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Authors: Lesley Choyce

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Driving Minnie's Piano

BOOK: Driving Minnie's Piano
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Driving Minnie’s Piano

Memoirs of a Surfing Life in Nova
Scotia

By Lesley Choyce

Published by Pottersfield Press at
Smashwords

Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia,
Canada

Copyright © 2006, 2011 Lesley
Choyce

All rights reserved. No part of
this publication may be reproduced or used or transmitted in any
form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying - or by any information storage or retrieval system,
without the prior, written permission of the publisher. Any
requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage
and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in
writing to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing
Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5. This
also applies to classroom use.

Library and Archives Canada
Cataloguing in Publication

Choyce, Lesley, 1951-

Driving Minnie's piano : memoirs
of a surfing life in Nova Scotia / Lesley Choyce.

ISBN 978-1-897426-30-2

  1. Choyce, Lesley, 1951-. 2. Authors,
    Canadian -- 20th century -- Biography. 3. Lawrencetown (Halifax,
    N.S.) -- Biography. 4. Surfing -- Nova Scotia -- Lawrencetown Beach
    (Halifax, N.S.) I. Title.

PS8555.H668Z464 2006 C818'.5409
C2006-903705-1

Ebook editor: Mary Ann
Archibald

Cover photos: David Pu'u,
istockphoto

Cover Design: Gail
Leblanc

Pottersfield Press acknowledges
the ongoing support of The Canada Council for the Arts, as well as
the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage,
Cultural Affairs Division. We also acknowledge the financial
support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program for our publishing
activities.

Pottersfield Press, 83 Leslie Road,
East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada, B2Z 1P8

www.pottersfieldpress.com

###

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Tuning of
Summer

The Drowned
Coast

Driving Minnie's
Piano

King of the
Drumlins

A Stone's Throw From
the Sea

Winter Surfing and
the Search for Sanity

The Year of the
Skunk

The Final
Draft

Origins of the
SurfPoets

Zen and the Art of
Canadian Winter Surfing

Elegy for a
Surfer

Spring Surf

April

Locust
Blossoms

The Thin Edge of the
Wedge

A Short History of
Fog

Fools, Baseball and
Beach Stones

Ravens

China and Other
Possibilities

Class
Reunion

Hair, Surfing and the
Meaning of Life

Epilogue: The Piano on the
Highway

Introduction

Chuang-tzu, a Chinese sage and
precursor to Zen ideas, says that “the man of character lives at
home without exercising his mind and performs actions without
worry.” Clearly, I am not Chuang-tzu's ideal man of character. Nor
is any other man or woman that I know of. Lao-tzu, who preceded
Chuang-tzu, included in his recipe for success this seemingly
simple advice for a happy life: “Reduce desires.”

Not one but two electric
heaters are at work in my office this morning in lieu of my wood
stove, which is often fueled with pages from revised manuscripts
and wood from the woodpile. It is a day of minus digits and wind.
And snow. The lake before me is frozen, the marsh a great white
expanse of round, small hills and valleys of snow. The ravens seem
to barely be able to keep themselves stable on the electric wires,
where the wind sings an ominous chord. In the distance, the
Lawrence-town headland is a white wall against a blue-grey sky.
Above the surface of the sea hangs a vast low blanket of mist that
appears to be drifting east towards Ireland, to where my older
daughter, Sunyata, will be moving within a week.

Having carved out a few hours
to ponder just who I am now, I realize I am a kind of perfect Zen
failure: absorbed, worried, lacking naiveté, strongly attached to
my identity, my geography, my vanity and my striving. I am the
sound of one hand clapping and it is the sound of a small, poorly
tuned orchestra of chaos.

If I have any goal in sorting
out autobiographical experience, it is to be neither linear nor
complete. All of our lives can be retold in many fashions with
numerous beginnings, middles and ends. The drama shifts with point
of view and method of delivery. This story begins with snow and sea
and cold but it shifts quickly to the past.

