Jane Siberry last night
There were things I saw last night that I may never see again. The first was the stunning conclusion to the World Series, in which the situation arose at the end of the game where any one pitch would win or lose an entire season. A base hit and the Blue Jays win. A double play and the Dodgers win. I think I awoke in the timeline where the Dodgers won, but it did indeed have the feeling of one of those situations in which a timeline splits into two. Somewhere in a parallel universe, the Blue Jays won and the baseball gods took a shine to this particular Cinderella and granted her an inch or two of leeway, for a ball stuck under a wall, a bounce off an outfielders glove in a collision at the warning track, a zephyr to deflect a line drive an inch or two further away from a third baseman who happened to be in the way, the ever so slightest dip on a pitch that would have sunk a fastball in the strike zone and resulted in a ground out instead of a towering home run.
I have never seen a sporting contest come down to minuscule twists of fate in such strange ways.
When the game was over I took advantage of the extra hour of time change to watch all the post game interviews with the Blue Jays players. All they could talk about was the love they held for one another. Professional athletes don’t always have the broadest emotional vocabulary and you could see every single one of them struggling to find words to describe the depth of relationship they have with their colleagues, and their families and the staff of the organization. They were pleading with the cynical corps of sports reporters to have them truly understand the depth of love that they all experienced. It was a once in a lifetime experience. It was transformational. They didn’t win the World Series, but they can never forget the love – the utter agapé of it all – that flows between them. It is love that transformed them from a last place team to a team that missed their destiny by a whisper. It is love that left them changed as people. It is, I might say, the love that we should all have a chance to experience once in our lives. We are built for it. It does something to us. I’m not shy in saying there is a theology about it.
And that brings me to the second thing that happened to me last night, which I may never see again, and that was going to see Jane Siberry perform live and solo at the Motel Chelsea up in the Gatineau. It is a surprising and lovely little venue, a place of vision, stuck on a side road by an off ramp from the Highway 5 that winds its way from the city of Gatineau across the river from Ottawa up into the Gatineau hills and beyond in the wilderness of southwestern Quebec and the Kitigan Zibi homelands.
Jane Siberry is one of the people I count among the pantheon of psalmists in my life, along with Bruce Cockburn, Dougie McLean, Martyn Joseph and Ani DiFranco. She opens me up and can make me cry at the drop of a hat. Her performance last night was a ceremony of liberation, a woven story where lyrics and images flowed and churned like a river, coming back around in back eddies of meaning and imagery. A consistent tone centre, an entire first half hour played on guitar in a diatonic scale of open E voicings, the words “light” and “love” and “mother” coming back again and again, deepening each time.
I turned to the friends we were with at the end and said “this is a liturgy.”
She finished with “Love is Everything” and if you didn’t know the truth of these lyrics before, then you might have had a chance to witness them in much more stifled words from the mouths of the Blue Jay players in the locker room last night. And so, here they are. Because I hope that everyone who witnessed that journey – who witness the deep journey of being human, in fact – at some point comes to the realization that Jane Siberry and Ernie Clement et. al. have come to. May you live this.
maybe it was to learn how to love
maybe it was to learn how to leave
maybe it was for the games we played
maybe it was to learn how to choose
maybe it was to learn how to lose
maybe it was for the love we madelove is everything they said it would be
love made sweet and sad the same
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leavingmaybe it was to learn how to fight
maybe it was for the lesson in pride
maybe it was the cowboys’ ways
maybe it was to learn not to lie
maybe it was to learn how to cry
maybe it was for the love we madelove is everything they said it would be
love did not hold back the reins
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leavingfirst he turns to you
then he turns to her
so you try to hurt him back
but it breaks your body down
so you try to love bigger
bigger still
but it… it’s too lateso take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
and know you’ll never be the same
and find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn’t I?
