Driving Minnie's Piano (26 page)

^{I was extremely good at this
charismatic but fatuous little surfing manoeuvre and did it over
and over as I grew into a better and older surfer until I had
really long hair and actually began to somehow do injury to nerves
in my neck as a result of flicking my heavy sea-laden hair out of
my eyes.}

^{The paradoxical thing about
long hair and surfing is that the longer the hair is in the front -
the more you allow your bangs to grow - the harder it is to see.
Your hair is always falling down in your face and getting in the
way. But you don't care because it's your long hair and you'd
rather die than admit that short hair is more
“practical.”}

^{Now that I'm older and much
wiser, I see some of the absurdity and the follies of my youth, but
it doesn't mean I'm about to change them. Although my hair is
considerably shorter than in my glory days of the early seventies,
I have a healthy mop of it that still hangs in my eyes during
summer surfing at the beach. In the winter when I surf, I tuck most
of it into my wetsuit hood so that I look like the most certifiable
dork on the Eastern Shore. Not all of it stays tucked in, however,
and, as a result, it gathers salt water and - you guessed it -
freezes. I have to brush frosty locks out of my eyes but I allow
the rest of it to form elegant, dangling icicles, some reaching
down as far as my Adam's apple. It's like some exotic winter
jewellery. The sun glints off it in a spectacular way and it is
only a minor inconvenience as it dangles against my cheek when I
scoot across a wave. I've discovered, however, that a head dip in
subarctic conditions is not a really smart move.}

^{In my extensive research on
the subject, I've noted the historical and literary importance of
hair. When someone wanted to rob Samson of his strength, who do you
think they called? Yes, Delilah and her scissors or whatever they
used in those days. Walt Whitman had long hair and so did a bunch
of other dead poets. So long hair and creativity were a match.
During those storied days of the late sixties and early seventies,
it was a sure thing that long hair made you play the guitar better.
That even worked for me. For example, picture me at thirteen, with
something not much better than a flattop with a little fringe
around the ears. I'm playing my Silvertone (from Sears) single
pickup electric guitar through a Danelectro thirty-watt amp. I'm
hitting the A note on the high E string enthusiastically - over and
over. Not much to get lathered up about, eh?}

^{Then fast forward to me at
twenty. Hair hanging down to my belly button, hitting that same
high A note over and over and shaking my freak flag. It's like a
whole different universe of hair/music euphoria.}

^{This same celebratory hair,
however, meant you got stopped by the police more often. Did they
really sit in their patrol cars and say stuff like, “Joe, you see
that carload of long hair punks? Should we go get 'em and nail
their sorry asses for whatever dope we can find in the car?” Did
they really say stuff like that to each other? Yes, I'm certain
they did.}

^{But I was never caught at
anything truly illegal, just stopped for my hair or maybe a
burnt-out bulb in a tail light. When I went to college in North
Carolina, though, I had a redneck refuse to sell me gas at a gas
station outside Greenville. He looked at me, my shag, my 1962 Ford
Galaxie convertible with the surfboard and the New Jersey plates.
He sized me up good for what I was as if I had a big magnetic
Day-glo painted sign on the side of my car: FREAKIN' NEW JERSEY
HIPPIE SURFER. He took his time silently sizing me up, looking
directly at me, creating a substantial, hovering North Carolina
hiatus right there in the humid afternoon after I had requested
service. “Ten bucks of regular, please,” was all I said. And I said
it politely. His response when he finally got around to one was to
slap a lock onto the gas pump and say, “Sorry, we're all
out.”}

^{I had a feeling that what he
was doing was somehow against the law but decided to go the
discretion route and I drove out of there, my long mane of hair
floating freely and passionately in the southern
breeze.}

^{I cut my hair for a job once
and I cut it again before I immigrated to Canada. Did I really
think someone would turn me back at the border for the length of my
hair? Could be. I wasn't taking chances. The hair grew back and I
felt that I had successfully hoodwinked the Canadian immigration
authorities.}

^{Hair sits on top of your head
and keeps you warm in winter. It keeps mosquitoes and black flies
off your skull in summer. Hair is politics and perseverance. It
hides your flaws and at the same time makes you somehow larger than
life. Hair should be left raw, trimmed slightly, or fuzzy. Clean
but free. Hair is freedom and promotes a lack of concern for all
the pestering conduits of fashion, conformity and upright
pretentious browbeating.}

^{One should
not dismiss, however, the dangers of long hair. Even today you are
probably more likely to be pulled over by police and searched if
your mop is shaggy. Carry nothing illegal. The other car problem
was first outlined for me in the 1967 classic
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive for the
Compleat Idiot
. There were
quite a few of us complete idiots in those days and John Muir, the
author, sold a big whack of books to us. His classic line in his
how-to book on Volkswagen repair went something like this: “Be sure
you don't yank your hank!” And he had a very good point. He
admonished never to work on your VW engine while it was running -
your long hair could easily get caught in the fan belt looped
through those two pulleys. Muir assured his readers he'd seen one
of his hippie brothers lose a big fistful of hair this way and it
was not a pretty picture.}

^{The world moves on, I know,
and this year's flat top fad gives way to next year's mop top.
People with long raw hair are not necessarily happier or smarter
than their counterparts with shorter locks. Someday soon, long hair
may become fashionable again beyond the mere drone of lead-singing
alternative music icons. If it becomes fashionable, I will feign
some indifference lest I be considered another convert of a current
fashion.}

^{And therein lies a conundrum.
If long, unkempt hair becomes universally fashionable on men, do I
cut my hair to endorse my role as “enemy number one of the fashion
industry” or do I keep it long and let people think I am completely
up-to-date and trendy? My guess is that I will ignore the paradox
altogether - as we should always ignore paradoxes - and go surfing.
I'll scoot across the face of a six-foot green wall of northern
water, do a good old head dip for old times' sake and be careful
when I fling the salt water from my locks so as not to injure my
neck.}

