Illustration by Belle DeMont

The Light, sadly, has not fallen often on Substack lately because I have been sprinting towards the end of a book project. But it will soon be done—the lion’s share of it probably in the next two weeks—and then I’ll be back typing away.

In the meantime, here’s a piece I wrote 31 years ago, when the G
-7 Summit was coming to Halifax for Maclean’s during my days as its Atlantic bureau chief; well, I was the bureau.

Go at daybreak, when the morning fog still cools the air. Then, as the mist clears, and the outlines of the harbor emerge like the printing of a Polaroid snapshot, picture the scurvy-ridden British pioneers arriving, the booty-laden privateer ships that plundered all the way down the continent’s eastern seaboard and the Second World War convoys massing before departing for Europe. From there, anyone can stare into the same blue waters as the red-coated admirals who once plotted Britain’s campaign to hold on to the New World. They can see the spot where in 1945 a German submarine torpedoed a Canadian minesweeper, killing most of its crew, and the place where in 1917 the French steamship Mont Blanc and the Belgian steamer Imo collided, causing the biggest manmade explosion the world had seen until Hiroshima. Perhaps they can even glimpse the beaches where the bodies of criminals once dangled from makeshift gallows, a warning for all who entered the splendid harbor.

One cannot travel deeper into the Canadian soul than by entering the anchorage the Micmac Indians once called Chebucto. Certainly, the Plains of Abraham contain all the drama, sadness and triumph of the national psyche. But in Halifax, with its 250 years of rollicking, myth-laden life, the past so overlays the present that history seems alive. “It had always looked like an old town,” the novelist Hugh MacLennan once wrote about his home town. “It had a genius for looking old and for acting as though nothing could possibly happen to surprise it.”

Well, maybe in 1941 when those words were written. But what would MacLennan think about Halifax today? Would he see the old garrison town to which Rudyard Kipling once gave the stodgy handle “Warden of the Honor of the North”? Or would he see a boisterous, good-time city of the moment - a place with an inspiring landscape, a distinct culture and a relaxed mind-set, but humming with more edgy energy than it has in years?

For if there is a city that is emblematic of the yearnings of these times, it is Halifax. The editors of Harper’s Bazaar, the American magazine that christened it “the very anatomy of a hip city” back in 1993, realized that. So do the burned-out Torontonians arriving in pursuit of a bit of the good life, and the Europeans gobbling up real estate in the gorgeous coves and valleys surrounding the city. So, even, do Halifax’s young people, who now feel they may have found their last, best place without ever leaving the city of their birth.

For too long, Halifax’s energy has been smothered by a colonial regard for authority and convention. Now, the conservative capital of Nova Scotia seems to have rediscovered a lost youth to go with its penetrating sense of history. “It is like someone turned on the power in this place,” says Colin Starnes, president of the University of King’s College, which was founded in 1789.

The world - in the form of the G-7 summit - could not have arrived at a better time.

It is 1 a.m. on Saturday morning - and the Halifax night is just beginning its raucous second act. Downstairs in the Seahorse Tavern, the ship’s bell has rung, and a few stragglers pull on their drafts as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design students, the film-makers, the newly minted lawyers and the rugby players pour into the night. Outside on the wind-scoured street, a mass of skinheads merrily wail along with a guitar-playing busker. Next door at the newly opened Economy Shoe Shop Cafe and Bar, sophisticated thirtysomethings order cappuccino or another single malt Scotch. And everywhere - down Argyle Street towards the octopus of dance spots known locally as the “Liquor Dome,” and up Blowers Street towards pizza corner, the mecca of late-night fast-food dining - young people stroll, noisily discussing where to go next to ensure the party does not stop.

At the Birdland Cabaret, where all nocturnal roads seem to lead for those under 25, the coat-check woman seems giddy and the undersized doorman downright frazzled. Here, the local stars are the magnets, among them grunge sensations Sloan and all-girl jale, who got the city tagged “the next Seattle” by the music press in the United States and the United Kingdom. Talent scouts from the big American alternative record labels like Sub Pop and Geffen Records regularly visit the club, searching for the next hot Halifax act. Tonight, the members of Vancouver’s The Odds + Ursula thrash away on stage, while all around them young faces glow in trancelike fascination.

Slouched on a stool, one hand clutching a bottle of Olands Export Ale, the other a pool cue as he awaits his turn at the table, Lindsay Sharpe, 21, needs no better reminder of why he stays in Halifax instead of heading back to Toronto, where he has spent most of his life. “This is a great place to be young,” exclaims the goateed accounting clerk for an educational publishing house. “Everybody plays music. Everyone goes out. There’s a real sense of excitement. You feel like something is really happening and you are part of it.”

Something is happening. And the phrase that echoes through the downtown clubs, the old Victorian residences and the studios and offices of the new-breed entrepreneurs is self-confidence. It is a self-confidence that comes from feeling that, for now at least, one lives in a Place To Be rather than a backwater or an outpost on the edge of the continent.

It was not always thus. Even now, when sheets of rain pour from the steel-grey sky and not a hint of romance or poetry hangs in the air, the city seems shabby, drab and down-at-the-heels. But when the sun breaks through, softening the hard edges of the stone Victorian and Georgian buildings and glimmering off the water, Halifax delights the eye. And through the jumble of history, the city’s new story reveals itself: in the profusion of clubs and pubs within staggering distance of Citadel Hill, the old garrison where Leon Trotsky was once jailed; in the trendy shops, cafés and ethnic restaurants leading towards the ancient burial ground where headstones date back to 1752; on Spring Garden Road - walking in the direction of the rambling mansions built by the city’s brewers, shipping merchants and naval commanders - where on a recent afternoon an orange-robed Buddhist monk floated past a trio of bare-chested musicians pounding out a frantic jazz beat.

Preservationists fought hard battles to keep the city’s past intact - to ensure that new highrises and office towers left the historic downtown open to light and air. So it is never easy to forget that Halifax has marched to a military drumbeat from the moment it was founded by the British in 1749 to counter the French presence in the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island.

In its 19th-century heyday, Halifax was almost as renowned for its waterfront blind pigs, whorehouses and press gangs as for its wonderful deep-water harbor, which was the envy of the seagoing world. But by the Second World War, a layer of Puritan repression had settled over the town, leaving it stagnant, depressed and dull - a place that only came alive during wartime. “It was terrible, really,” recalls Constance Glube, now Nova Scotia’s chief justice, trial division, but a first-year law student at Dalhousie University when she arrived from Ottawa in 1952. “There were only a couple of restaurants, and there was hardly a bar in the city where a woman could go for a drink.”

Cut to the early 1980s and nothing had really changed. Cathy Jones, one of the stars of the hit CBC satirical television show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, used to call it “Halifax, City of the Living Dead,” when she first visited. “We thought it was horrible: dull, uptight, racist, boring, redneck.” Now, though, she lives in a Victorian reno in the city’s South End. As for her adopted home, she declares it “totally cool, totally hip.”

How did this come to be? How did a city that had always lost its young and ambitious to the sophistication of Boston, the career pathways of Toronto and the promise of Calgary suddenly become Halifax the Hip? A visible sign of the city’s transformation from backwater to trendsetter was in a huge waterfront shed last month, where beat poet Allen Ginsberg sat banging together a pair of wooden sticks and was well into his “Put Down That Cigarette Rag” with its endless chorus “don’t smoke, don’t smoke, don’t smoke, don’t smoke.” To his right, Celtic fiddling sensation Ashley MacIsaac - sporting a week’s growth and amber-tinted sunglasses - flashed a bow across his violin. Across the stage, Chris Church, another local fiddler, provided counterpoint.

Most of the fashionable crowd listened reverently as the most famous survivor of America’s beat literary scene rambled on, sometimes breaking into a reggae riff. Many simply gaped in disbelief at the scene: the 68-year-old New York City beatnik poet and the pair of early-20s hip-hop fiddlers from Nova Scotia - performing together in honor of the Sawang Osel Rangdrol Mukpo’s enthronement as leader of the worldwide Shambhala Buddhist community, based in Halifax since 1986.

Halifax has been “discovered” before. Its last, brief moment in the sun came during the late 1960s and early 1970s when American draft dodgers and visiting actors and artists spread the word in the United States of an easygoing “San Francisco North” in Nova Scotia. Back then, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design - hailed in 1973 by the influential magazine Art in America as possibly “the best art school in North America” - exerted an influence throughout the North American art world that defied its small size and out-of-the-way location.

But the buzz had certainly faded by the time the Sawang’s father, the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, decided to move the westernized Buddhist community he founded from Boulder, Colo., to a less aggressive and materialistic place. A decade later, the word on Halifax and Nova Scotia is undeniably out. Not just among the 800 of his spiritually enlightened followers who now make their home there, but also the executives who decide in mid-life that there is more to it all than trying to climb the corporate ladder, wherever it may be.

How big is the trend? One sure indicator is the European ownership of 1,700 properties in Lunenburg County - a picturesque piece of coastline about an hour south of Halifax - most of them from Germany. And that does not even include the financiers, writers and actors from Toronto, the politicians from Ottawa and the American computer executives who now call the South Shore towns of Lunenburg, Mahone Bay and Chester home for most of the year. They include the likes of broadcaster Alan (Fireside Al) Maitland, and David Johnson, one of the stars of the old CBC television drama Street Legal, as well as summer folk such as ex-federal Tory cabinet minister Barbara McDougall, the exotic Sri Lankan-born financier Christopher Ondaatje and Senator Finlay MacDonald, the federal Tory heavyweight.

And consider the Haligonians who left years ago but are now returning with well-honed job skills and higher expectations of their old home. “The quality of life is just so much better out here,” says Michael Napier, an architect who left Halifax for Victoria in 1992, only to return home six months ago. Judy Lake, a former Toronto vice-president with pension fund manager Aetna Canada Ltd., hopped on the wave even earlier. Five years ago, she and her husband, Bill Fullerton, an executive with the Toronto-Dominion Bank, sold their house in the tony Leaside district of Toronto. Now, she mothers two children, acts as an international environmental consultant and runs a string of luxury cottages the couple built in Rose Bay, 80 km southwest of Halifax. “Most of our customers are Torontonians,” she points out, “coming down on scouting trips, trying to figure out how they can move here for good.”

That is not just an astute marketer’s braggadocio. Emigration used to be the city’s bane. But from 1986 through 1991, including the early part of the same spirit-breaking recession that wracked the rest of the country, the population of Halifax and the surrounding communities of Dartmouth, Bedford and Lower Sackville - now going through formal amalgamation - grew by eight per cent, reaching 320,000, compared with a six-per-cent increase in the previous five years. And once a newcomer arrives, it takes a crowbar to get him to leave. “Whenever I talk about moving somebody to an office elsewhere, they threaten to quit,” complains Hector Jacques, president of the Jacques, Whitford Group of Companies, which does engineering consulting around the world.

The city’s biggest booster, Walter Fitzgerald, the portly 59-year-old mayor, can hardly contain himself as he talks about the roughly 100 telephone calls a day his office receives from people expressing interest in moving to Halifax, setting up businesses, holding conventions or just visiting. “I’m a salesman,” he says. “I’m always selling Halifax.”

In truth, it can still be a hard sell. Last year, provincial government incentives did help to persuade the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce to create 500 jobs in Halifax with a new telephone call centre. On June 1, another 600 people started work, but only thanks to the controversial new casino in the waterfront Sheraton Halifax Hotel, which opened for business despite the fact that everyone from government backbenchers to the provincial chiefs of police opposed it.

Otherwise, the small local market too often simply scares off potential investors. Halifax may be the Atlantic region’s centre for finance and legal services, but it is still a relatively small city. No surprise, then, that Halifax’s downtown remains littered with empty storefronts and office buildings. Fully 12 per cent of the workforce are federal and provincial civil servants - a dangerous reality in these times of public sector restraint. Moreover, cutbacks loom over the 13,000 armed forces personnel in the area, as well as the faculty and staff at its five universities. Yet they keep coming - despite the lack of economic opportunities.

To really understand the appeal of Halifax, it is best to consider the city’s self-perception as an oasis that just oozes laid-back lifestyle - a conceit that is justifiable as well as contagious. Kenneth Rowe, the crusty founder and president of IMP Group Ltd., the Halifax-based aviation giant, gloats about the way his counterparts in Toronto or Vancouver sit mired in traffic for hours, while it takes him just 10 minutes to get to the office from his well-appointed Halifax home, and 15 minutes more from his summer place in picturesque St. Margarets Bay. For Mark Surrette, a Halifax-based executive recruiter, the city offers just the right mix of big-city cachet and small-town comfort: “Where else but here will you be able to join the golf club, the yacht squadron and the most venerable old men’s club - all for under $4,000?”

Outsiders better get used to that smug tone. It comes from living on a harbor that is dotted with sailboats, kayaks and Windsurfers weaving among the freighters and naval frigates on a clear day. It comes from walking through tree-lined streets, parks and green spaces. And from being able to enjoy all the amenities of a cosmopolitan, bigger city - thriving theatre, a top-notch symphony, live jazz, rock and country music and clubs that cater to gays or straights - and still being only a $5 cab ride from home. It comes from leaving the office on a summer Friday afternoon and, within an hour, lying on a saltwater beach, dining on fresh seafood in Lunenburg or catching some Shakespeare in the tree-shaded Annapolis Valley town of Wolfville, 90 km north of Halifax, where Christopher Plummer has been an enthusiastic booster of the Atlantic Theatre Festival.

An East Coast paradise? Far from it. In a survey of the health of Canadian cities, Chatelaine magazine recently ranked Halifax a lowly 15th out of 25, lambasting it in particular for treating a mere 10 per cent of the wastewater from toilets, sinks and drains before releasing it into the harbor. Being set on a peninsula also means that land is scarce and so housing is pricey: according to real estate giant Royal LePage, a standard two-storey house in the city’s most desirable section cost an average of $170,000 in April, making it no cheaper than buying one in the best area of booming Calgary, about the same as one in the well-appointed Toronto suburb of Oakville and miles above other Atlantic centres such as east-end St. John’s, where a comparable house costs about $125,000.

For some, too, Halifax remains conventional and narrow-minded. The city’s 8,000-strong black community, for example, remains mired in poverty and anger. Just last month, the city, fearing public embarrassment during the G-7 summit, evicted a pair of squatters who had been camping in a former black settlement known as Africville to protest the manner in which the land was expropriated during the 1960s. “The community’s gains have been minimal,” concludes Gilbert Daye, a black multicultural programs officer with Heritage Canada. Women, to a lesser extent, can legitimately make the same complaint. “Men still overwhelmingly hold the levers of power,” says Anne Derrick, a high-profile lawyer and founder of the city’s sole women-only law firm.