and I gave it big… sometimes
and I gave it in my own sweet time
I’m just leavinglove is everything…
I am in Ottawa with Caitlin to do a little work and visit the place we lived from three years back in the early 1990s when we graduated and started our life together. This morning I find myself in a cafe on the edge of the Byward market, deeper into the historic French and Catholic neighbourhood boards the north end of Dalhousie Street. For all of it’s growth, Ottawa remains remarkably unchanged over the past 30+ years, especially in the downtown core which is partially protected by the work of the National Capital Commission and full of important and historical buildings. As a result even the neighbourhoods we lived in remain familiar and intact – the Golden Triangle and Sandy Hill. The apartment and duplex we lived in are still there, and in fact last night, out on a late walk home from a movie, we stopped in front of our old place on Frank Street and one of the residents asked what we were looking at. When we told him, he gave us a tour inside the building. Nothing had changed. Memories came flooding back.
I love that about visiting physical places in which I have lived. The same happened when I took my son to England in April and showed him the place where I lived as a pre-teen in the three years our family spent there. Things change, but also they don’t, and walking through places of forgotten memory wakes up deep FEELINGS, not just stories. I can tell you about the time we were introduced to chèvre at the Ritz on Elgin, or the nights we spent at the Bytown theatre, or the potato skins we ate at the Royal Oak, but visiting these places (or the locations of these places) evokes a feeling that is indescribable. It put me in mind of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia, which, I discovered this morning, had its seminal scene filmed in the Bagno Vignoni, which I visited in May without making the connection. Funny what we miss.
It’s a thin time, All Souls Day. I can feel them here in the cold wind coming down the valley, the fall colours on the Gatineau Hills and the smell of leaf mold on the breeze. I love it.
Speaking of films, last night we ventured to Landsdowne Park, a place which HAS changed a lot since we lived here. It is the hoe of the TD Place stadium which hosts both of Ottawa’s professional soccer teams and its Canadian football team as well as the arena where the OHL Ottawa 67s play. A whole entertainment district has spring up around the stadia, and we headed there to watch Aziz Ansari’s new movie, Good Fortune, and then catch the end of game 6 of the World Series, which the Blue Jays lost 3-1 after a bizarre ninth inning in which Barger’s ground rule double due to a ball lodged perfectly in the left centre field wall prevented the Blue Jays from tying the game.
About that movie though. It’s not very good. Ansari plays a guy who supposedly makes documentaries, but who is working gig jobs in LA and living in his car. It’s a comedy, which is such a weird take for the struggle that lies just out of view of the film. Due to the errant actions of a guardian angel acting above his pay grade (Keanu Reeves), he ends up switching places with a tech bro (Seth Rogan). Ansari’s character gets comfortable and tries too steal that life. The angel says he can only switch back if he can find meaning and worth in his life as a poor homeless person. Ansari fakes memory loss after an accident and won’t give the tech bro his life back. Why would he?
Except, inexplicably, he does. I’m going to spoil it here, although you can see the ending coming a mile away, but Ansari eventually relents, the tech bro minimally atones for his experience by paying his gig drivers more, but the union drive at the hardware store fails again and everyone resolves to keep working to change the conditions over which they have no control. It’s actually pretty horrifying. The privileged white guy gets his fortune back, the brown guy ends up poor again but with a renewed sense of purpose and with his true love, a struggling colleague who tries unsuccessfully to organize her workplace, and the angel gets his wings back. A bunch of gig workers quite their jobs, but it’s not clear to me how they then make ends meet after walking out.
Tellingly at the end of the movie, Ansari’s character puts an ad on Craigslist asking for folks to take part in a documentary about the LA underclass and gig working. I walked out of the theatre wondering why Ansari chose to write a lighthearted comedy about these people rather than ACTUALLY MAKE THAT DOCUMENTARY. It smacked of a film made by people who heard about how bad stuff was from their delivery drivers and baristas, but no one involved has lived experience of this life and it shows.
Miss this one and go re-watch Tangerine instead.