I realize now that I must have downloaded The Vinyl Café at the most opportune time because it appears to have been scraped off the web, so the CBC can do a podcast about the behind-the-scenes of it, which really should be its own separate thing but isn't. This rendition starts with an ad for Mint Mobile with fucking Ryan Reynolds in it.
But because I am in Martinique and my computer is off and my old new phone is dead, I am working off my old hand-me-down phone that doesn't have the unedited radio broadcasts on it. No matter, really.
But, I will say this for any data hoarders out there: if you're looking for a feasible challenge, try to cobble together the extant list of Vinyl Café story titles from their original air date and associated MP3 files. I'm certain it's still doable, but requires some effort. As it is, I think I have roughly 100 of them more or less appropriately titled on several devices, but technically every episode has 2 titles I believe, and neither variant is truly descriptive unless you're already familiar with the context of the particular story, so both almost equally... I don't want to come off harsh by saying useless, but a synopsis of each episode is also hard to come by if I recall correctly. With some effort, a solid archive could be DIY'd. I digress.
We were planning a trip to Portugal. We'd never been, don't speak the language, don't crave the food, and don't know the history of it. But, we had heard Lisbon was overrated and therefore flights to Porto cheap.
Earlier today we were languishing in the Martinique after work commute congestion, heading back to our hotel, listening to the special "ask us anything" episode of The Europeans podcast. The penultimate question, if memory serves me well, was "what European country have you not yet visited but is at the top of your list to go to next?" and I not only remarked at what a good question that was, I immediately spoke over the broadcast to ask Patrycja, since we were looking for a third country to visit this summer while in Poland (we had already been invited by her italophilic mother to go to Italy—for our second time—and enthusiastically agreed)—and her immediate response: Portugal.
What did I know about Portugal besides the trip we planned and never did?
I remember John Wall Barger talking about it at length in *Hummingbird*, a poetry collection of his from 2012, my second year of being a reviewer.
All the typical tropes of Portuguese lit were mentioned therein. All the most frequented sights, as to be expected, too. But it was predominantly Lisbon, not Porto, he explored and versified.
The only other thing I recall about Portugal from literature is Eça de Queirós's story about the Greek poet living out of a hotel and trying and failing to woo a woman—he was a big deal, in Greece, but she didn't know Greek, and was unfazed by his supposed literary grandeur.
We have a friend that we adore, Michael, who went to Portugal once. He hopes to buy a house and retire there some day. I hope he does, too, but it doesn't mean anything to me because we've never been.
So anyways, it is the middle of the night in Martinique, I am sat at the alloyed metal table on the patio of our entranceway overlooking the bay of Fort-de-France from L'anse à l'âne, and I catch a title of a Stuart McLean story called "Dad is Dying".
I remember the day I found out my dad was dying, nearly six years ago. It was summer. I was walking out of Métro Snowdon in Montreal, northbound, on my way to the dollar store, when my brother called me. Dad was in a coma. He had had a seizure. He would go on to live another 5 years following this event, and I remember then and there being so not okay with that. I didn't know then that it was the beginning of the end but a part of me always felt like I should have. Probably why I remember it so vividly. I had just seen him that spring.
McLean's story starts with “Most people will tell you that spring is the most reassuring of seasons. They will tell you that it's something about the renewal of the natural world, the return of the sun, the songbirds of God's green garden that puts a spring into their step. This spring came to Dave differently than most.”
That spring was admittedly a blur. I had just gotten promoted at work, for the first time ever, and I had just fallen in love with the most beautiful girl I was certain was never going to have the time to find out together what we were. My dad was finally living out his dream of becoming a modern-day Henry David Thoreau, bought a cabin in a secluded wood on the water in North Frontenac, and we were working on our grief together following the passing of my mother 5 years prior. Life was as good as it had been in as long as I could possibly remember. It brings a tear to my eye now just reflecting on it.
"Like all storms, no one noticed its first stirrings."
The McLean story is funny.
I remember my maternal grandfather dying. I must have been about 12 years old. Papa, we called him. I remember feeling too old to cry, I was so young. At his celebration of life, I cried. Tears of joy, because of all the new stories old friends of his I'd never met had to share with us. Taking a cat in a burlap sack down to the river to drown it and it literally getting out of the bag to defend itself, never to return. Very different times then. Another, taking a fistful of firecrackers down to the same river and seeing if they could make a bucket into a rocket and a piece of shrapnel from said bucket propulsion gone wrong carried in his leg like a reminder for the rest of his days. Big smoker, died less than half a decade short of eighty.
Not my parents. It baffled me then the way it baffles me now: people outlive the people you love all the damn time. There were eighty-year-olds twenty years ago when Papa died as much as there were eighty-year-olds a year-and-a-half ago when my father died. We had a trip planned to go canoeing on Lake Banff the next day, we were in Calgary, and the town was swarming with retirees. I just remember thinking, of all the old folks bumming around, why him? Over time, the sensation dulled, but never faded away. He was only a month shy of 64.
Stuart McLean... it's like what happens if you reverse engineered a Tragically Hip lyric into prose and took all the protagonist out of it.
Porto was the first trip I planned. We must have been in Poddąbie, summer 2022, my father warning me every day about what was going on next door in Ukraine and asking for my reassurance that Poland was safe (of course it was, we were many miles away).
