The Highwayman

When my Dad offered to read to us as kids, we would run to the yellow bookcase in the den to haul out his tattered school reader with its scuffed and worn cover. Asfor many school texts of those times, previous owner’s names were scrolled across the fly leaf. A fat book without illustrations, its bindings were held together precariously with string, but it’s memory was intact and it would fall open at our favourites, one of which was The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes.

From years of doing readings in one-room schools and rural homes without electricity which came to the prairies in the 1950s, my father’s recitations were polished and mesmerizing, his voice sonorous and mellifluous and the phrases paced and evocative. He had as well a real gift for voices and would read Little Bateese by William Henry Drummond in French Canadian dialect. His readings, a form of performance art before we knew what it even was, created a magic net I can still recall with clarity. Both he and my mother read to us from the Grimms Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales, but it was the poems we really loved.

It was only later when I encountered The Highwayman in school as a teen that I realized how brutal an event it portrays. For me as a child, it was about the magic of the purple moor, the highwayman in his velvet coat with lace at the chin, tlot tlot of the horses hooves, the marching of King George’s men and the landload’s black-eyed daughter plaiting a love knot into her long black hair.

While I think as kids we only take in what we can absorb at the time and make sense of, it seems to me now that kids also absorb the real meaning or true sense of a story rather than the specific details. I find now I have returned back to my original understanding and appreciation of the poem, the repetitions capturing the movement and wonder.

I read The Highwayman as interpretive poetry at Toastmasters and was stuck by how much is involved in reading poetry well, getting the cadence, the rhythm, rhyme, flow and meaning clear. The Toastmaster’s manual has a lot of good suggestions about capturing the skill and it opened my eyes to what a truly wonderful gift my father had. It also served to bring home to me again how important is not only what we say and how we word it but how we say it especially our tone and timbre.

Vintage Drapery

I was waiting for my friend at the ferry dock about 5:15pm. It was the computer ferry when hoards of hurrying workers from Vancouver scramble onto the dock and head for the car park.

A fellow came up behind me, someone I didn’t know, and said, “ I like your outfit.”

I had on Capri pants and a short-sleeved top made out of vintage drapery material. The kind called barkcloth, which I have used to make cushion covers and futon covers. Brightly coloured, bold flowers and broad sweeping lines. You’d recognize it if you saw it.

“It’s like 50’s drapery material,” I replied, looking down on the large, lush hibiscus and lilies painted in vibrant colours while I continued to keep an eye out for my friend.

“My mom had one like it,” he said, grinning. His face was open and friendly with a squint in one eye making it slightly eschew. He too seemed to be waiting for someone.

It was a boiling hot day so I added, “Well, I am glad it is an Indonesian knock-off because that thick drapery material would be much too hot today.”

“My mom really liked hers. She died recently” he said, somewhat sadly. "She used to say, Scarlet!”, he exclaimed laughing, throwing one arm out at the side. “You probably know that skit.” He demonstrated again, throwing one arm out at right angles to his body, “Scarlet!”

I looked down at the material. Not much scarlet in it. I smiled at him and said thank you, not at all sure what he meant. But it is not that often that someone you don’t know comes up and tells you they like your outfit. Such happenings can make your day.

Just then my friend walked over with someone in tow and a request that we drive him home as well, so we engaged in making arrangements and introductions. My new friend had slipped away, probably spotting who he was waiting for and I didn’t think about the exchange until later that evening.

Still wearing the Capri pant outfit, I was explaining the interaction to a friend as a typical kind of connection created here on the Sunshine Coast.

She laughed, “He meant Scarlet O’Hara!”

Then she went on to explain, “When Scarlet was destitute and hungry and wanted to seduce Rhett Butler, she decided to go to him to plead for food but she had no dress to wear so she tore down the green satin curtains and made a dress out of them.”

Something stirred in the deeper recesses of my mind.

“Then”, my friend went on, “Carol Burnett used to do this funny skit when she pretended she was Scarlet O’Hara but had left the rod in the curtains so whenever she turned from side to side, she would hit people with the curtain rod. It was hilarious!”

For me it was a glimpse into someone else's very special family stories. We all have them. They are how we make meaning and embrace ritual in our lives. For my new acquaintance, a chance encounter with an outfit sewn from vintage drapery material invoked his mother and her enjoyment of her drapery outfit, as well as Scarlet's and Carol Burnett's take on it. He got me to thinking about my own family stories and the need to savour them.

Photos: vintage barkcloth drapery

Up the Ying Yang

Jerry Seinfeld might indeed be the originator of “Yada Yada”, but my brother coined the term “Up the Ying Yang”. Without the help of a TV program drawing millions of viewers or a stand up comic, my brother launched a descriptive, evocative phrase at the age of 5 that has since circled the globe!

Do you have family jokes, words and phrases that only your family enjoy? You might be sitting on something that can spruce up the rhetoric of the English language.

When my brother was young, I often read bedtime stories to him in his room in the basement. We had the Grimm’s Brothers Tales and Hans Christian Anderson’s folktales but I frequently read him books that I was interested in. When I was fifteen and he was five, we were reading Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.

Supper times at our house were a time of conversation. Older kids would be asked about school and my brother, who was not yet in school, would be quizzed about the book being read to him. It was in retrospect excellent preparation for gathering and presenting one’s thoughts. My brother surprised me when he was asked, because he remembered the name of the book, that it was about China and even the trip the characters were making up the river.

“Where were they going?” my dad continued.

My brother struggled. “Yang, Ying, Yat” before he blurted out confidently , “They were going up the Ying Yang” . Then he looked around proudly, sure that he had got it right.

“Up the Ying Ying?” My father asked his eyebrows raised as the rest of us hooted with laughter.

“He’s close”, I opined. "It’s the Yangtze River.”

We laughed long and loud, so my brother, as kids will do, continued to use the phrase. If he couldn’t find a sock or tee shirt-- it was up the Ying Yang. When we were heading off for a car ride to visit my dad’s friend and none of us had ever been there, we were heading up the Ying Yang, accompanied by peals of laughter. Soon the whole family were using the phrase to mean the unknown, the lost or even someone who was confused for any reason.

I was at university when I noticed other people around me were using it. It has an onomatopoeic ring to it which connotates bewilderment and confusion. It is self explanatory, providing a verbal embellishment of a situation. I can’t ever recall anyone needing to ask me what it meant. It is also a very descriptive way of saying someone is off topic.

Later when I was teaching at university, I would occasionally use it and soon I noticed others were using it too.

Now it is out there and it has a life of its own. The other day I heard someone, whom I am sure that my family and I have never spoken to, using it on the radio.

If constitutes a wonderful personal story about something, but I am not sure what. Either it is that we are all connected in vocabulary terms by only six degrees of separation and our unique family joke has made it out to the world. Or it could be related to to the 100 monkeys truth, that when a new skill is learned by 100 monkeys on one isolated island it is not long before monkeys everywhere have acquired the same skill—a sort of collective transfer of consciousness for monkeys. It is also possible that a wonderfully evocative phrase began for similar reasons, about the same time in several widely separate locations around the same time. What do you think? Do you have such a family story?

Photos: Bro and his pumpkin crop, Bro painting in dad's shirt in the bath