And, of course, a person has to make a living. Halifax actually weathered the recession better than most cities. Last year, according to the Hemson Report, a survey conducted by the Toronto-based Hemson Consulting Group, the Halifax metropolitan area recorded the eighth-best economic performance in the country measured by indicators including employment, growth and change in real estate value, topping Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto, among others. The outlook? Better now that the port, responsible for nearly 9,000 jobs, has rebounded after years of losing traffic to Montreal. And the city fathers hope that word spreads about a study conducted by KPMG Management Consulting for the federal government, which identified Halifax as the lowest-cost site among 10 Canadian and American cities for building light manufacturing facilities.

The big problem with Halifax has always been a lack of entrepreneurs to create jobs and give the economy its fizz. Truth is, a person must be creative to earn a buck in a small city where the public service is the guiding force. Fortunately, information technology and the new knowledge-based economy make that increasingly possible. Three CBC television series - This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Street Cents and Theodore Tugboat - are now shot in Halifax, making it one of the country’s television production centres. On a per capita basis, according to Halifax-based NSTN, the country’s largest Internet provider, Nova Scotians use the Internet more than people in any other province, a fact underscored by a new coffee shop in downtown Halifax that features a personal computer that customers can use to dial up the Net. And a new breed of entrepreneur, peddling expertise and products in everything from microelectronics and computer software to environmental cleanup technologies, now provides a growing share of the local job market. They include people like John DeWolf, 26, and his partners in 1-2-3 Media Design, who last year created television graphics for Nickelodeon, a United States cable channel that features director Robert Altman as executive producer. And Judith Swan, an expert in the law of the sea who has written the fisheries agreements of 10 countries. And companies like DynaTek Automation Systems, a firm specializing in data storage systems for computers, which relocated to Halifax from Toronto two years ago even though almost all of its $75 million in sales are outside Nova Scotia. As Michael Donovan, vice-president of Salter Street Films, one of the country’s most vibrant independent film companies, puts it: “You can live here. But you have to make your money somewhere else.”

Halifax, technically, is a city, the 14th-largest one in the country by last count. But spiritually, it is a small town - particularly in the morning, which starts with a leisurely, practised pace that not even something the magnitude of the G-7 summit can really alter.

Inside Perks, a coffee shop sandwiched between the ferry terminal and the city’s law courts, the self-styled “waterfront intelligentsia” were well into their usual groove one recent morning. The city has dozens of similar places: bars, coffee shops and greasy-spoon diners where the clientele is fixed and the talk a loose banter based on an intimate knowledge of everyone else’s business. A stockbroker and provincial Tory bagman debated golf clubs with a corporate lawyer; a prominent Liberal arrived to pick up a morning paper and trade political gossip; the rough-looking guy in the windbreaker who pulled up a chair turned out to be a judge on his day off. But today, amid the noise, cigarette smoke and smell of baking sugar, the new face of Halifax is also evident: the Italian-Canadian judge with the Al Pacino hairstyle lining up for an early-morning jolt of caffeine; the writer - eyeing the muffins - who recently returned from Vancouver to work on a new Internet project for a local film production company; the music promoter just stepping through the doorway who is putting together a summer comedy festival for the thousands of tourists who flock to the city to see what the buzz is about. “Oh, Halifax is changing,” says Dennis Ryan, a musician and businessman, his voice dripping with the lilt of his native Tipperary, Ireland. “You can almost feel the earth shake under your feet.”

The tremors register a few blocks away at the city’s venerable Georgian legislature building, Province House, where Premier John Savage is fighting for his political life. His crime: doing the unthinkable and trying to end Nova Scotia’s old pattern of Tammany Hall-style political patronage. They also resonate through the waterfront courthouse, where the justice system is still trying to regain credibility after a scathing 1989 royal commission report into its role in the wrongful murder conviction of Donald Marshall. “The jury is still out on whether we have truly cleaned up our act,” declares Craig Garson, a Halifax lawyer who has clashed with the legal establishment in several controversial cases.

In a way, though, the new willingness to challenge the established order speaks volumes about Halifax - a city energized by new blood and rediscovered confidence. Intellectual vigor is to be expected in a place with five universities - total enrolment 25,000 - and among the best-educated populations of any city in the country. Colin Starnes of King’s College maintains that being on the geographic margin of Canadian life makes for a certain independence and freshness of thought. “Halifax has always enjoyed the marvellous ability to be a provincial looking at the centre of the country without having to be caught up in its enthusiasms,” he says.

Now, though, the city’s moment may finally be here. On a recent fogbound Saturday night in the same aging harborfront pier shed in which Ginsberg had held court, a Cape Breton-style celeidh, a kind of Celtic square dance, was under way. On a rickety stage, Buddy MacMaster, the dour dean of Cape Breton’s traditional Celtic fiddlers, whipped off reels, strathspeys and airs with effortless facility. Then, Mary Jane Lammond, thirtyish and garbed entirely in black, silenced the room with her soaring Gaelic lyrics. The music was centuries old. But there was nothing provincial and tradition-bound about the crowd whirling and jostling on the dance floor. “That’s the thing about Halifax,” explained Wendy Friedman, 31, the manager of a Himalayan clothing store, as she sat finishing a beer with her Sri Lankan musician boyfriend. “The cultural and social barriers have disappeared. Everything and everybody is included; nothing is neglected.”

Then she was gone, heading into the night, where a foghorn wailed like a banshee. Somewhere out there she knew something was going on. She just had to find it.

Maclean’s June 19, 1995

This is a snapshot in time. So, some glaring errors and omissions must be excused. Twenty-one years later, Perks is gone, so, sadly, is John Savage. But some of the problems then are problems now. And change is again everywhere in this city, bringing new challenges and opportunities.

The best thing about my last Substack post, in the view of many, was the accompanying photo reprinted with this one: a shot of the Queen Elizabeth High Lion’s Boys “A” basketball team, circa 1972. This reaction surprises me not one bit.

Since it’s an old picture, at least two folks in it are gone, and others so changed that it would take an archaeologist…

Read more

The author, third from left front row, on the basketball beam at Queen Elizabeth High, in Halifax, where the physical wear and tear began.

For no obvious reason, the ball of my foot has been throbbing lately. Some kind of inflammation, a bone bruise, a stress fracture, gout, the start of plantar fasciitis— I really have no idea.

Thus, I’m doing nothing other than Advil, ice, and constant bitching, in the hope that it will magically go away.

The truth is that I fret about physical woes, even the seemingly innocuous ones, more than I used to.

My infrastructure, you see, is slowly crumbling. After decades of thinking myself invincible, in the back of my mind, now lurks a nagging suspicion: that the next ailment will be the one that does it.

It’s the years—i have reached the venerable age of 70—but more than anything, it’s the miles. I’m generally a clean liver: no cigs, moderate booze intake, a good diet. For more than half a century, I have got my steps in, and then some.

I gave up running a decade ago, but at that point, according to some quick calculations, I had probably run three-quarters of the way around the world’s equator.

Then there were the decades of grinding tennis, in the past couple of years replaced by pickleball, not to mention my beloved karate practice that continues to this day. The tens of thousands of pushups, the endless crunches, the boundless lunges and squats.

The result of all this wear and tear is a litany of injuries worthy of a cage fighter: a torn retina and meniscus, broken ribs and knuckles, tennis and golfer’s elbows, sciatica that comes and goes.

Both of my shoulders have been frozen. I have replaced one hip and will probably need to do the same to the other. My lower back is arthritic. My limited neck mobility means shoulder checks at the steering wheel consist of a 15-degree swivel, then a cry of “I’m going in” like a Canadian soldier about to storm Juno Beach.

Yet, when my foot or anything else aches, it’s not so much the pain that troubles me; it’s the worry, on some deep level, that this will be the time my body says enough.

This, I am aware, sounds like the worst sort of virtue-signalling, implying, as it does, that only with discipline and motivation can someone inflict this kind of damage upon a human body.

Except I don’t mean it that way at all. I suspect that somewhere in my psyche something off-kilter exists—OCD? A masochistic bent?—that has made me pile activity upon activity and throw common sense to the wind, running a half marathon with a stress fracture, for example, and training for a big karate grading essentially on one leg.

But we are the way we are. We all know the health benefits of making the heart and muscles work. Even so, I can honestly never once recall thinking “well, this is going to give me an extra couple of days on the other end” in the midst of an endless tennis point.

I just like the way that physical exertion, short of the kind that signals a lasting woe, makes me feel. That’s the brain’s natural painkillers and mood-enhancers, endorphins, at work. Yet it’s more than that.

I find it easier to let the cares of life melt away on the dojo floor than the meditation cushion.

Perverse as it might sound, I also take pleasure from the feeling of being sore and achy when it comes from the physical life, particularly involving play, or something akin to it

On some level, it makes me feel like a kid again, even though back in the ancient days I could spend a Saturday morning on the ground hockey rink, the afternoon riding around on my bike, and the evening running the risk of being concussed playing tackle football in a helmet as thick as an eggshell, and still arise the next day as if born anew.

This, then, is a sort of physical nostalgia. To sit on the sofa, beer in hand, tender body parts encased in ice, after putting your body through something gruelling is not the same as being slumped in a chair after a day of toil on the laptop is it?

The pain is the price you pay for that feeling. For me, it’s worth it.

A long time ago, I read a line from the American poet Wallace Stevens, “The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.” I suspect he was talking about the great outdoors, but I think his words are just as fitting when it comes to doing something that makes the muscles strain and the heart beat faster.

And so, held together by duct tape and chicken wire, I limp on, aware that my rambling days perhaps at some point must end, but happy that moment, for now, has not yet come.

Photo courtesy of Albert Lee

Welcome to the latest chunk of Last Night at Hum Mow’s, my novel-in-progress about a newspaper war in Halifax during the last years of the Second World War.

The story thus far: Doc Savage, the managing editor of one of Halifax’s four papers, has hired a pickpocket named Albert Sweeney, to steal the diary of the city’s most formidable bordello owner, in which she lists not just the names of clients, but also their tastes.

The idea is that the paper would use the diary as fodder for an endless run of front-page stories, building circulation in the fierce war for newspaper market share.

Showing unexpected initiative, Sweeney disappears with the diary, leaving some people might yworried.

Wow, that sounds like a lot doesn’t it? But, as I said, a work in progress. I hope this chunk makes you want to read more.

Sometimes, when the troubles of the night got to him, and he awoke not sure what was real and what was not, the names would come back, the faces, the voices too, as if as punishment for the past. When that happened, when his brain was a-swirl, he would lie there, alone, in the dark until he got his bearings, which could take a few minutes depending upon how much the hypos had gotten the upper hand. Sometimes he became so discombobulated that he called out, to whom he was never precisely sure, causing Mrs. Farrell, the latest in a string of kind ladies from Newfoundland, to gently open the door and ask if he was alright.

Usually, he just lay there until his heartbeat quieted and his breathing, labored now at the best of times, returned to normal. He was an old man, surprised to have lived this long. Along the way, a person accumulates their share of regrets, he would say to himself, his eyes, once green, now grey, staring up at the ceiling where the light played.

He walked when his legs were young, and the weight of the world did not so much burden him. He would leave his big house, down on the avenue where the brewers, magistrates and shipping magnates lived, sometimes when it was still dark, and make his way on foot through streets that he knew well, until he reached the building that carried his name. Now, because of age, bulk, and the eyes, his outings were by car, in the back seat of a blue Packard that sat in the garage until he asked Mrs. Farrell to call down to Thomas Kearney, who drove for him, among his other duties.

It’s precisely 28 steps from his bedroom to the closet, where she stops and asks what overcoat he wants to wear today. And, since he knows it to be cold outside, he chooses the grey, wool one, with the Italian buttons, made by Kilgour’s on Saville Row, where he liked to have his coats and suits made when he made that journey yearly.

Together they wait for the elevator, the only one east of Montreal. Out in the back, Cold Tom, as Kearney was known, although never to his face, would be holding open the door into the back seat on the passenger’s side. Harlan Pike has always been a man who takes pleasure in sensations, the feel of a fine shirt, the smoke of good whiskey in the back of the throat. He loved to sit in the back seat of his car, to feel his body sag satisfyingly in the leather, to smell that new automobile smell—he buys a new one every year--then, a moment later, to feel them leave the driveway, the miracle of Detroit engineering seeming to elevate him from the pavement, so smooth is the journey.

Because of the macular degeneration, Haliax had been fading for years. That struck him as no great loss. Ever since childhood, he suspected that the past and present were intermingled—the deeds of yesterday showing through like an ancient brushstroke still visible in one of the old master’s paintings hanging on his wall. It wasn’t the sort of thing a person admitted to, at risk of being packed off to the hospital for the war mad in the North End, but, since his eyes have dimmed, there are times when the streets, as he drove through them, seemed to open like a crack in time. What came to him at moments like that, spurred by some smell, or a sound, or the touch of a breeze, are scenes and images that jump back and forth across the ages and tend to appear and vanish like pages from a calendar, meant to show the passage of time in a movie at the Capitol Theatre: The city aflame with ten-thousand small fires, as the sooty snow falls in big, wet flakes all around. A mother with a baby carriage, pointing up at a German dirigible floating high in the sky. A car, a finned Valiant, stopping, a door opening and a hand beckoning for someone to enter into a dark back seat.

Kearney always called ahead so the Halifax Club knew that Pike was on his way. A uniformed staffer, waiting vigilantly behind the big oak door, hustles down the steps when the Packard pulls to the curb. The door opens, and the bowing and scraping begin.

Pike doesn’t like the notion of having to take an arm and be led like an invalid into this place. So, he holds onto the rail and takes the steps slowly by himself. He makes sure to stand straight, head held high, when pushing through the door, knowing that they will be looking up from their newspapers and backgammon board, as they did when Harlan Pike entered.

A couple of dicky turns done from memory, and he is inside the bar, lowering himself into the seat at the table he prefers. He was always pleasantly surprised by the speed with which the waiter—the first one he met, introduced by Ernest Manning, who made them tremble there long before Pike arrived, was named Steve, so he called them all Steve—placed a very dry martini with Gordon’s Gin and three olives next to his right hand.

Pike savoured the first sip of a well-made martini, the weight it had on the tongue, the combination of salt, tang, heat and ice, the bite without harshness that made it to his mind the perfect libation. He had been blessed with an impressive constitution, which he tended to think of as pure force of will: his father and grandfather before him had no head for the drink. Pike had chosen not to take the pledge because he put no stock in things like a higher power. Instead, when Steve placed his martini lightly down on the table, with the flattened ting that, along with the juniper’s snap, telegraphed its arrival, Pike drained a third of the glass. He sighed. Then, returning the glass to the table, he waited.

As always, his son Desmond arrived late, starting with the excuses even before he had warmed the chair: beyond his control…the traffic…the incompetence, that sort of thing.

“Same as my dad’s, Stevie boy. Two olives though, hahaha.”

Sometimes Pike thought that his boy just waited outside checking his watch, because he knew lateness infuriated him and being a few minutes past the appointed hour showed that he was his own man, and didn’t answer to his daddy’s beck and call.

By way of greeting, Pike said, “A Coca-Cola, Steve,” seeing as he did his own father’s weakness in his son. Squinting, he noticed that his son wore a bow-tie, which was at least not a cravat, but was still, in Pike’s view, a sign of weak character. If his eyes were abler, he would have noticed the sheen of sweat, the two-day stubble, the pin-prick pupils which meant that his offspring was back on the morphine, or perhaps worse.