Similar to the trip we never made to Latvia, Porto enticed me enough because of the cheap airfare. We could also fly home to Montreal from there, so if we planned it right, could be a last hurrah on our way back for fall.
We never ended up going but here's the eleven things I had in mind:
The Sandeman Cellars, a-k-a The House of Sandeman. As a fan of tawny port since 2020 (a versatile bottle for the hopeless wreck I was during the first year of the pandemic, chilled port with a slice of orange was as refined as any cocktail exceeding more than one ingredient to concoct) and sherry (absolutely crucial for my favourite drink at some point in time, a memory lost to time I'm afraid to admit, but available in many lovely variants), it was the first stop on my list. We would only be going if I planned it, so I put my strengths (and spirits) at the forefront of my mind.
Next was the Passeio das Virtudes. This seems reminiscent of another landscape I had planned to visit with Patrycja but never went and that is Perugia, Italy. I am certain it is lovely but that was a trip I had planned for November, so less than spectacular weather for travelling. Perhaps I'll expound another time. The thing about Passeio das Virtudes that strikes me this very moment, however, is how similar the houses on the hill seem to the ones here in Martinique.
Claus Porto was next. They do soaps and perfumes, although apparently the duty-free at the airport sells the same. If you're looking for a boutique experience, however, they have their own history of Porto to share, and, if you're lucky, an old-fashioned hot towel shave.
Now that I think of it, I think my dad had been to Lisbon. He got me a few books in Portuguese from one of his trips to Europe after Mom died. He had always wanted to travel; her, not so much. It comes to mind because the next place I had in mind was Livraria Lello, an absolutely breathtaking bookshop with massive ornate staircase in what, at a glance, appears to be red velvet and mahogany, a stainglass skylight, and architectured ceiling. I'm sure it's even more stunning in person. Never a fan of Harry Potter myself, its mixture of neogothic and art nouveau design was allegedly the inspiration for Hogwarts. The transphobe who lived.
Everything in Porto is so damn historical. Speaking of stories, I completely lost sight of Stuart McLean. The dog is dying. Sam thought he was too old to be crying about his dog dying so he told his class his dad was dying instead to save face. Hilarity ensues.
My mother used to spend all weekend making long-distance phone calls. She'd talk and talk and talk for hours with all her old friends, all the women who had been part of our lives growing up in Kitchener-Waterloo. One of them, our godmother, Jojo, passed shortly after our father went. I got word from our old neighbourhood friend Peter, who messaged me from Germany. Wish we had been invited to her funeral. Too much to deal with in the wake of our father's death, but still would've been nice. Her husband JP died years ago. I remember talking with her after our mother died. She suggested I get my license to become a PI. Saleema Nawaz Webster, a Montreal writer whose *Mother Superior* collection I absolutely adored when I reviewed it years after its release, recently did that. Makes sense. Maybe I see in her what Joanne saw in me.
Stuart McLean... I wonder what will ever happen to all those secondhand copies of Vinyl Café hardbacks. Synonymous with retirees, church benefit book fairs, Adirondack chairs and sunsets. There were too many when he was still alive. Does anyone under 30 even listen to radio anymore? Let alone the CBC? It's always been a bit tough to see being Canadian as being cool. You tell anyone but an American about CBC Radio, god forbid Stuart McLean, and they wouldn't have an NPR to compare it to, and BBC doesn't really match up. Yet only attractive people seem to wear those vintage CBC tees, so maybe I'm the problem. As it is, still love tuning in. Quirks and Quarks, The Debaters, Under the Influence? Perfection.
The rest of my Porto-to-do list consists entirely of restaurants: O Diplomata, Musa das Virtudes, Época Café, Casa Guedes Tradicional, Adega de São Nicolau, Gazela Cachorrinhos Da Batalha.
Back in 2022, these likely held more currency. I am dubious there was a more obvious theme now, but perhaps I got really deep with it. By name, they all appear to be different kinds of restaurants, different experiences, not just different menus. Perhaps I picked them based on our potential accommodation. I don't have it listed anywhere. I probably had Queirós's hotel in mind. Looking at all these dishes is making me hungry. Like us, you may seldom think of Portuguese chicken, or bread, or beer, but seeing this flurry of images now, I can't think of anything in the world I'd like more than that, if not another splash of Martinique rum.
Sam, Dave and Morley's kid on The Vinyl Café, finally spills the beans: it's not my dad that's dying, my dog is dying.
"My dog's going to be all right! It was just worms!"
Word spread through the neighbourhood like wildfire.
I wish my father had been diagnosed. In five years of non-epileptic seizures and a rollercoaster of unrelated maladies, he never had the privilege of finding out the cause.
I don't know what sort of nonsense the medical profession has succumbed to in Ontario since I left, but they barely treated my mom 10 years earlier much better either.
Quebec has its own crisis, too. So I get it. But it's one of the few things I think of even though I should: why the hell have we let things get this bad in Canada? What have we done to deserve this? Why is nobody helping? Why is nobody fixing what's broken?
What's going to happen when I end up in hospital in my forties, fifties, and sixties? Will I even live long enough to find out?
What if I just need a pill and I end up getting referred to a never-ending parade of specialists in different cities across the province who have too many patients to diagnose me? Who do I call then?
Jay Miller is a tech writer and poet. He occasionally posts book reviews on Bibelotages.com and pics of the cat he shares with his beautiful partner Patrycja, @itsthemilashow on Instagram.
