JOURNAL, Thursday, Dec. 20th

“Music symbolizes humanity’s search for harmony, with oneself and others, with nature and with the spiritual and sacred within and around us.” - The Dalai Lama


I found these words in a book of quotations that I sent to Bill for Christmas. This particular quote I lifted and wrote in his card – it seemed so appropriate for Bill the musician-philosopher.

Those profound words on the nature of music came back to me today and made me laugh as I stood in the gym, listening to three hundred kids belting out “Frosty the Snowman” and “Jingle Bells”, accompanied by a very battered and unworthy piano.

I thought of His Holiness and how touched by a giggle he would probably be to see his insights reflected in the reality of this particular search for “harmony” among so many eager souls. A group of older boys overcome their unstable, transitional voices by trying to out-shout each other; the grades 1 and 2 are as sincere as cathedral choristers; the grade 6 girls glance furtively at neighbours, to judge an acceptable level of participation – they are too cool. The primary teachers join in enthusiastically while teachers of the older grades patrol, watchful, careful to maintain as much of the “harmony” as possible with such an exuberant assembly. Everyone in this room is eager for the end of classes. Some look forward to Christmas in a few days, some won’t mark its passing, but we all sing of the joys of winter.

I was thinking of the Christmas we were in Scarborough with Sophie. I remember a sing-along much like this one, at Centennial Park in the days when you were allowed to sing “Silent Night” in school. Now a committee of parents and teachers meets each year to choose seasonal songs that won’t offend anyone and will allow all to participate. It puts yet another spin on the meaning of “harmony” in music.

Music – sometimes its power is so overwhelming, it can take my breath away. I was coming home the other night from doing some research at the university library when the “Oldies” radio station played “Stairway to Heaven”. I was shocked at the intensity of my physical reaction to this song. It was more than just a flood of memories washing over me; I felt that I was transported back to the grade 9 Christmas dance in my school cafeteria. I can see the glow of the Coke machines lighting the face of Jason Miller, the first boy who ever asked me to dance; I feel his large, moist hands resting on my shoulders; I smell the lingering cafeteria odour of deep frying and gravy; I sense the sweetness of his borrowed cologne around me.

I remember as a teen, I had a love-hate relationship with music. I resented its ability to take my emotions and completely transform them without effort into something unexpected and unbidden. I didn’t like knowing that something from outside had such power over me. Yet, sometimes I would use this power to lift me out of moods of uncertainty and fear. All I needed was a good dose of rock and roll, loud and throbbing, to make me rise up, take courage and get on with it – like a rallying song in battle of life.

Generally speaking, Bill was the musician and I was the poet in our house. Maybe I chose this path deliberately to have an expression of my own, to prove how different I was from him. Bill would spend hours learning a new riff or arranging an intricate pattern to old classics on the guitar. For him, words were at best superfluous, at worst a major interference in the flow of a piece of music. For me, the words were filled with their own pulsing rhythm and harmony; they guided me through a maze of dawning awareness and wonderful nonsense – “Don’t worry, be happy! Dooo, doo, doo, doo…”

Where we did find common ground was in the music of Bruce Cockburn and Joni Mitchell. Bill would get me one of their albums each Christmas and birthday and he would play it as much as I did. Their music lay before each of us, a no man’s land between our individual battle camps in the adolescent wars. We would go to this buffer zone – sometimes together, sometimes alone – and for the six cuts on the side of an album, a truce would be called, long enough to build some sort of healing bridge that kept us coming back to the music and to each other.

I don’t think that I can overestimate the influence that Bruce and Joni had on me as I was growing up – to this day I think of them more as friends of the family than as celebrities. My earliest memories sway to their rhythms. My view of the world emerged in images that they created. ”Both Sides Now” was my lullaby, “Musical Friends” was my wake up song. And with every new album that Bill brought home, they provided me with a song and a philosophy for each new phase of my life. A few years ago, I read that Joni was reunited with the daughter that she had borne and given up for adoption while still in her teens. I was shocked to realize that I felt something that could only be described as sibling rivalry on hearing this news. It didn’t surprise me however to realize that Joni has had a much greater influence on me and is closer to my heart than my own mother.

What would my life have been like, if my mother had given me up for adoption? I used to fantasize that perhaps Joni or Bruce would have taken me in.

Copyright 2003