Steve placed the chunky bottle on the table along with an ice-filled glass. Irritation flickered across the face of the younger man as he poured, the bubbling liquid filling the silence.

“Slainte,” he said.

His father, wanting as much distance as possible from his Celtic ancestors, raised his own glass. They drank as formalities dictated. The son leaned in.

“Jesus, Dad.”

“This day was coming, you had to know that.”

“There are a thousand names in that fucking book.”

“Except most of those names would be fake ones, wouldn’t they?”

Des Pike’s face seemed to deflate, as if losing air.

The father continued: “The point is that your name is in it for anyone to see, right? Along with some other shabby facts as well, correct?”

Des put his head in his hands and uttered a strangled sob, which his father feared was an attempt to elicit sympathy, making his lip curl even more deeply in distaste.

The envelope had been delivered to his office by hand, with just an ink-smudged address that said Mr. Harlan Pike Esq., on the front. With a pearl-handled opener, he shredded the envelope’s edge, then held it open so that he could remove a single sheet of notepaper that he laid on his desk. Training his magnifying glass on the paper, Pike bent forward.

Sir:

I have got hold of the private diarys of one Germaine Booth, who you may of heard of. In them she keeps track of the visitors to her fine establishment, there wants and pleasures. It makes for very interesting reading, Sir. You would reconize some of the names wrote down there. One of them is your son Desmond, who has been a busy young man.

So I reckon it would be to your advantage if them diarys stayed out of other people’s hands. Better still if they was to disappear altogether off the face of the earth.

That can be arranged.

It will cost you dear, but I don’t expect that will trouble a gentleman with your means. Money is one thing you have no shortage of.

I will be in touch,

A friend

The note was printed so crudely that Pike wondered if the misspellings and elementary school grammar were all a ploy to cloak the author’s identity. Pike leaned back in his chair, which creaked with his weight. With thumb and forefinger, he worried a scab on his forehead, which he did when something displeased him, or deep thought was required, as was the case on both counts at that moment.

It was times like this that made him wish that Desmond had gone to war instead of Walter, the older boy, the scholar, the athlete, the son any father would want to have. Walter had an out, the same one his younger brother used: that the family’s enterprises were invaluable to the war effort and were too much for the aging father to run. But he turned it down.

“You had your war,” Walter said, standing before his father as a newly minted member of the West Nova Scotia Highlanders.

Yet, the boy knew the truth. That after signing up for the Royal Flying Corps, his father had sailed for England, where he boarded a train for the countryside, and that the war had ended before he finished his training. It always made him feel diminished to stand beside men decked out with their ribbons and medals on important civic occasions, to fear that they suspected that while they were crawling through the mud and barbed wire of the Somme, he was buying waterfront slums at war-depressed prices, taking the first steps towards building his fortune.

Maybe that was what Walt sensed, how the narrative haunted his father, and never wanted to feel the same way. Perhaps that was why his remains now lay buried in a cemetery in a small Italian village, beneath the hills where the Canadians fought, leaving Pike alone with Desmond, and all of his entanglements and flaws.

The boy’s resume was a litany of failure; relieved of any real work obligations, Desmond did demonstrate a certain knack for debauchery, creating one scandal after another, many of which needed the father’s intervention: the pregnancy the required a bag of cash, and a visit to a once-well-regarded general practitioner who discovered discrete abortions paid more than lancing boils; the gambling debts incurred at Hum Mow’s; the quiet word with Leo Coakley to smooth over some bad blood with his homicidal son Spurgeon.

Occasionally, Cold Tom had to be dispatched, sawed-off shotgun nestled in the crook of his arm, to a small, subterranean bordello that catered to a more particular kind of clientele than those who frequented Germaine’s, to a
French freighter crewed by men displeased with Desmond’s unwillingness to pay for a crate of morphine.

But that was rare, since his boss understood that sometimes the fear of a thing was more powerful than the thing itself.

So it was with Kearney, who was not especially tall, but wide in the shoulder and narrow in hip. Even the fellows at the prize-fighters club had never seen anything like his hands, which, when clenched, resembled the roots of trees. His face at first seemed pockmarked, but upon closer examination turned out to be a sheen of rough scars, burnishing the legend of his violence-tinged past.

From it, eyes of the palest blue stared out. They never blinked as if nothing was capable of surprising him. He had seen some things, anyone meeting Kearney could tell. He had been to places where few would ever want to venture. If there was one thing, above all, that made him the most feared man along the Halifax waterfront, it was that.

Pike was never sure why his boy was the way he was. His wife, Harriet, had babied him as a child, pushing him around in the pram, long after Walter had learned to drive a bicycle. From the start, then, Desmond was a weak child, which might have explained the lack of ambition and work ethic. The moral failings—the whoring, the intemperate gambling, the love of narcotics—were another matter. Some things were just the way they were, Hattie used to tell Pike, stroking his brow as one might calm a small animal, when the boy had gotten the best of him.

She had departed the earth seven years gone, leaving Pike to deal with his son’s failings, which were now more than a mere inconvenience. He had plans; he always did. He wasn’t a man to dwell on the twists of fate, but it didn’t escape him that everything he now wanted rested on the shoulders of the son of whom he’d long despaired. The one who sat across the table from him a disappointment once again.

Watercolour by Lisa Napier

For 31 of the past 34 years, on the final week of June, I have had a ritual: I pour myself a cup of coffee. I step into my yard, which is next to a school. Then I just stand there and watch the scene unfold.

The school just beyond the fence has had many names; now it goes by LeMarchant-St. Thomas Elementary. On the day I’m talking about—the close of the school year—its yard seems to vibrate, with an energy that has been building for weeks.

I remember what it was like: the dwindling attention span, the wistful looks cast out the window where the sun always seemed to shine tantalizingly.

When I was an elementary school student in this very neighbourhood, I knew nothing of the secret the adults were keeping from us: that we needed to treasure the two months of summer vacation because those 62 days would be the most freedom we would ever enjoy until the CPP kicked in.

Back then, it was enough for me to understand that once I walked out that door, every day from there on in was mine to spend as I pleased.

No great adventures beckoned; no trips to the beloved family cottage or stays at some summer camp to be reunited with old friends. I knew from experience that a lot of summer vacation in a small Canadian city, in the time before screens, when kids were mostly left to entertain themselves, was going to be kind of boring

Yet as the big day neared, it seemed like I needed to be weighted down in my seat, or else, in my excitement, I would levitate and float off into the air. When the doors finally opened for the last time, we were like race-hounds after the starting gate had been lifted, our Converse-sneakered feet just grazing the pavement as we sprinted into Summer.

This year, I paid particular attention to the end-of-school proceedings: our Halifax house is on the market; more than likely, this will be the last time—without the cops being called—that I will stand and watch the final morning in the elementary school year play out,

It will be hard to leave our house for a thousand reasons, big and small. One of them will be to no longer live across the street from the now-shuttered school I once attended, where a teacher each day read us a chapter of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books, and, after the bell rang, out on the school yard, we pitched cards, and honed our hand-to-eye coordination trying to hit a tennis ball with a canoe paddle.

Back in those sectarian times, the school next door was for the Roman Catholics in the neighbourhood. By the time my offspring entered LeMarchant-St. Thomas everybody went there. Over the decades, I watched them come and go, the student body, once lily white, changing to reflect the city’s vibrant diversity.

It would be a lie to say that on some level I didn’t live vicariously through the kids who came and went: How they raced to school in the morning, just happy to be young and alive; how, at recess, they would burst through the door, and, missing not a beat, resume the game they were playing before being summoned to class. The joy when they saw a pal. The way, untroubled by the complexities of the world, their voices always seemed to ring with innocence and hope.

Some things were different in my day, I say, slapping my knee like Jed Clampett, remembering how we roamed freely to and from school without a phalanx of parental bodyguards and how, at least once, we marked the final day of school by throwing our scribblers into the air.

But kids are kids, right? And what matters now is surely the same thing that mattered then. At least that was how it seemed to me, standing on the doorstep, watching, probably for the last time, the past overlay the present.

It was great to see them hurry by with the school’s piped-in version of Pharrell Williams singing Happy as their backbeat.

One kid, almost at the family car, turned and ran back to the school fence, so he could wish Tommy, whom he might not see until September, a good summer.

As the youngsters piled into the school bus—LeMarchant=St. Thomas is a French Immersion school, which means some of them have to travel a distance to get there—a staff member hustled over to bid them farewell.

Out on the school yard, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eight did laps on a two-wheeled bike, still adorned with training wheels, as if wanting to relive the great memories of the last year, one last time. But a parent beckoned.

Soon they were all gone; the school yard was empty. Because, on such a day, why would anyone linger?

Photo courtesy of Albert Lee

Another first-draft excerpt from my novel about a newspaper war in Halifax, N.S., during the final tumultuous years of the Second World War. It is a mixture of the real and imagined: there was, for example, a Mahon’s Stationery and a Chappell’s Leather Goods in 1940s Halifax. And once a man named Doc Savage ran the newsroom at a Halifax paper—but to my knowledge, he was neither corpulent nor conniving. Hum Mow’s, as the picture above proves, also existed, but I have taken considerable liberties with it, as well.

Some years later, as Spurgeon and Lawlor Coakley dangled him by his ankles a quarter mile over the waters of Halifax Harbour, Albert Sweeney was to remember the not-so-distant day that had led him to that moment. As he whirled in the ether, he felt not terror but a calmness, as if, facing death, he wanted to slow the precious seconds down. It was quiet at that height, he discovered, once he let the brothers’ mad rat-tat-tat laughter recede into silence. Albie Sweeney’s short, felonious life meant he was no stranger to those moments when existence could turn decisively for better or worse. Nonetheless, he was surprised to discover that he had the wherewithal, while upside down with his life dependent upon the goodwill of simpletons, to wave a hand in the direction of a passing navy corvette, the ordinary seamen pausing their work to stand in wonder. Then, as if he had all the time in the world, Sweaney recalled the day that Doc Savage, face red as a Roma tomato, dropped his bulk into a chair at Hum Mow’s, and in his asthmatic way said he had a little job for him.

They had had conversations like this before, as the battle for circulation between the city’s four newspapers raged. The managing editor of the Chronicle possessed a gift for the kind of grand chicanery necessary for such a back-alley conflict. Some things, even against the backdrop of a World War, had to be done from a distance. At moments like that, for the right compensation, Sweeney was happy to lend a hand.

As Savage’s emissary, he had approached the Daily Herald’s linotype operator, whose love of poker was matched by his ineptitude at the card table, making his debts disappear for the simple act of making a charcoal pressing of the paper’s front page and having it in Savage’s hands before his paper’s morning press run began.

When Savage needed the metal printing plates for the Evening Mail to disappear before it could inform its readers that the Allies had invaded France, Sweeney was his man.

Yes, he was a handy fellow when someone had to compel a competitor’s newsboys to surrender the best corners—and when the witness of a waterfront straight razor attack needed to be spirited away, and kept in women and grog, so only the Herald’s readership would be thrilled by his eyewitness accounts.

“You know Germaine,” said Savage.

The answer being obvious, Sweeney said nothing.

“Then you know about her diary.”

“If there is such a thing,” said Sweeney. “It’s a legend, innit, like all that stuff about her life beforehand.”

“Just the rumour that it exists, and that every fellow who enters her house of accommodation becomes an entry in her journal, gives it power right. Why else can she operate as she does?”

Sweeney gave a makes-sense shrug, took a sip of his “special” tea.

Silence settled over the table, which, mid-afternoon, was the only one occupied in the restaurant. Glances were exchanged. Another pause, longer this time.

“Doc, c’mon now,” Sweeney said, hands out, as if seeking benediction.

The newsman swabbed his moist forehead with a cloth napkin. Then made a face that only in the broadest possible sense could be described as a smile.

Sweeney listened as Savage explained things. He liked the infallible logic of the whole enterprise—to steal the bordello madame’s daybook and use it as fodder for the front page, or as leverage for who knew what future advantages for the paper. The more he heard, the more thrilled he was to learn that the caper possessed the kind of flair that would burnish his reputation as a finger-smith.

When the thought first edged into his mind, Sweeney tried to push it away. Seconds later, it returned, causing the gears to turn in his head. His eyes betrayed nothing, but as Savage explained the who, what, why and where of his plan, Sweeney’s thoughts had veered off in another direction. The details would come later. All he knew when he left Hum Mow’s and stepped out into the spitting rain, was that things would not unfold as Doc Savage expected.

Like an athlete readying for an important game, Sweeney had his rituals before a big job: the soaking of the hands in water as hot as he could stand it, to improve the tactile sensation; the cracking of the knuckles and flexing of the fingers along with the rolling of the wrists, clockwise and counter-clockwise, to ensure the necessary degree of mobility.

Sweeny’s personal hygiene was questionable; years of dental neglect had left him with just a smattering of teeth; his hair was plastered to his scalp with tallow; on warm days, he emitted a gamey odour, like a forest animal.

His hands, though, were immaculate, the nails trimmed and clean, the cuticles groomed. The fingers were disproportionately long for his height, a fact that he liked to point out to prospective paramours with a lewd lift of the eyebrows. They were also perfectly formed, the tendons, muscles and bones tapering evenly. Germaine used to say that he had a pianist’s hands. How she would know enough to offer such an opinion was uncertain, but Sweeney chose to treat it as a compliment, his hands, after all, being the tools of his trade.

Along with the range of motion and dexterity, his fingers were unusually sensitive, allowing him to rummage around sightlessly in a coat pocket or, even a satchel, and tell by touch what he touched. Once he had read about a famous Parisian pickpocket who filed down the skin on his fingers to increase their sense of touch, so he did that too, using fine sandpaper and rubbing away until they bled, which he thought of simply as the cost of greatness.

Sweeney’s room, home to just a bed, table, chest of drawers, and a single chair, possessed a monastic aesthetic. It felt right for him to sit in there, by lantern-light, practicing the series of movements he would need to discreetly stick a hand into the satchel by which Germaine Booth’s lawyer, Arthur Bligh, once a month, walked her diary from bordello to law office.

Sweeney was clumsy at first, fumbling the notebook he bought as a practice prop as he tried to ease it from the bag he found at Chappell’s leather goods, which he knew closely resembled Bligh’s, right down to the tapered handle. That morning, though, he had performed the lift flawlessly, half a dozen times in a row, timing every one with a stopwatch, ensuring he did so within the seven seconds he had calculated was the maximum length of time he would have for the task.

More than anonymity, the job required deceit. He settled on a slouch hat, and blacked out one of his few remaining teeth. On the way out of the flop house that he called home, Sweeney grabbed an umbrella that stood unused by the door to add a bit of flair to his get-up. Half a block later, his confidence was briefly shaken when a second-story man named Delacroix passed him on the street and did a double take. But the air smelled fresh, Sweeney thought, like a new start.