^{Epilogue: The Piano on the Highway}

^{While driving Minnie's piano
to Nova Scotia, I was also carrying other important cargo. There
was Pamela, of course, and the surfboard. My mother had also given
me some scarlet runner beans to plant in the damp cold Nova Scotia
soil. There were money plant seeds and sprouted bamboo shoots. In
my yard in South Jersey where I grew up, those tall bamboo trees
had flourished, dividing the yard from the traffic like majestic
oriental guardians that swayed in the summer winds. Japanese
immigrants sometimes stopped and asked my mother for new shoots
just like the ones I was taking into Canada.}

^{I was also carrying some
baseball cards to Canada. Baseball cards from when I was a kid - a
Mickey Mantle rookie card, a Roger Maris from the year he hit all
those home runs, a couple of Hank Aarons and a pair of Stan
Musials. Others too. According to the book for card collectors, my
handful of baseball cards was worth more than the car I was
driving. They were worth more than all the royalties I received in
total from the first six or seven books I wrote. Some of those
books took a couple of years to complete.}

^{During the rainstorm in Maine,
I was carrying a heavy responsibility and a bit of fear. The fear
was gone by the time we were driving past Lake Utopia in New
Brunswick. But the responsibility had been there when I left Canada
and headed south and it was still with me when I got back home. It
would be with me for the rest of my life and I would continue to
carry it with as much dignity as I could muster.}

^{The responsibility came with
the territory of having two daughters and keeping the house and
cars fixed, food on the table and trying to keep everyone warm and
happy. And in some ways, it was a losing battle, I knew, because .
. . well, I just knew.}

^{There was a lot I did not
declare at customs going to and from the U.S. I carried images of
the sea on a summer morning when the waves were perfectly formed
and there was no wind. Surfers called those waves “glass.” Glass
was ruined by the wind. Glass never lasted but if you could sneak
in a few waves before the wind came up, then you had something to
carry around in your head to ward off negative
thoughts.}

^{I carried morning glass in my
head all the time, not just to New Jersey and back. I always took
it to the dentist's office and it carried me through drilling and
gum work.}

^{On the road north I carried in
my wallet an ID card I had bought in college. I had sent away five
bucks and received official credentials from the Universal Life
Church stating that I was a minister and had the right to marry
people as well as “all the rights and privileges accorded to a
minister of the Universal Life Church.” The card was signed by the
Reverend Tony Diamond, DD. Why I still carried this card was a bit
of a mystery but there it was.}

^{I also carried the soft,
beautiful secrets of a spring forest in Nova Scotia: dew on the
fists of fiddleheads, spider webs crystalline in the morning sun,
sagging with the weight of the night's damp
caress.}

^{I carried a sense of urgency,
which I had conjured up sometime in high school. I had a gut
feeling that life would slip away from me if I didn't snag it and
hang on for all that it was worth. There wasn't much time to sit by
the side of the turnpike and let your engine idle. Sure, get the
heck off the road if the downpour turns hellish but get back in the
flow and get moving as soon as the sun comes out and your plugs dry
off.}

^{I carried my Canadian
passport, of course, and my Nova Scotia driver's license but both
of them had a picture of a guy from New Jersey on them. I sometimes
had a feeling that people could tell this and some day I might be
questioned. Just because I had sworn allegiance to God and Queen
and taken a driving test in Nova Scotia, did that truly make me
Canadian?}

^{Driving Minnie's piano to
Canada was a significant event in my life. The Miller Piano Company
in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, built it in 1929. I had first heard
it played by my grandmother I think around 1960, the year Adolph
Eichmann was captured by Nazi hunters, the year Gary Powers was
shot down in his U2 plane over the Soviet Union. We were headed
into a dark time as Minnie played the piano for me. My grandfather,
Gaga, was eating raw oysters in the kitchen, oysters that had been
shipped up in a five-gallon can from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
My grandmother had been up since 5:30.}

^{The weight of the piano in the
U-Haul made it hard to go up hills and a line of cars clogged up
behind us. There was not much passing of other traffic - a tractor,
maybe, like the one my grandfather used to plough the fields with -
slow but lots of traction. I could feel the trailer weight slowing
us down, overheating the poor engine, and I realized that I should
have had the radiator replaced as my father
advised.}

^{Pamela, as I recall, did not
complain about the heat and we left the radio on loud with the
windows down and wind blowing all through the car. It was a dull
roar of pop music, traffic, and wind - especially out on the
Tantramar Marsh looking like a giant manicured Acadian
lawn.}

^{The final leg of any journey
gives rise to a kind of anxiousness, a joy tinged with satisfaction
but also fear. The journey is an event which interrupts the
ordinary life and prevents you from dealing with the usual set of
problems, tasks and responsibilities. That all comes collapsing
back upon you as you near home.}

^{On a clear day, as you drive
towards Lawrencetown Beach, you can see my house from about two
miles away as you cross over the Lawrencetown River and look beyond
the great expanse of marsh and lake. At that moment, I look across
to see if my house is still standing. When you go away, you always
pray that your home and your life will still be there when you come
back.}

^{The potholes on our gravel
road seemed deeper than when I'd left. I drove very slowly but the
bumps were substantial and I heard the piano produce a minor chord
or two before we made it to my driveway. Having arrived home,
Pamela jumped out of the car and opened the back door to the usual
explosion of dog. Jody, jumping and licking faces and peeing on the
ground in the excitement of our arrival.}

^{It rained hard that night, the
torrential rain having followed us from Maine. In the night, my
dreams collected their chaotic scrapbook secrets and pooled them
together into an insane montage of events.}