ephron's humour was always so brittle and superficial, or if this collection marks a change in my attitude or in her writing. Sadly, it hasn't jumped off the bookshelf at me. Still, a quick and amusing read if you're in the waiting room at the dentist and not interested in last year's Maclean's or Time magazines.

Next up is this year's Canada Reads selection, Paul Quarrington's King Leary. Having read Civilization a couple of years ago, and having been a fan of Quarrington's comic novels for years, I'm swallowing my iconoclastic tendencies and am going to read it (my attitude is usually, fine, if everyone else in Canada is reading it, I don't have to, do I?).

After that there's the new Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife. I admire her greatly, but I don't have a good track record of actually finishing her books - I think the one on menopause is the only one I've actually managed to consume. Still, I like to think I'm supporting her continuing endeavours by generating a royalty payment or two. I can only be grateful that she chose to write about Shakespeare's wife rather than the wife of the English author whose life I hope to turn into a novel some day. And I suppose if I really want to be able to say, 'but it was my idea first' I should be open about it here on the blog, but I'm not going to be.

While at Black Bond on Sunday picking up the Rigler novel, I was seduced by three other novels and slunk home with what felt like ill-gotten gains: another copy of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, since I'm obviously never getting my own copy back; the mass market paperback edition of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Carol Shield's Unless. I am not a huge fan of Shields' work - I wasn't blown away by either The Stone Diaries or Larry's Party. But The Republic of Love, recommended to me years ago by painter and former bookseller friend Barb Symons, was a very fine novel, and on the off chance this one is as good, and because it was selling at the ridiculous remaindered price of $7.99, I bought it. The spectacular cover didn't hurt either.

I am still looking for a copy of Thomas Wharton's Icefields, another of the contenders in the 2008 Canada Reads contest. Haven't been able to find it anywhere (although I confess I haven't looked with my usual diligence). In the meantime I read his next novel, Salamander, a strange but intriguing fantasy of a printer, a mad baron, and, ultimately, of two men and their daughters.

Now if only it would get warm so I can sit out in the sunshine and read to my heart's content....