From a grainy old newspaper photograph, he was able to spot Bligh moving slowly down the other side of Hollis, his hunch and top hat being the giveaway. Once he crossed the street, events seemed to unfold in slow motion: Sweeney emitting an exaggerated “ooff” as he collided with his prey, then blustering, in a voice not his own, “whoa, what’s this, what’s this?”

Up close, Bligh looked like he was 100—cheeks sunken, nose cross-hatched with veins, complexion sallow, a trembling hair two inches long extending from a brow. There was confusion in the old man’s eyes as Sweeney grabbed a bony shoulder, the opening move in the Old Jostle, as the manoeuvre was known to those in his trade.

This was always the moment when Sweeney came alive, when the drabness of life receded. It seemed like an eternity until the thumb and forefinger from his free hand clicked the satchel lock. Panic started to well up as he touched a paper clip holding together some sheets of paper, then something small and hard, an official stamp, perhaps, for Bligh’s barrister’s business. Then he felt the smooth warmth of moleskin. His fingers, worthy of Horowitz, closed around the notebook, lifted it out of the valise, then slid it into a pocket in his overcoat, sewn wide and deep enough to accommodate an object of that size and shape.

By now, Sweeney was doing his bit, brushing off Bligh’s overcoat, wondering loudly if he was alright. The lawyer, turning his back, began a stumbling retreat. Thus, moments later, he did not see Sweeney stop in front of a woman pushing a carriage.

Even if he had, there would have been no way of Bligh knowing that he was breathing the air of an unfolding legend. And that from that moment on, the lore of Halifax skullduggery would recount how, instead of a baby, the carriage held a doll that until recently had sat on a shelf in a Zeller’s department store. How Sweeny nimbly dropped a Moleskine notebook with a Mahon’s Stationery sticker by its side. How the lady then resumed her journey, pushing her pram at an unhurried pace towards a downtown building where Doc Savage awaited the diary he paid through the nose for.

The getaway was always a giddy time for Sweeney, the boosted pocket watch or filched wallet seeming to emit an incriminating light that he was sure that the whole world could see. This time was different. The audacity of his act, and its implications, roiled around in his brain as he cut down an alley between a ship’s chandlery shop and the Ladies Temperance Society, then slid sideways through an opening on a padlocked back door.

Sweeney’s work demanded that he knew the rabbit’s warren that was the Halifax waterfront, an ancient place of water and decay. Some of the buildings dated back almost to the city’s beginnings, six years before the American War of Independence, while others had been added atop the city’s existing architecture, almost like layers of geologic time.

Though he grew up in the outlaw lands on the city’s edge, Sweeney came of age on the waterfront, learning its ins and outs like few men had, the success of his trade depending as much upon his ability to disappear following the pilfering as the theft itself.

He had discovered that warehouse years before and always felt that if he listened hard enough, he could hear the moans of shackled slaves from Africa and the West Indies lying there in the damp, mud and cold, waiting to be auctioned off at a nearby market. It was one of those shameful places where no one ventured, as if it were cursed. Once he would have needed a lantern, but Sweeney had been down there so often that all he had to do was run a hand along the wall, no matter the time of year, as cold as winter, to find the stairs. At the top, the door resisted. He pushed again, then felt it give.

Blinking in the daylight, he stood for a second, calming himself. He checked his pocket to ensure that he hadn’t dropped his package somewhere back in the dark, where the rats would already be shredding its secrets. Fingering the notebook with relief, he pulled it out, fanning the pages, surprised by the delicacy of the handwriting.

It was, in retrospect, ominous that at that very second, a circling herring gull released the uric acid in its kidneys, which mixed with the solid waste in its intestines and landed silently on the serge of his overcoat. But nothing could darken his high spirits that day: Sweeney brushed off what he could, then stepped into the swell of humanity on the Halifax street with the swagger of a man on the way to becoming a legend.

Lately, there’s been lots of hubbub about Miles Davis, who would have turned 100 on May 26. I joined right in, listening to every recording of his I own on vinyl since that seems to be the only way to do it, and taking in a bunch of old interviews about him, of which there are plenty, since the Prince of Darkness liked to talk about himself almost as much as others did.

One of those interviews, found, naturally, in Downbeat magazine, reiterates something I’ve heard the man himself say in that flayed speaking voice: that the most important thing for him as a musician was having his own sound, which “has to match what you think—not what someone else thinks.”

There’s a lesson in that for all of us who try to express ourselves in ways big and small. For me, this revelation took about thirty years, with millions of words for newspapers, magazines and books under my belt. I’m just happy it came at all.

I was 52 when, for better or for worse, I found the on-the-page equivalent of my sound. I know the exact moment it happened, even if I have no idea exactly why: I had been working on a book about coal mining, my family and Nova Scotia.

Most of a first draft had been written when I looked at some old notes in one of those stenographer’s notepads, the handwriting scratchy, the events distant enough that I had to squint hard to recall them.

I was starting a new chapter, which meant there was a clean slate; I could have written it any number of ways. For some reason, I began this way:

***

One afternoon, years before starting to write this book, I sat on the hood of a rental car parked over the northern end of the Sydney coalfield, and let my thoughts wander. It’s a holy place; the entire history of coal mining in Cape Breton lies buried underneath, in the tunnels and shafts where the GMA sunk the first shaft in the area in the early 1800s, in the men who died there, in the names of the companies that pushed further out, beneath the massive weight of the floor, following the seams towards Newfoundland. It would be months before the last whistle blew in 2001 and the Prince mine, which extended eight kilometres from where I sat out into the ocean, closed. But this story was sputtering to its melancholy climax. And so, on an Indian summer day, in the parking lot outside the final mine operating in the province, I sipped rotgut coffee and waited for the last of Cape Breton’s fabled colliers to emerge into the sunlight.

***

I’m not suggesting there’s anything brilliant about that paragraph; even now, off the top of my head, I can see changes I’d make: losing one of the two “shafts” in the third sentence, for starters, but also making some of the language less muddy.

My memory is that the words just poured out and that after writing them, I sat there staring at my MacBook screen for a bit, perhaps blinked a couple of times, then went back to the beginning of the book and started rewriting the whole thing.

Now it is possible that the original draft was better, and that I would be writing these words from a pied-à-terre in the South of France, rather than an old lobsterman’s house on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, if I had stuck with that approach, or opted for some different way forward than how I opened Chapter 14 of Coal Black Heart.

But the truth is that I have never written the same way since typing that paragraph. It was like, all along, I had been speaking one language passably enough, only to discover, at last, my native tongue.

The first person, I discovered, was a comfortable narrative place for me. Something about being the guy sitting on the hood of the car, a ghost, watching events unfold, seemed to work, which made sense since I’ve always been more of a noticer than an explainer, anyway.

The tone of the words fit too—sombre, written in the minor key, which it took me half a century on this earth to realize was the way I tended to look at life. Even the pacing of the sentences, which I cannot explain but only recognize when I see it, sounds right to my ear, even if to no one else’s.

Up until that point, I banged away in a somewhat florid style, ladling on the description and adding the modifiers two and even, gulp, three at a time. I didn’t decide then and there to change that. But there are a few adjectives in the paragraph above, and almost all of them--“holy,” “melancholy,” “rotgut,” and “fabled”--seem to give things more weight than lift.

Granted, the subject matter was heavy: by my calculation, more Nova Scotians have died underground in coal mines than on the battlefields of the First World War.

But from that moment on, I tightened things up, eschewed the banter, wrote like a different man. I knew that what I wanted was my own sound, which I heard for the first time all those years ago, and have been chasing ever since.

Illustration Belle DeMont

“How come you still write?” someone asked me the other day.

“That’s a good question,” I said, now that I no longer work at a newspaper, where my job is to “maximize web traffic.”

I hummed and hawed for a bit about why, instead of taking up ikebana and learning how to juggle, I continue to type away.

It’s different now that I’m free to write about what I want when I want, I said. Which is true: I’m helping a friend with his autobiography, a pleasant task if there ever was one, and am working away on a first novel, and take to Substack when there’s something I feel compelled to write about.

Part of it, for sure, is having an offramp, so that I didn’t awake one day—as I feared would be so--unshackled by the 9-to-5 life, but paralyzed by my newfound freedom.

If my toil makes a little dough, that’s nice but incidental.

Because it’s more than that. I was drawn to journalism for the reasons everyone is: to right wrongs, to be close to the action, to see some things, to do something “worthy” with my working hours.

A big part of it, though, was that I just wanted to spend my days searching for the right words, then trying to string them together in a way that was useful and not grating on the ear.

Now I am writing less, since discovering that I have lots of other things to do, but enjoying it more. This is old news to lots of people. For me, it’s a wonderful surprise.

There are times when I miss the buzz of trying to write something of value while on deadline.

But there were also times when pumping out a magazine article or newspaper column with the clock ticking could feel like you’re running a 10-K, putting one foot ahead of the other, eyes focused only on the finish line, where the rush, such as it is, awaits.

I don’t want to overstate this: I have been lucky when it comes to picking what interests me and what I want to write about.

Except now, with only myself to please, the act of writing is one of the abiding pleasures in my life, a late-in-the-game revelation that makes it all the sweeter.

What I now know is that my wavering attention span means that sometimes I only really see things when I type them into my laptop for the first time.

Writing forces me to notice things, to pay attention, because as Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” The act, therefore, anchors me to the world.

By writing something down, I capture it. More than that, I work through in my head how I feel about it, whether “it” is a movie theatre that was a fixture of my youth, the curative powers of Cannonball Adderley, or why I still choose to write.

Since I’ve been doing this for a long time, and the words mercifully come easier than they used to, the craft of writing itself is a delight. Sure, there are moments when I have to remind myself that it is my own choice to sit in front of the keyboard, as the American sportswriter Red Smith once said, and there to “open your veins and bleed.”

Mostly, I’ll look up after an hour—feeling the craftsman’s satisfaction that comes with trying to do something well simply for its own sake—and wonder where those sixty minutes went, so lost have I been in the typing.

I’m trying some new things writing-wise these days. There’s a pleasure to be had from that even if it is still comfortably enough within your wheelhouse that you aren’t starting completely from scratch.

And so, helping someone tell their own interesting story, in their voice, using the rhythms of their own speech, provides a new sort of satisfaction for me.

On the other hand, being unshackled by facts--flying by the seat of my pants and making it up as I go—is a completely different kind of thrill. Writing a column, the most gratifying moment is when you hit send and know that what you’ve done is the best that you could on that subject in the time available.

Now, I take to the keyboard to work on my novel as Henry Miller said he did, fingers poised over the keys, waiting for the words to come pouring out. Regardless of the result—I’m no Henry Miller--the excitement when the process starts is profound.

I read something the other day, a celebrity on the subject of how AI is finding its way into so many books, screenplays and articles.

The commenter was baffled. He loved writing; why would he forego that pleasure by handing it over to someone or something else?

I ask myself the same question.

Photo courtesy of Albert Lee

A second excerpt from a novel I’ve been pecking away on about a fictional newspaper war in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as World War Two drew to a close. It’s a work in progress, in which I mash together time and throw made-up and real people and events into a blender. A knowledgeable reader will notice whopping discrepancies, such as the fact that Hum Mow’s famous restaurant did not open at the above Halifax location until years after this story unfolds. I plan to iron some of them out, but leave others intact since, for example, I cannot dream up anything better than a place called Hum Mow’s, where upstairs men from the old country played Mahjong at the Chinese Benevolent Association, while in the restaurant, Halifax swells, with a wink, ordered a pot of “special tea.”

They were milling around when the police arrived: a sea of restaurant cooks and waiters, some card players—Chinese but also Greeks and Lebanese—even the great Hum Mow himself. A crew from the groggery across the street hovered, a Garrick Hotel resident in plaid bedroom slippers, alongside some bobby soxers from the girls’ school down the way, all of them attracted like gulls to carrion, angling for a better view from behind an outstretched patrolman’s arms.

Maynard Wolfe, lean and country-looking, with one of those pliable Adam’s Apples, followed in the wake of the senior man, Roy Tutty, down past the vegetable crates and garbage bins. Tutty shone a torch on the body, face down, legs splayed unnaturally out. He pushed the crates back and groaned as he squatted, aiming his light. A whistle, then another groan, this one more heartfelt, as Tutty returned his bulk to a standing position.

“Have a look,” handing Wolfe his light.

He found a slat of wood to protect his uniform pants, then knelt and canted his neck so that he was staring into the right side of the face of the deceased, single, alarmed eye open, mouth mashed ajar.

Wolfe, the new man on the job, stood and shrugged as he brushed off some debris.

“I take it that is not Joe Sweeny.”

Tutty’s face puckered like an old maid’s kiss.

He had been at the station, just starting the shift when the chief gestured him into his office. Out on the street, the boss had never made any big collars, but he had made no real enemies either, which helped in Edward Hanrahan’s relentless pursuit of the force’s big chair. It came at a price. A policeman’s job was to maintain order, or at least, the semblance of order, but the war and the city’s role in it had left Halifax in flux. The morality of yesterday had given way to something different, beyond his grasp. The city had become “a lawless sinkhole of crime and corruption,” he would tell his wife, before she left. Hanrahan uttered these words through lips stained a chalky white by the Phillips Milk of Magnesia downed to soothe his roiling innards, for the chief lived in perpetual unrest, the duties of his office pressing ceaselessly upon him.

.“No one has seen Sweeny the younger since Saturday,” he said.

“We can be more thankful than sorrowful of that,” said Tutty.

The chief paused, antacid bottle halfway to his open mouth, looking at him as if he were addled. Sweeney’s folder on his desk contained the usual maimed and feral childhood, broken homes and early transgressions that made a criminal life seem the only career path possible.

His father decamped to parts unknown early on, his mother tried but the fates were against her. His CV started with shoplifting and rolling drunks down on Hollis Street, then progressed to b-and-es, where his fearlessness in high places made him a fabled second-story man. Though Sweeny had done time in Rockhead Prison, it had been just dickey stuff, warranting short sentences, burnishing his reputation as a master thief, although not of the gentlemanly kind.

Like everyone with a passing acquaintance to the outlaw life in Halifax, Tutty knew the story: how, when the city was still farmland within a few miles of the harbour, his predecessors at police headquarters had a simple solution for incorrigibles: they would take them to the edge of town, open the gates of the paddy wagon, and shove them out, with a warning not to re-enter the city limits if they knew what was good for them.

Except in a void, nature will have its way. As Halifax grew, the folk who could ill afford to live in the old town put down roots in those settlements. English and protestant, Quarry Town became the fiefdom of the Hackett clan. The Gully was where those who had been unsettled a few generations earlier from the Scottish Highlands like Sweeney’s people, tended to congregate, all of them Catholic, many of them still speaking the Gaelic of their ancestors, which helped keep their secrets from the rest of the world. There, the Brogans ruled with a hard hand.

What worried Hanrahan was what young Sweeny’s disappearance might mean to the precarious order of his city. Sweeny’s father, in everything but name, was Leo Brogan, a simpleton prone to acts of breath-taking violence.

“He’s garbage, no question,” Hanrahan said. “The trouble is he is Brogan’s bag of garbage.”

“Being no saint, he could be anywhere,”

“His girlfriend knows his habits, such as they are,” the chief said. “She called the duty sergeant, a relative, didn’t want to make an official complaint, but if he had heard anything…”

Hanrahan, expression pained by now, raised a hold-that-thought finger, took three glugs of Phillips.

“…which he had not. He told me, now I’m telling you.”

“What exactly, boss?”

“The best thing for every one of us is if he is found sleeping it off in the arms of some chippy and is driven as soon as humanly possible to the home of the patriarch Brogan, before the blood-letting starts.”

Tutty nodded.

“If it’s the Hacketts, or if he even thinks it is…”

“You see then. You understand what I am talking about.”

He said nothing further because Tutty had learned that silence was the safest way when Hanrahan got like this, when it seemed that he wasn’t looking for a response, and certainly, not one that implied incomprehension.

So, he looked down at his toes, shuffled a little bit from sore foot to sore foot, not realizing that Hanrahan was now staring at him.

“Out behind the chinaman’s, I’d say that is worth a look.”

Tutty was making for the door when the chief raised a hand.

“Wait a sec, the young fella?”

Tutty said, “Not a complaint. Not much company, but better than the other way around.”

“Not like his dad then.”

“I didn’t know him.”

“Maybe he will tell you about him someday.”

Tutty was going to say that seemed unlikely, but Hanrahan had already ended the audience with a grimace, reaching reflexively towards his churning gut.

Tutty was not the kind of policeman who would ever be asked to brief the mayor on an investigation, or to stand, straight-backed and jut-jawed on some public stage when an ornamental law enforcement presence was required. Even his own daughter, as much as she loved her dad, knew enough not to invite him to her school on career day, picturing him in front of the class, his blocky head glistening with sweat, failing to find the right words to describe this work and why it mattered so much to him, as it did.

Not everyone thought this way in the Halifax police department, a whole generation of which had returned from the Great War wounded inside and out. The good intentions were still there, but sometimes opportunities presented themselves; it took a special man not to take advantage of them. Tutty chose not to be part of it, knowing full well that ensured a bumpier ascent through the department ranks, along with the dreaded “does not play well with others” label, which meant that his fellow officers might turn their backs on him some night when a knife was drawn in an alley or tenement.

There was no chance of that this day, standing in a restaurant laneway, summoning phlegm from somewhere deep in his chest, which hit the sidewalk with a thud.

“This doesn’t help us at all then,” said Wolfe.

“Worse than that, you know who this is?”

Wolfe started to reply, then heard a sound to his left. He knew the face of the man standing there: a reporter he had a nodding acquaintance with when they passed each other at the station, young like Wolfe, still trying to figure things out.

Tutty turned his head, the size of a shipping container, Charlie Deegan the Chronicle’s crime reporter, thought, and said, “w-h-a-t,” drawing the word out like an insult.

“Got an ID?”

The cop turned back towards the corpse.

“When is Peddle coming back?”

“Peddle died a year ago.”

“So, you have been doing this for what, 12 months?”

“Give or take.”

“And yet you seem not to know the most basic rule of the work.”

“Which is?”

“We talk and you listen.”

Deegan started to say something then closed his mouth.

Another pause, until Tutty spoke again.

“Officer, do we have an ID?”

“I don’t know Sargeant, do we?” Wolfe said.

“Well, since this young man has no doubt paid the entrance fee.”

A nod from Deegan, confirming that he had slipped a $5 bill into the hand of the patrolman at the head of the alley, ensuring a few minutes’ head start over his rivals from the other papers.

“The truth is that we know only one thing: that it is a sorry thing to die in a damp alley behind a Chinaman’s restaurant, even one as fine as Hum Mows.”

Wolfe and Deegan looked at Tutty waiting.

“The victim’s name,” he went on, “is Tommy Vane, and he is known to Halifax police.”

“Is this the one they call The Bat?” said Wolfe, realizing he shouldn’t have.

Deegan cocked his head to one side, like a dog who had just heard a very high noise.

“It’s not because of a love of the game of baseball, is it. You may have heard the stories, but mostly he made a living working the docks, scavenging and the like.”

“Wolfe,” said the older officer, the first time that Deegan had heard the younger cop’s surname uttered.

He dropped down on his haunches again and, despite his spare frame, turned the corpse over.

A flash startled them, a photographer from the afternoon Star, who did double duty for the police when the body count mounted.

“Make sure you have all the wounds in. How many do you count?” said Tutty.

“Two,” said Wolfe, “wait a second, got a handkerchief?”

“Is that one over there?” Tutty said, pointing.

The shooter snapped away, pulling open the corpse’s jacket for a better view of the gore.

“Someone didn’t like The Bat,” this from Deegan.

“He was easy not to like,” Tutty now.

“Before you ask,” the senior man said. “Yes, we are treating the matter as a homicide. As of now, no suspects or a murder weapon. We will canvas the neighbourhood. If anyone knows anything, they should come forward.”

He waved a hand, as if shooing a fly. “You know all we do. Off you go.”

Understanding the kind of florid detail a story needed to earn the prized above-the-fold spot on the front page, Deegan hovered, but got nothing but a blank expression from the senior cop while the junior man stared straight ahead.

Deegan remembered then what they called the younger one over at the station: Destry, after the Jimmy Stewart character in the movie by the same name, rib-thin, all height and elbows, happy with silence.

The reporter glanced at the body one last time, then headed in the direction of the restaurant’s back door, the kitchen crew already starting their retreat.

The policemen watched this pantomime unfold, Tutty rubbing his well-trod bald spot, as he did when sunk into reflection.

“The question for us now, I guess, is where Sweeny is,” he finally said.

It was as if the body lying there was already buried, and Brogan, a legend in life, was reduced to a couple of inches of dense serif type in tomorrow’s newspapers.

Someone somewhere might grieve that he had met his maker. Just not those two, standing in the damp, mulling the bigger, unstated issue of whether the carnage that their boss feared had begun.

Something I saw on Substack the other day caused a pang beneath my breastbone.

I don’t know how many books in The Hardy Boys Series once sat on my shelf, since there was a hell of a lot of them, and it was hard to tell one volume from the other, which, from the publisher’s side of things, was probably the point.

The covers did an admirable job of building the brand. Every book I owned had an identical vintage matte finish. On the spines, the profiles of Frank and Joe Hardy, slightly cherubic, not a hair out of place, eyes expectant, as if the game was already afoot.

The cinematic front covers always caught the brothers in full flight, on the verge of discovering The Secret of Pirate’s Hill or on the way to solving the Mystery of Devil’s Paw.

On the back cover, publisher Grosset & Dunlap set the hook. “All boys from 10 to 14 who like lively adventure stories, packed with mystery and action, will want to read every one of the Hardy Boys mysteries listed here,” said the pitch, updated with each successive volume.

This boy surely did.

The sight of a row of Hardy Boys books on The Dean’s List Substack https://substack.com/@deanbowen made me feel like I was 14 again, as relics of the past do, particularly when you have just hit one of those birthdays that make you gaze fondly back.

But there was also this: like many of the folks who commented on the recent post, my love of reading began with the Hardy brothers.

More than that, though I may think that the ensuing years have caused my tastes to change and evolve, I am clearly just looking for the same things that I found in those pages nearly six decades ago.

It is no lie to say that thanks to Franklin W. Dixon, the pseudonym for the stable of writers who turned out the Hardy Boys series, I discovered the genius of Borges and Modiano, and the sensibility of Sebald.

Or that the goings on at Bayport, the American coastal town where most of the stories were centred, brought me to the bleak landscapes of Chandler, McCarthy and Thomson, which I treasure.

What draws me to a novel like Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, True Grit by Charles Portis, or Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry—to name just three in easy reach of me as I type these words--and what brings me back to the weary heroes in Kate Atkinson, and the late father of Tartan Noir, William McIlvanney is the writing, the distinctive world-view, the timeless story-telling.

When I am honest, it is also the elements revealed for the first time in the company of Joe and Frank Hardy—secrecy, dread, tension and revelation--that get me.

I search for the kind of atmosphere that pervades those stories, as it does the London of Sherlock Holmes, and the Gothic locales of Edgar Allan Poe, both of which I came to later.

I forever seek confirmation of the belief put forward in those old narratives that there is more to life than meets the eye. That a person, with skill, will and effort, can try to figure it all out. And, even if they fail, they can feel virtuous for at least trying.

A little online research tells me this is more than just my imagination. There are credible theories about why adolescent tastes stick with us forever. This is particularly true of music.

Our brain’s memory systems are at their most efficient during late adolescence and early adulthood, when so many things, memorably, happen for the first time.

Songs are important to people because they associate them with important moments in their lives: the first kiss as Hey Jude spun on a turntable; driving home from basketball practice in a buddy’s car with Love Train cranked on the car radio,

It’s different with books--although there may be some who feel fondly about David Copperfield not because of its memorable first line, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,” but because they read it in classroom, a row away from their first crush—but the same too.

Now it is possible that I like books with a noirish flair because they coincide with the way I have looked at the world from the moment I emerged from the womb.

I tend to subscribe to the widely accepted psychological and cognitive view that people use mental frameworks to interpret and organize experience and knowledge, and that these frameworks are formed during childhood.

This ensures that the books we read as a kid shape our preferences throughout the rest of our lives because we are conditioned to return to similar stories, tropes and narrative structures, a sort of comfort food, as long as we live.

This explains a lot. The books on my shelf, the movies and TV I tend to watch, and even a novel I began pecking away at when COVID hit.

It’s about a newspaper war that unfolds against the backdrop of the final months of World War Two in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This is a work in progress, so things are changing all the time. But when I see the scenes in my head, everything’s in black and white and all the characters, every one of them, for some reason is named Joe or Frank.

It would be wrong to say that I have always been scared of the dark. It is true, though, that I had never embraced it.

Scientists think there’s an evolutionary reason for this, since over the millennia we upright walkers have been conditioned to fear the darkness, because of the real-time predators skulking there.

And my adolescent reading and viewing tastes taught me that vampires and werewolves never appear in daylight.

I think that an aversion to the dark is also perfectly natural for a city dweller, for whom light is a constant that gets harder to avoid by the day.

Which is why I want to tell you how I have come to welcome the murk, which is far different in the country than it is within the city limits.

This has been a gradual revelation. I arrived in rural Nova Scotia, a city boy as jumpy as a newborn. There were scattered lights out on the country road, a football field or so away from our fixer-upper. Across the cove and through the woods, the glow from neighbouring homes winked in the night.

Even so, the near-total darkness was so alien that, from the safety of our place, I used to stare through the window, literally wondering what the hell was out there, feeling less like the observer and more like I was being observed.

This, I understand, sounds like tin-foil hat paranoia. Except I knew from the bear scat in our yard, and the keening cries of the coyote packs somewhere in the distance, that feral things lurked not far from our doorstep. By word of mouth, I heard reports of wildcat and wolf sightings.

For a time—though the existence of one has never been confirmed in Nova Scotia—a cougar was said, to pad, on silent feet, through the nearby woods. In a book of local history, I read about the fiery ghost of a woman, the victim of a farmhouse fire, sometimes glimpsed on our country lane.

Christ, I would think, eyes straining, looking for threatening flashes of movement off in the corner of my vision as I took the dog for his nighttime constitutional. During our first winter, I eyeballed the animal tracks by the back door, wondering what beast they belonged to.

But, after a while, my city dweller’s heightened fight or flight mechanism began to fade.

Just familiarity, I suppose, along with the fact that as the months and years passed, I heard not a single actual report of a neighbour’s body found eviscerated out in the woods.

I started to notice things: the way moonlight changes the landscape; the filigree of fireflies. Sounds and shapes that once spooked me—the call of a barred owl, the rustle of something unseen in the woods—now thrilled. Instead of being outside the ecosystem, it felt more like I was part of it.

I even became something of a nocturnal animal myself, if not exactly prowling around in the dark, at least happy to step out into it, walking where no street light glowed, strolling back alone from the occasional event at the local community hall,

It was more than just shedding apprehension about the unknown. This requires some explanation.

It started with the night sky, which has attracted me from the moment I aimed a beginner’s telescope from the Eaton’s catalogue, skywards in the hope of seeing one of the moon’s seas from the little balcony behind our Halifax home.

It was a smaller city then, devoid of the office towers, skyscrapers and the other sources of light that now make celestial bodies, other than the moon and sun, invisible to the eye.

Out in the country, light pollution disappears. At night, the contrast between the dark and those heavenly objects turns the sky into something that makes the head spin.

An app on my iPhone tells me where Arcturus and Cappela are and which astral formation the ancients named Leo. Soon, when the sky is clear, I’ll be able to see hints of the Milky Way along with the shooting stars and jet vapour trails.

That sort of thing makes a person’s mind expand, gives you a sense of your place in the order of things. So does this realization that outside in the dark, you are looking at light emitted by stars as distant as 3,000 light-years away—a long-enough journey that the stars themselves may no longer exist.

That’s a sobering notion. When beset by the hassles of modern life—the price of a tank of gasoline, the drama on the stock markets, the turmoil to the south of us—it’s a liberating one too.

Weighty thoughts like that, in my experience, are only possible somewhere devoid of booming car radios and screeching ambulances. As it was one night last week, one of the first warm enough to sit outside on the deck.

In inky dark, when the only sounds are the hiss of surf, wind in the tree tops, the din of spring peepers, and your own breath, time slows. Crazy as it sounds, the world seems ancient, as if life was expanding, making room for the past and the future.

Looked at a certain way, the silence, like the dark, isn’t empty. It is layered and deep. Instead of insignificant, you felt like you belonged to something, even if that something was beyond words.

Painting, The North Star Got Me Lost, by Belle DeMont

During COVID, I started pecking away at a novel, tentatively titled Last Night at Hum Mows, about a not-completely fictitious newspaper war during the city’s wild and transformative WW 2 years.

This week, I took a look at it for the first time in years. Here’s a chunk from the very start.

The title, by the way, is a reference to a now-departed Halifax restaurant which used to be at the very centre of the city’s nightlife and, I like to think, played a similar pivotal role as the warships massed in Halifax harbour, as they did when the above picture of Hum Mow’s was taken.

The big man at the desk, the folds of his neck spilling over his collar, his face glowing with rosacea, picked up one of the index cards, which Deegan knew to be handwritten with the occasional typo. He took his time reading, then, without looking up, placed it off to the right, saying softly, “this one’s for me.” He picked up another one daintily between thumb and sausage forefinger, read, said “so’s this one,” and added it to the pile, then did the same with a third, wordlessly this time.

Michael Browne was a wily son of County Mayo, a man whose temperament, with five years to go until pension, was only mildly soured by the bottle and the disappointments of life and career. Charlie Deegan grew up in the tarpaper shacks in Greenbank along with the other families of the Irish labourers who, through the slate subsoil, carved out the railway cut connecting Halifax harbour to the bigger world. Which meant he knew the type. This common history, and a steady flow of ten-dollar bills, was the only reason the young cop reporter for the Chronicle, one of Halifax’s two morning papers, was granted this special audience, deep in the bowels of the city’s police station.

Browne liked to lord it over him a little. “Aye, now this is a good one, Deegan,” he would say, pretending to pass the details of the previous night’s case to him, then at the last second pulling it back. Some were “too hot to handle,” he would smirk, fanning the index card like it was aflame, while of others Browne would whisper “the things man does to man,” about some dark doings of which the Chronicle’s readers would remain forever uninformed.

This tease and withdrawal, worthy of Estelle down at Germaine’s House of Pleasure, would go on for a while. It was, Deegan liked to think, the price he paid for the moment when Browne would see something on a card, look theatrically up, then down again, and finally, with a flourish, hand it to Deegan, as he did this day. Deegan would read it right then and there, because Browne, despite his loud and persistent disdain for the fourth estate, knew exactly what the readers of a morning paper like the Chronicle needed.

Oh, they were gold, these woeful tales of damaged lives and savage acts, block printed in terse police-blotter prose. Beneath its veneer of civility, its profusion of churches, its deference to authority, its adherence to the old British ways, Halifax had always been an unforgiving town; wartime seemed to amplify its latent hard-heartedness. Deegan’s luck, he knew, was to live during a world war that transformed his city into a chaotic, all-but-lawless place, and, therefore, a newsman’s dream.

Stories that made it to the front page, and that newsboys announced in loud voices from street corners, were what he needed because Deegan was a distant third when it came to the city’s murderously competitive police beat. Archibald Munn, a Fleet Street washout over at the Herald, the Chronicle’s morning competitor, wrote better. Everett Smith, the afternoon Mail’s man, had the contacts. If Pete Brennan, the son of the Star’s owner, wasn’t prone to spending evenings in languid dream among the other hop heads, Deegan would have been dead last in terms of readership, a bad place to be when every paper in the city was fighting for what Sitland over in sales called “market share”, whatever that was.

He at least had youth on his side. Deegan was just 14 when Albert Rouse, who had been squiring his sister Florence about, fled impending fatherhood to enlist in the Royal Canadian Navy. Rouse’s departing act of generosity towards the Deegan clan: handing young Charlie his Chronicle delivery route, which at least brought a little cash into a house where hunger was never far from the door. From that day on, five mornings a week at 4:30 a.m. Deegan rose. Triple-layered in winter, short-panted in summer, he walked from his home to the back of Marchand’s store, where the papers waited, stacked and ready so that the citizens of Halifax could receive All the News Fit to Print, as the Chronicle’s masthead promised.

Deegan was responsible for 147 houses in the city’s well-groomed South End. Though it was expected that he would grouse along with the other newsies about the early rising, he loved the mornings, particularly the pre-dawn, walking between the mansions bought with brewery and shipping profits, the wooden Georgian homes that hid more than they revealed, the stately residences which had to subdivided when the old money ran out, the row houses that were home, at least for a while, to the men who managed the grain elevators, piloted the harbour tugs, ran the naval insurance offices and ships chandlers, and worked in the yards repairing the ships damaged by Nazi subs.

Decades later, with Halifax’s wartime newspaper wars long forgotten, Deegan would sit like a relic at the city’s press club, swirling the ice in his guvie and coke, telling the rookies anxious to hear about the old days how the stars glittered at night back then, and how the sounds—the rustling of the trees, the hiss of car tires on wet streets, the horns as the ships passed through the submarine nets deployed across the harbour mouth--expanded to fill the morning air.

Most things and people look better in the dark, he came to believe. Possessing, even at the age of 14, a romantic heart, Deegan felt that in the dark the mundane became mysterious, sad, maybe even a bit magical. Under the cloak of darkness, he had watched a snapping turtle wade across a magistrate’s lawn on Lucknow Street, and a coyote kick through the leaves of a home built by a Cunard ship captain on Young Avenue. Once, he hauled a naval ensign lying in the middle of Hollis Street out of harm’s way. Another time, he hid in an alley as a pair of policemen led a finely-dressed woman into the back of a paddy wagon while a man—her husband?—stood in the doorway and wept.

Afterwards, at their Formica kitchen table, Deegan licked his thumb and forefinger and rustled through the pages of the day’s paper, looking for some explanation of what he had just witnessed. It was the first time that he had really opened a newspaper to see what was inside. It was like he was staring into a building with binoculars, and each item was a window through which he could see something happening that was more interesting than anything in his own life. The words seemed to lift from the page: the ghoulish crime, the raffish doings down on the waterfront and dockyards, the courthouse dramas, the heated city hall debates about things that he did not really understand.

It thrilled him to read about the grand soirees, how someone’s son or daughter had returned triumphantly home for a visit, and that Mister X and Mrs. Y, from a place so alien that it could have been Zanzibar, had spent the night at the Lord Nelson Hotel. It felt wrong to do so, but he loved to read about the lives of people who had died, and also, conversely, the names of the newly arrived war brides starting their days in Canada.

He had his favorite writers, the sports columnist who seemed to turn out a small book every day about small town boxing matches and colliery league hockey games, but so entranced by it all was Deegan that he pored over the words of the anonymous scribbler behind the Of Interest to Women section, and the equally mysterious author of Ferry Tales, the odd little yarns that transpired on the motorized boat that travelled back and forth between Halifax and smaller, mostly ignored Dartmouth, across the harbour.

The career options, at that moment in time, were limited for an Irish wean in Halifax. There were no priests in the Deegan family for his mother to brag about. He could have gone into Uncle Rory’s funeral home, fixing up the departed, then standing around, hands folded, as the family milled about. He wanted no part of that, just as he wanted nothing to do with the fellas who showed up at the back door of the family house, looking for a bottle of the poitin that came dripping out of the copper tubing his older brother, Huey, stole from the shipyard.

Reading the newspaper, something that half of his aunts and uncles could not manage, made him realize that life could be about more than scraping by on dubious schemes. The men whose names appeared below the articles in the paper knew things and were anchored to the earth by that knowledge. Their lives had meaning beyond what Father Lanagan called the “exchange of labour for lucre.”

To dodge the scorn such an announcement would have sparked, Deegan told no one about his newspapering dreams, instead quietly concocting a plan: on his morning route, he started taking notes in a lined scribbler, using a classic Dixon Ticonderoga pencil like his paper route paymaster at the Chronicle. In time, his note-taking expanded to fill the rest of his day. Greenbank, his home turf, was off-limits for fear of reawakening one of those ancient feuds that haunted the place. Everything else he saw on the way to Tower Road School, and taking his time coming home along the piers and wharves, went into the scribbler.

The act was a revelation. It was as if by noticing things and writing them down, he somehow wrote them into being, as if he was making the world up as he went along. He became a rover, after school and on the weekends, rambling wider in the city, which seemed wild and feral with the normal peace-time restraints gone.

One day, after watching a truck weave down Lower Water Street and, losing complete control, continuing down a wharf and into the murk of the harbour, he hustled home, printed what he saw on foolscap, then legged the dozen blocks down to the Chronicle building. The man at the front door looked dubious when Deegan said he had something for the newsroom, but pointed him towards some stairs.

He stood there for a second, his head fogged by the notion that the grooves on the steps could have been made by the feet of John William Regan, who later interviewed Admiral Perry after his return from the North Pole, and other giants who had worked there. Then Deegan took the stairs two at a time. At the top, he stopped to tuck his shirt into his pants. Deegan ran a hand through his hair, damp with sweat. He took a breath, which he had read in the Chronicle was what snipers did to calm themselves with a Nazi infantryman in their sights, and opened the door to go inside.

It can be hard to recognize the city where I live, where, for the longest time, nothing seemed to change, yet which is now undergoing the kind of reboot that delights the champions of growth and befuddles preservationists.

Romantics, though, are untethered to reality. This makes it easier to move through the perpetually remade landscape of Halifax, Nova Scotia, since amidst the pounding of jackhammers and screech of nail guns, it is still possible to detect the faint hum of the rough-edged city they once knew.

Examples abound, but let me give you two: the twin Purdy’s Wharf office towers on the Halifax waterfront. An enviable corporate address, overlooking, as they do, the fabled harbour, located on the edge of the city’s resurgent downtown.

What does it say about me that when I stand below these marvels of commerce and engineering, I don’t think about all the economic activity generated inside, or how they sit on pilings overhanging the harbour?

No, I think about the summer of 1975, and a new high school graduate—the one in the picture above--to whom everything seemed memorable. Among the most memorable things from that long-ago summer was a job I scored, with an outfit I had never heard of--Purdy Brothers--in a line of work, ship chandlering, that had the whiff of privateers and adventures on the high seas rather than glittering office towers.

Through some noodling around online, I have a few barebones facts about the Purdy family: that they were United Empire Loyalists and that, during the 1800s, they moved back and forth between New England and Nova Scotia.

And that by the start of the 20^th century, some of them had acquired a wharf on the Halifax waterfront where they supplied the ships entering and leaving the harbour with everything they needed, from grub to spare ship parts.

By mid-century, their line of work was thriving enough that the 1945 Halifax city directory listed a column of companies that described themselves as ship’s chandlers. Purdy Brothers was still thrumming with activity when I showed up early one morning, 30 years later.

This week, I called Paul Coolen, a student at Saint Mary’s University back then, who stepped onto the Purdy’s work site about the same time I did. We remembered the scene the same way: a parking lot out front, then a huge shed, almost like an airplane hangar, inside which our eyes widened.

Trucks arrived and left; sparks from welding rods arced through the air, like in a John Woo movie; the guys who worked there—among them at least one fabled Halifax tough guy, a moonlighting weed dealer, a handful of arthritic old-timers--materialized from nowhere, then just seemed to melt into the shadows.

Every so often, one of the managers—the lanky paymaster or the perpetually harried site boss—would come flying down the impossibly long staircase from the office above.

Economics would have had something to do with the perpetual scramble: in the stagnant 70s, the Halifax waterfront wasn’t the lucrative place it had once been.

“It looked to me like a hustling operation,” Paul recalled. “They were just doing whatever they had to do to expand their businesses.”

If you were humble labourers like Paul and I, you were like a wrench or a vice-grip, a tool that was turned to whatever task was at hand: unloading trucks, humping pallets of iron from this place to that, stacking rebar, piling bricks, sweeping the shop floors. For this, every second Friday, we were handed a paper envelope with a small bundle of cash inside.

The work wasn’t necessarily hard. But this was the 1970s; never once did we don helmets, gloves, steel-toed boots, or any other safety equipment.

When your job was done, you stood there, waiting for the site boss to arrive, like a battlefield general, to deploy you elsewhere.

The wait was never long. Purdy Brothers’ prosperity seemed to depend upon the company’s willingness to do whatever needed to be done up and down the Halifax waterfront.

Paul and I were a welcome presence on the company payroll; our lowly status meant we could be ordered to do stuff no one else wanted to do.

It would be hard, for example, to forget the couple of weeks that we spent at the beck and call of the Nova Scotia Power Corporation, a mile or so from Purdy’s wharf.

There, for no obvious reason, we donned rubber suits and climbed down into pipes, no wider than an economy seat on Air Canada, that ran between the harbour and the power company’s operations.

Using scrapers, we dislodged the mussels that had attached themselves to the sides of the pipes, then piled them into wooden boxes that were hauled to the surface.

I had just turned 19 that summer, making it legal for me to enter the groggeries of Halifax, and possible to get up to the kind of mischief that could keep a fellow out and about until the wee hours.

Sometimes it seemed like I had barely closed my eyes when I climbed into the clammy suit that fit me like packaging and began my descent.

When the lunch break arrived, I returned to the surface, rolled down the top of the suit to let the heat escape, and sat down at a makeshift table not far from the water’s edge.

Paul and I would wolf down our sandwiches, then lean forward, head resting on forearms, and fall into a deep sleep for the rest of the hour.

Once, I remember waking up, looking out towards the harbour and seeing dolphins jump in the murk. It could, I suppose, have been a mirage, induced by heat, fatigue, and the strangeness of those working days.

But who really knows; it was a different time then, and Halifax was a different place. At least it was to me.

I was slouching my way along a Halifax throughfare the other morning, toque down, collar up, to the point where it would be hard to confirm there was a human being in there.

My hands—fingers already turning blue from the Raynaud’s--stuffed into my pockets. My gait short and fast, like a man determined to make it through the crosswalk before the yellow light turns red.

The temperature would approach double digits in a few hours, but it was cold enough then to see my breath.

Believe me when I say that I am the rare Canadian who does not embrace wintery moments, whose frown deepens when the mercury is low.

It wasn’t always this way: as a kid, I skated on ponds and backyard rinks. During the teen years, my internal furnace heated by raging hormones, I prided myself, as we all did, on donning shorts and short sleeves the moment winter broke.

I have theories on when and why my thermostat went on the blink.

During reporting assignments that found me in cold places in the middle of winter: the deep woods of Newfoundland; the ice flows of Labrador; a New Brunswick barn during a midnight calf delivery; the wee hours searching out the homeless in Halifax’s back alleys and abandoned buildings.

Or, perhaps, during a 19-month strike at my paper, when, for a time, I spent four-hour stints walking the pavement in temperatures so cold that afterwards I had to stand outside my car for a while before I could bend down enough to go inside.

The other day, walking along Quinpool Road, another possibility came to me as I squinted in the cold in the direction of a hole where a minor landmark in my life once stood.

Halifax, when I was young, had few restaurants. One of them was a Chinese eatery called the Sun Kee Kee, sometimes known as the Sun Run Run by the university kids who would land there after a night downtown, order a number four on the menu, and afterwards, sprint for the door, leaving the bill unpaid.

When I asked around on Facebook this week, my friends had warm memories of Frank, the guy who owned the Quinpool Rd. spot, and the Golden Dragon Lounge downstairs where local legends like Dutch Mason, the chairman of the blues, once played.

An old pal spoke of the Sun Kee Kee’s egg rolls, the best he had ever devoured. And that, in a roundabout way, got me thinking about a day that I had forgotten about, when my lifelong aversion to plunging temperatures possibly began.

Back in the mid-70s, I had been in and out of two universities and was back living at home, doing enough work to keep me in movie tickets and draught at the Piccadilly Tavern.

Occasionally, I got work on the Coke trucks, where several guys I knew toiled in a Dickensian arrangement in which they would deliver the fine products of the Coca-Cola Company to stores, restaurants and other customers, for which they were paid in cash at the end of the day.

One mid-week winter morning, my parents’ phone rang with an offer to man one of the trucks leaving the plant in a couple of hours. Now, I had spent the previous night at the aforementioned Piccadilly. Though my bank account was in the mid-three-figures, I begged off.

A couple of minutes later, the phone rang again, this time a buddy named Greg. Without a helper, he wouldn’t be able to take the truck out and make his deliveries that day; he needed, or at least wanted, the dough.

Loyalty outweighing laziness, I limped down to the Coke plant and climbed into the passenger seat beside him.

My memory was that the freezing rain began the moment we left the parking lot. There was a hole in the cab floor, which meant that an icy wind blew up my pant legs.

Greg’s semi-permanent status warranted him rain-repellent outerwear. I sported a windbreaker that was soaked through the first time I stepped outside to hump crates of pop bottles into the back room of a corner store.

I can’t remember how old the shift was when my friend clutched his back like he had taken a sniper’s bullet, and, through gritted teeth, said that it would be up to me to finish the deliveries.

It must have been early, because all I remember of the rest of the day is the lashing rain and unrelenting cold, and how stiff, frozen fingers made it hard to grip the crate handles.

Did I laugh hysterically at some point--my hangover deepening, the hypothermia setting in—as I bent forward against the wind and trudged up yet another long driveway to some customer?

Since DeMonts have always possessed an eye for the absurd, I might have found some humour in learning that the foul weather meant we were hopelessly behind schedule. A lunch break, then, was out, bad news for someone who had skipped breakfast, as I had.

Instead, we would drive on, with only a bag of Cheesies and a bottle of Coke to fuel my toil.

In the years since, I have often thought of that day. The way, though barely 20, I moved like an old man from cold and fatigue by the end of the shift. And how, when home, even a long, hot shower didn’t stop my shivering.

This, finally, is where the Sun Kee Kee comes in. Because half a century ago, with some cash in my pocket from the day’s labours, I did not do the responsible thing and wait for morning to deposit it in my depleted chequing account.

No, I threw some clothes on and hobbled the three blocks to Quinpool Road.

This week, looking at the space where the Sun Kee Kee once stood, it is hard to imagine how welcoming the restaurant’s interior was back then.

But I do remember the thrum of anticipation, sitting there waiting for my takeout order to arrive. I can still taste the first of my six egg rolls—as good as my friend remembered—when I bit into it around the corner, unable to wait until I got home.

Since insights come so seldom to me, when one arrives, it feels like my head is turning sideways like our dog’s when he hears a high-pitched whistle.

Just the other night, for instance, I was sitting in the part of the kitchen we call the breakfast nook, even though it is where we eat most of our meals.

I was alone—the remainder of the household having decamped elsewhere—and without purpose, now that the meal was over and the dishes cleared away. My iPhone had died, rendering me screenless.

So, there I sat, sideways on the bench, looking out of the window at the school next door, as I have done 10,000 times before.

No light-bulb went off during this quiet interlude. No eureka moment occurred as the seconds ticked by.

At a certain point, though, it dawned on me: for however long this had been going on, I had been thinking about absolutely nothing.

More than that, rather than wasted time, it felt great, which is why I am telling you all about it.

For years now—while perpetually juggling newspaper, book and other writing work, amidst the pleasures of family life, and the demands and stresses of modern-day existence—my brain was a busy place.

That was okay when something actually needed my attention. The trouble came in moments that should have been idle: then my mind would default to some future or imagined task. When that wasn’t enough, I would reach for the nearest screen where the addictive distractions of the internet could be found; anything to keep the old noggin occupied.

Now, that I no longer punch the clock, I want to ditch my tendency to measure the passing moments in terms of productivity.

For that to happen, it seems to me, a person must be able to just sit there and feel like that is a worthy way to pass the time.

Before you hit Close Tab, let me get to my point here.

Because lately, I have been reading the Japanese novelist and essayist Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. As the title says, it’s about running and writing, and in also how something that looks like doing nothing can be meaningful.

Not because of how much mileage a person clocks, but because the act of running strips everything in life down to putting one foot in front of the other, while you breathe in and out.

Rest easy: I am not going to try to draw a parallel between Murakami putting thousands of kilometres on his Fitbit and me sitting there and staring out the window.

I bring him up because long before he became a famous writer, he ran a jazz café in Tokyo, called Peter Cat. People would come in, quietly drink an espresso or sip a single malt and listen to Miles Davis and Charles Mingus LPs on a great sound system.

If anyone talked too loudly, or maybe at all, the other customers shot disapproving glares.

The point wasn’t to yak or troll for a companion; it was to just sit there and listen attentively without distraction.

Bars like that, known as jazz kissa, were popular back in the 1970s when Peter Cat was at the height of its fame. Now, according to National Geographic, they’re spreading to cities around the world.

I have heard rumours that one exists in my hometown. If so, I will hunt it down, because I like the idea of sitting silently among others with no purpose other than to burrow deep into great music.

Until that happens, I have to replicate the experience myself, which is doable now that I have a decent turntable and speakers, and a resuscitated vinyl collection.

The other night I poured myself a couple of fingers of scotch, turned off my IPhone, and then finger-tipped my way through my albums until I found one I knew would sound sublime—Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, released in 1963 on the Impulse label.

Like a Manhattan diamond merchant, I delicately pulled it from the sleeve. With deliberate care, I set the record on the turntable, hit the start button, then sat back on the sofa, perfectly centered between two speakers, the sweet spot for the best sound.

Now, I believe that what Thelonius Monk, or possibly Frank Zappa, said is true, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. So, all I will say about the seven tracks is that they were wondrous and end it there.

And I will leave you with this: that album is just over 35 minutes long. When the last notes from Ellington’s Steinway faded, leaving a faint hiss before the needle returned to the armrest, my whiskey was untouched, I hadn’t once reached for a communications device or said a single word.

I guess I had thought about something during the previous half hour. For the life of me, I just cannot tell you what it was.

Since I stopped punching in from 9 to 5, and began mulling how to spend the period my son calls the victory lap, my social media feed has been filled with wizened codgers doing pullups, and silver-haired vixens flouncing around like Ann-Margaret in Viva Las Vegas.

Hardly a minute goes by without the unsolicited appearance of a bull-necked ex-Navy SEAL explaining the right way to do goblet squats, or a tweedy egghead pushing me to learn Latin, now, while I still have all my marbles.

I thank the AI gods for feeding me material that makes me hopeful about the future. But I really want to say, please, Hal 9000, stop the onslaught because I already have all the inspiration I need.

It arrives every Wednesday at around supper time in a dance studio at the University of King’s College in Halifax, where the Silver Cranes take flight.

We have been doing so since I ran into a friend on the street, a former student at the same Halifax dojo of the International Shotokan Karate Federation, where I have been training for a long time.

He’d love to get back to it, my buddy said, but he was about to start collecting the CPP and didn’t relish facing off against some university kid who dreamed of becoming the next Donnie Yen.

And so was born the Silver Cranes, for anyone over 50 who wants to learn the challenging and rewarding art of Shotokan karate.

We had a bit of a rough start: Sam Campbell and I had some things to learn about what older karate students need. COVID hit. In time, it was just five of us on a schoolyard in the dead of winter.

But the rebirth has been such that last Wednesday, when our sensei, Tony Tam, paid a visit, two dozen Silver Cranes were out there punching and kicking.

My spirit lifts every time I walk into our dojo, because if there is a single activity that gives us all we need to stay healthy and fit, it may be martial arts, and because the rigor and fulfillment of Shotokan Karate form one of the pillars of my life

But also because doing things with people is said to be one of the keys to a long and happy existence.

There is this too: it is one thing to take up something as demanding as a martial art when your hair is dark and full, your muscles hard, your joints supple.

It is another matter altogether to begin this long journey when you grew up watching the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and your knee has never been right since that tumble at the Roller disco rink.

The other night, Sensei Tony reminded us that there is no true failure in karate as long as we continue to train—a truth echoed in the third precept of our club’s dojo kun, which can be translated as “to endeavour.”

For precisely that reason, I cherish being among the Cranes as we swoop and soar.

Age, if you don’t watch out, can mean circling the wagons. An unwillingness to take chances and put yourself out there can set in--ditto a hesitancy to do something badly, which, let’s face it, is always a prerequisite for ever doing something well.

The Cranes, week in and week out, demonstrate that there’s a different path forward. To my way of thinking, this makes us emblematic of a global demographic—the boomers, or near boomers, looking for more rather than less at an age when our predecessors took to the rocking chair

Every Crane has their own reason for being here: the aging jocks, and the folks using their bodies for the very first time, both experiencing the abiding pleasure of doing something new and challenging.

The newbies literally learning how to walk in the Shotokan manner, and the old-timers, black belts frayed from use, happy to train in a way that is easier on the joints.

Any visitor looking into our dojo on a Wednesday will see the naturals who would fit in just fine in our club’s all-ages class, but also the grinders who push through with grit and earned skill.

Inside will be couples sharing the journey, parents who entered the dojo for the first time with a kid for a family class, and just never left, a guy who saw a poster on a bulletin board and thought this might be interesting.

Some of us are held together by duct tape and chicken wire: the sciatica sufferers, the folks with surgically repaired knees and titanium hips, and frozen shoulders that never really healed

It is hard to feel too sorry for yourself, training beside the math prof in his 80s who only missed a few months of training because of a cancer diagnosis, the arthritis sufferer in her 70s who occasionally steps off for a break, but never misses a class, the guy in his 60s, who had to watch it for a few weeks for fear that he might pop his stitched-up hernia.

I am not going to lie, there are days in there when the decline can get the best of me, when I cringe at the mawashi geris that land mid-thigh, and am shocked by the glacial speed with which I now attack and defend.

But never for long; everyone in there makes accommodations. We soldier on because just showing up, in its way, is triumph enough.

One of the great joys of karate is that its lessons never end at the dojo door. For me, the Cranes, by their actions, demonstrate how life, at any age, is to be lived.

By being bold, not fearful. By realizing the profound pleasures found in doing something hard simply for its own sake.

By heeding the counsel of the dojo kun and Sensei Tony: to always, above all, endeavour.

When Irish folk singer and musician Denis Ryan (second from the right) moved from Dublin to Toronto in 1969 he played with Sullivan’s Gypsies, which received rave reviews after this appearance at New York’s legendary Old Shieling Pub.

The run-up to St. Patrick’s Day seems like a good time to publish an excerpt from my in-progress book project: helping Denis Ryan, the traditional Irish musician and singer turned investor and entrepreneur, recount his colourful life and career.

What follows comes from a chapter about his arrival in Canada in 1969. It helps to know that our hero had been living in Dublin, selling paper products for a Waterford concern, and cutting his teeth in the city’s lively down-home music scene.

He and some other fellows had planned to go into the publishing business together—until that is, his wife Muriel read a newspaper article about some lads from Dublin making a bit of a name for themselves playing Irish music in Toronto.

It went as well as you can imagine it would when I returned from Belfast in the first days of ‘69 and told the boys that I had decided to defer my plans to become the next Lord Thomson of Fleet. Instead, my very pregnant wife and I would head, of all places, to Canada, entirely on the say-so of some fellas from Ireland, whom I had met a total of once. There, rather than begin a business certain of success, I would try to make my fortune singing the songs that I first heard from old-timers back in Tipperary.

Shock and anger, at first, and who could blame them? Some choice words were directed my way. Then, did I see a softening in their expressions? The kind of look that you might give a fella on the street, feeble of mind, grabbing your jacket sleeve, wanting to explain that he needed a couple of pounds to get to Galway, since the voices in his head had told him that, in a graveyard there, O’Reilly’s gold lay buried.

To be honest, I found my own confidence in the thing wavering a little as I told them, let’s face it, a bonkers-sounding tale. The newspaper story, the pulling over by Fagen’s pub and then the telephone call to Dermot Dunne, a man whose main claim to fame had been getting through to the quarter finals as a bantamweight wrestler for Ireland in the 1960 Olympics, now fronting a traditional group making a bit of a splash over in Canada.

I spared them the blow-by-blow of our chat, which would have seemed like rubbing salt into the wound, and just provided the executive summary: that I said to Dermot I hear you are looking for another man for the group. Indeed, they were, he said with his smooth Dublin accent, before suggesting we get together when I returned after Christmas.

Since no one else had responded to the Evening Press story, the get-together was more meet-and-greet than audition. I played a couple of tunes on my tin whistle just to prove I could handle the instrument. We talked a bit about Toronto, the boys doing their best to play down the weather and climate, making it sound like it was truly the land of opportunity--America without guns but better manners. When I wondered how hard it would be to jump through the immigration hoops, Mick Crowley, a fine guitar player, or maybe it was Sean Broderick, the tenor singer from Cork, said relax we’ll get you in, as if they had some real sway over there.

Muriel and I had made our minds up anyway, by this point. Nothing was going to make us rethink our grand plan—even the small issue of money, by which I mean that we had none. I went to my old flatmate, Paddy Barry, the banker, who secured me a loan of 200 Irish Pounds, which, scant as it was, would be enough to send us on our way. (I still have my passport, with the paltry amount translated into dollars stamped on it on Feb. 6, 1969, the day we arrived in Canada.)

It pains me now to think of the look on my mother’s face when she learned that her firstborn son and also first grandchild were joining the diaspora. To soften the blow, I told her the same fiction I told my once business partners. “Ah, mom, we will only be for two years, we promise,” I said, “just long enough to see a bit of the world, before returning home, the wanderlust done, to get on with our lives.” Except, this being Ireland in the 1960s, she and dad had heard versions of this tale too many times before from others to believe that I meant what I said.

So, the ensuing weeks were sad, right up to the afternoon when I had my last pint of Guinness with my parents at Durty Nelly’s pub in Bunratty, a few miles from the Shannon airport. In those days, before arrival and departure gates came to Ireland, you could walk across the tarmac, right up to the steps of the plane. Not much was said as we readied to board the Aer Lingus 707 that would take us to Montreal. The thing that I remember most about that moment was that it was the first and last time I ever saw my father cry.

The whole event was so heavy and emotional that I recall just bits and pieces of the flight over. Forewarned about Canada’s temperatures, Muriel and I had prepared ourselves for dogsleds and the Arctic tundra: me with this massive anorak, and herself with a sheepskin coat, a gift from some old boyfriend. We melted, sitting there in the Montreal airport, waiting for our connecting flight to Canada’s biggest city.

Now I had been on my share of airplanes before: aboard turboprops to Glasgow, and once to London, on the same flight as Tommy Makem and the Clancey brothers on their way to record a BBC television show; some years earlier I had spent a week in Biggin Hill, U.K. trying out to become a pilot for the RAF, before learning that an abnormality in my heart meant that I was better suited to be a navigator, which had no appeal for me.

But Jayzus, Mary and Joseph, as we approached Toronto airport: a clear night sky, the lights from the city seeming to stretch to the limits of my vision, all we saw confirming that Canada was the kind of place worth leaving everything for. I’m not exaggerating when I say that our heads were spinning from fatigue and excitement as we gathered our bags. The whole blessed day became even more unreal when we stepped out of the airport terminal and spied the Irish Rebels themselves, waiting in the first white limousine either of us had ever seen.

The luxuries in our new land, alas, were fleeting. Once the gigs started, and the money rolled in, we would have enough for a flat, the rent in Toronto being many times what it was in Dublin. For now, though, we had to make do: Muriel bunking with a girlfriend from Belfast; me in a house with the band mates themselves in the High Park area of Toronto.

It was far from ideal, but we were too caught up in the buzz that the city gave off to notice. The size alone--Toronto contained nearly the population of all of Ireland—turned it into a huge maze, without the landmarks to help us find our way. Even the faces were different, in a city already on the road to becoming an example of Canada’s multi-national approach to building a society. Toronto, to our eyes, seemed a conservative place—on Sundays the city shut down, which was a shock compared to Ireland, where that was the big day of the week. But it was the 60s, and the hippie counterculture was making itself known there too, particularly in the city’s Yorkville neighbourhood.

I remember one of my first nights there: the boys had scored a gig at The Golden Nugget, owned by a pair of European gentlemen right in the midst of Yorkville. We had played a couple of tunes when this fellow who would fill a doorway walked up to the stage, looked at us and asked, “Can you play my song,” less a question than an order.

Now, the great Muhammad Ali had once called George Chuvallo the toughest man he had ever fought. More than that, he was a hero of mine, and just about everyone who treasured the underdog, the person who takes a beating but just never gives up. I remember thinking, Christ, I’m talking to George Chuvallo, I’ve hit the bigtime, baby. Within seconds, the boys were into The Wild Colonial Boy, which could have been played as he stepped through the ropes into the ring, glaring at whoever was in the other corner.

Yes, life with the Irish Rebels was eventful right from the start. You couldn’t find better fellas anywhere in the daylight hours, but when they got into the jars, it could be like a switch had been flipped. I remember my first St. Patrick’s Day in Toronto, which, by two or three in the morning, found a bunch of us back at the house, including one lad who had been in the group before I came along.

At moments like that, when the hard stuff is flowing, it has been my experience that strong feelings can rise to the surface. So it was that morning, when our man, who blamed me for his current state of unemployment, broke a bottle across my forehead. I staggered out into the street, blood pouring down my face, until a car of Toronto’s finest picked me up and took me to St. Joseph’s Hospital. A few hours later, I gave Muriel a call. “Happy St. Patrick’s Day,” I said to my seven-month-pregnant wife, the seven stitches newly sewn into my forehead still red and throbbing.

“A wise nation preserves its records, gathers up its muniments, decorates the tombes of its illustrious dead, repairs its greatest structures and fosters national pride and love of country, by perpetual references to the sacrifices and glories of the past.”Joseph Howe

Sometimes, when I wonder why I am drawn to the past like a moth to the flame, I think it has to do with my nature: that, for some reason, I would just as soon hold onto the memory of events as experience them in real time. Or that maybe it is just natural to be preoccupied with days-gone-by since they explain so much about the here-and-now.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if there’s another reason—a fear, as bonkers as it sounds, that we are reaching the end of history.

I don’t mean that soon we will see the last of those big events that colour our lives, since, if anything, they are speeding up, and arriving at such a dizzying pace that they are impossible to keep track of.

No, I mean the infrastructure that enables us to know what happened in the past, and, therefore, allows us to make sense of it all.

I know this sounds like a notion right out of Borges, but I raise it for practical rather than theoretical reasons.

I should, this very moment, be working on a book, my tenth. Most of them, one way or another, deal with the history of Nova Scotia.

Sometimes there have been people to interview, but mostly, I talk to the dead, which is a one-sided conversation.

I find their voices in various places: old newspaper articles and television and radio broadcasts, as well as books written by those who were there, or at least in the general vicinity.

They call out in museums and heritage properties where the artifacts of their lives are gathered and echo through old buildings where they lived, worked and walked.

Now, everywhere I turn, the things that allow us to preserve our cultural memory are thinning, leaving me wondering how the historians of the future will be able to reconstruct the past.

Maybe an example is the best way to show you what I mean.

Eight years ago, I published a book called The Long Way Home, which, as its subtitle said, is a personal history of Nova Scotia, meaning that I used my family’s story as an entry poin

t into the province’s bigger narrative.

I leaned heavily on the kind of information we all have about my own people, gleaned from conversations, lore, family trees, that sort of thing. But, since the book had to be long enough to justify the $32 cover price, I had to do broaden the research.

I was in luck for a whole range of reasons. For starters, Nova Scotia was the site of the first newspaper in the country, and therefore has had a long and lively history of dailies and weeklies that I could use to learn what happened in the olden days as well as to get a handle on the warp and woof of everyday life.

That possibility, of course, is now disappearing as the newspaper landscape is hollowed out in Nova Scotia, as it is in the rest of the country.

It’s only a matter of time until the biggest daily in the province, The Chronicle Herald, stops printing a handheld edition and goes entirely online.

When that happens, instead of bound newspapers, the historical record of what happened in the region’s largest city will exist only as digital snapshots—pages captured by web archives before they vanish from the live internet forever.

So, good luck to any scribbler like me, searching for a sense of the lives of ordinary Nova Scotians, let alone the events that shaped them.

I wrote here just last week about how my reference points in perpetually under-construction Halifax are disappearing at a startling rate.

Thus, it will be impossible for some future chronicler to stroll where previous generations walked, and feel what it was like to lay your head in one of the drafty Georgian homes that once existed on Robie Street.

There will be no way of understanding how it was when the city’s downtown was a nest of brothels, dance houses and rooming houses, since it will no longer be possible, as it was for me, to have a dram in the remnants of the notorious Waterloo Tavern, in the early 19^th century the site of an almost constant stream of brawls, assaults and even murders.

That’s all in the name of progress, the natural consequences of the onwards and upwards ethos of our free market world. Except in some cases the historical record is disappearing by sheer negligence.

I will not bore you with a line-by-line examination of the just-tabled budget by Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston, other than to say that the uproar over it has been huge due to widespread concerns about the impact it will have on social programs, public services, and vulnerable communities.

What I also want to point out is that if the budget is approved, 12 of the 28 sites in the Nova Scotia museum network will be closed while others will see their operating grants slashed.

It is a shame to think that some future writer won’t, for example, have the same opportunity to use the Perkins House Museum in Liverpool, N.S., to flesh out their understanding of the life of the 18^th century merchant, landowner, militia and diarist Simeon Perkins, as I did for The Long Way Home.

The budget also proposes eliminating a $700,000 annual grant program for book publishers in the province. Small peanuts, you say.

Except that publishers competing in the small provincial book market already struggle to be viable with that modest level of public support.

Losing that program will make it harder than ever before to publish books like Harold Horwood’s Plunger & Pillage: Atlantic Canada’s Brutal and Bloodthirsty Pirates and Privateers, John Tatterie’s Cornwallis: The Violent Birth of Halifax, and Dan Paul’s We Were Not the Savages, all of which helped my research immeasurably.

Without public support, would Historic Shelburne, by Sarah Acker and Lewis Jackson, and Halifax: The First 250 Years by Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford and David Sutherland sit on bookshelves ready to enlighten whoever opens them?

Left entirely to the forces of the marketplace, would The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax, also by Fingard, and Captain From Fundy: The Life and Times of George D. Spicer, Master of Square Rigged Windjammers, by Stanley Spicer have ever rolled off a printing press?

Or would those stories just be left to vanish like a song in the wind?

(Thanks to Kevin Latimer for pointing out the Joe Howe quote.)

Dementia took my mom and dad, so I live in dread of becoming un-tethered from time and place, of my mind’s map fading to the point where the world can feel confusing, distorted, even unknown.

Lately, I have been getting a faint whiff of what that could be like.

It’s my neighbourhood, you see, the place where, on and off, I have spent more than half a century.

The city where I live, Halifax, Nova Scotia, has been undergoing a metamorphosis that began tentatively a couple of decades ago, but in recent years has gathered steam.

People are coming in droves. They need places to live, eat, shop, play, learn and receive the other necessities of life.

Instead of a port that boomed every century-or-so during wartime, Halifax is now a city on the move and the make, with aspirations to the big time.

There’s a price for that progress: traffic routinely snarls; every second street seems to have a construction flagger in a visibility vest holding a stop sign; whole blocks are suddenly yawning holes—as if whatever was there had been vaporized by a U.S. drone—waiting for the construction cranes to arrive.

The landscape, thus, is changing.

It can be disconcerting to drive down a familiar thoroughfare and suddenly realize that the usual strip of ragged commercial enterprise is gone, and, instead, you are surrounded by a gleaming new condo building and a residential/retail development that blots out the sun.

For a few seconds, you can wonder where exactly you are when turning a corner and, rather than an open field, being greeted by fencing with signs signalling that, at some future point, a block of new apartments will appear there.

By the same token, while out walking the dog, you can come to a baffled stop, at a loss to recall when the house to which you once delivered newspapers became a vacant lot.

This, I suppose, is to be expected in a city experiencing a growth spurt. And, I kind of get it as the younger folk give a so-what shrug when the boomers bemoan everything that’s disappearing in the name of progress--the city’s vernacular architecture, but also the buildings that hold their collective history, as well as their personal emotions and memories.

Lately, it has dawned on me that there’s something else too. Does a place lose meaning when all that you remember about it disappears? Or, to put it another way, without the reference points that have always guided us, how, in the future, do we find our way?

I ask because my neighbourhood now exists in a perpetual state of revision. The sound of jackhammers fills the air; hard hats rival winter toques as the most common headgear on passersby.

The terrain is dotted with empty lots and holes in the ground awaiting new foundations.

Within a few city blocks, this week, I counted eight of the above. When I looked up into the sky, I saw a trio of construction cranes, as benevolent as the alien killing machines in The War of the Worlds.

It is getting so that if a house sells, the first thought is Jesus, I hope it’s not a developer, because everybody--dentists, corner store operators, ordinary folk seeing dollar signs—seems to want in on the action.

This, I know, is how the free market operates. I know something else, too: buildings are more than wood and bricks. They are the landmarks in the map that we carry inside our heads. They anchor us in a community, city and even the world. When they go, it can be like some of the past has been erased.

This happens with breathtaking speed. If, for example, I leave my front door, head right for the equivalent of a football field, then take a sharp left, I hit a corner lot.

It has been vacant for a while, although, you would think, not long enough for me to forget the home—or was it a low-rise four-plex—that used to stand there.

I do recall the progression of buildings once found a couple of blocks to the east: a diner with a soda foundation where my dad used to take me for sundaes and donuts, which became a pizza parlour, then a corner store—though, not technically, on a corner—and, most recently, a Turkish restaurant where my daughter worked.

It is devoid of humanity now, the kind of place where you expect to see coyotes roam.

Nearby, there used to be an aged apartment building, where I had a few memorable nights during my university days. Now, it’s a shell awaiting the wrecking ball.

A short jog to the south is another empty lot, this one fenced off, with the kind of signage that implies a multiplex will soon materialize in that very spot.

I bet I have walked past that corner thousands of times. But if you offered me a hundred bucks to describe the house that used to be there, I wouldn’t be one cent richer.

I never knew anyone who called it home. Nothing noteworthy in my life ever happened inside that building. It was just one of those quiet places that existed on the periphery of my vision, a landmark on my vanishing map.

When mortality gets into your head, reminders that this does not go on forever—that all of your somedays may never arrive--seem to be everywhere.

At least so it has been for me recently.

A friend’s raucous, wonderous, but achingly sad celebration of life, and a funeral with all the pomp and ritual of the Catholic church for the parent of a daughter’s bestie, both of them taken from us too early.

The retirement party for a pal, packing it in long past the traditional expiry date. A buddy’s 70^th birthday, a milestone that looms soon for me.

In the midst of a stubbornly enduring Canadian winter, with everything that is going in the world, it can all seem a tad bleak.

As if a friend hit the matter right on the nose recently when he wondered, tongue-in-cheek, what the point was in reading books since he would soon be dead.

The man, it is worth noting, has no known health malady. He is, furthermore, years younger than I am.

So, you can see why my chuckle had a hollow ring to it, since, as we all know, his point is undeniably true: from the moment that we take our first breath we are one step closer to our last.

This knowledge must be of less consequence if you believe that our essence goes somewhere after our body dies. For those less certain of such things, the shortening runway can preoccupy.

That is a natural state of affairs: life, if you think about it, is painfully short, and, by definition, ends badly. But it is what we have.

The other day I donned a toque and boots and high-stepped into the snow-covered graveyard beside our rural fix-me-upper. It’s known as the First Settler’s Cemetery, since some of the original Germans, Swiss and Huguenots who settled this part of Nova Scotia’s Lunenburg County are buried there.

I head there from time to time, because there is something moving about the grave markers, hand-carved in fieldstone, reflecting the resolute lives of the old fishing and farming families in the community.

Last week seemed like an appropriate time for another visit, if only to refresh my memory about just who lay buried there.

Unlike the ornate memorials you find in bigger cemeteries, there’s scant detail on these gravestones, some without even a date of birth or death, leaving a visitor to fill in the blanks.

There are, for example, lots of Rynards buried there, which makes sense since that is a big name in this part of Nova Scotia. Among them is Leonard Rynard, who was born in 1782, making him, I believe, the first-born among all interred there, and his wife, Elizabeth, who drew her first breath six years later.

The couple lived long lives; Leonard was 79 when he passed, and Elizabeth 82, a positively Methuselian number for the 19^th century.

But the cemetery tells us that there was pain in their lives. Nearby, I found the gravestone for their children: Jacob who was 23 when he died in 1836, and Daniel who disappeared at sea four years later, age unknown.

Now, the South Shore of Nova Scotia is one of those Blue Zones, places where people live longer and healthier than in most areas.

So, it was no surprise, along with the ageless Leonard and Elizabeth Rynard, to discover the gravestones of Henry Benjamin Wamboldt who was 85 when he left the earth in 1909—making him, I believe the oldest person buried there--and his wife Sarah who hit an also-impressive 78 years, at a time when the average Canadian woman lived to 56 or 57 years of age.

And to learn that Joseph Smith had made it to the grand old age of 73, also far outliving the typical life expectancy when he departed this world in 1884.

They, though, were outliers among the visible headstones. Many of those buried there lived about as long as you might expect during their moment in time: Edward F. Teel made it to 53, and Frederica Goertzen Smith 45, while Elizabeth, the wife of J. Thomas Morash, was 43 when she breathed her last.

A number did not live out their natural allotment of days.

The headstones reveal that Daniel Rynard was just 21 when he was lost at sea on Aug. 24, 1873, which must have been a sad day indeed.

But how did it feel, 23 years later, for the parents of Lorella Teel to lay her in the ground there at the age of 12?

And did James and Sophia Conrad ever get over the death of their son, James Amos, at just five years old?

I doubt it, just as I imagine that the parents of Jennie Teal never forgot her, even though she spent just 43 days on this earth.

For no obvious reason, I trudged around amidst the headstones for a while. Afterwards, I stomped the snow off my boots and looked back at the little cemetery.

No great wisdom was gained in there, eyeballing those long-ago names, no insights gleaned trying to piece together fragments of those long-forgotten lives.

But I have to tell you that it did me good to be reminded of something that we all know but can tend to forget: that growing old has its downside, and, as the saying goes, is not for the weak.

But it is a privilege not everyone gets to enjoy, and should be treated as such.