It is summer. I am three or
four years old, and my father is building our house in New Jersey.
The walls are made of cinder blocks, a common enough building
material in those days. They are compressed blocks of refuse
cinders from burning coal. The walls are built up to the second
storey. My father has framed the inside walls and put rafters in
place, spanning the twenty feet or so of empty air. Beneath is a
sixteen-foot drop to the hard concrete floor of the basement. My
father has been working all morning and takes a break. I have been
sitting with a toy truck in a pile of sand in the yard, and when he
climbs down the ladder to join my mother for coffee, I must have
seemed content enough with what I was doing. But my eye was on the
ladder.

I seem to have no choice but
to climb up the ladder and venture out onto a single
two-by-eight-inch beam of wood, a narrow path for sure but one
begging for wear. When my father and mother see me there, I seem to
be quite proud of my accomplishment. I wave and smile and am
reaching for a hammer my father left up here. I stand up and begin
to walk the two-inch-wide beam back towards the ladder as my father
scrambles aloft. I meet him at the top of the ladder and he carries
me down to the safety of the earth. I don't know why he's breathing
so hard and why my mother looks like she's about to
cry.

When I am thirteen or
fourteen, I discover the art of self-hypnosis. I order a paperback
advertised in a comic book and learn to use self-hypnosis to do
well on math tests. I use it for various forms of self-improvement
but discover it is of little value in making myself more attractive
to girls.

Discouraged, I ask my
grandmother, Minnie, why some things don't work out in life.
“Sometimes you just have to sit back and wait and see what
happens,” she says, opening a fresh pack of Juicy Fruit gum and
handing me a stick. I follow her lead, unwrap it, fold it and place
it in my mouth, where it makes my teeth ache because it is so
sweet. Then she sits me down at her baby grand piano and sings the
words in a warbled, old-fashioned voice to a song about a “bicycle
built for two.” My grandfather has been out picking lima beans and,
when he comes in the back door, he yells for a glass of iced tea.
Minnie pretends she doesn't hear him and just keeps on
singing.

A few years later when I am
arrested for the first time - in the state of Delaware, over an
argument with a state trooper at a beach where I was surfing -
Minnie gives me the money to pay the fine and tells me that “these
things happen.”

Somewhere between the time of
walking the beam and learning self-hypnosis, I became interested in
surfing. It was pop music that would have introduced me to surf
culture and my first stand-up ride on a surfboard. In “Surf City,”
Jan and Dean promised there were “two girls for every boy.” And the
Beach Boys assured me that if you could just “catch a wave,” you
would be “sitting on top of the world.” The song lyrics even gave
you advice about how you were to act and look. All you needed was a
peroxide-bottle “bushy, bushy blond hair do” up top and huarache
sandals, for the feet.

My first surfboard was a 9’6”
Greg Noll slot-bottom nose-rider, which will not mean much to most
folks but it meant a lot to me. It was a big board for a skinny
kid. I would hold one end, my father the other, and we'd walk it to
the shoreline. Then I would paddle out into the warm waters along
the South Jersey Shore, and like those Zen masters before me, I
could make time stand still. I discovered the past and future
suddenly appeared to be false illusions. There was only a kind of
timeless now once I learned to catch a wave, stand up, bottom turn
and walk the length of my 9’ 6” Greg Noll surfboard as I became one
with the wave.

One illuminating summer
evening, I surfed truly hollow waves for the first time. The wind
had suddenly come up off the land, smoothing the faces of the
ragged walls of water and making them throw out - top to bottom -
over the sandbar near shore. I could paddle, take off, drop down
and tuck until I was truly inside the wave. My father watched me
getting tubed, then hammered, slammed and eventually washed up on
shore after each stunning wave, only to retrieve my board, paddle
out and do it again. After the twelfth time, he made me stop. It
looked like I was getting hurt. But I wasn't. I had passed through
some invisible barrier and was now living in an altogether
different space-time dimension.

I first arrived in Nova Scotia
on a surfing trip with my friend and fellow surfer Jack Parry in
the year 1970. We had created a band together - The Wipeouts - and
we played surf music. But the surf music era was ending (or it was
already over and we didn't know it). We were trying to hang onto
something pure and simple like surfing while all around us the
cauldron of American politics and war was drawing us into something
much more serious, something much darker. We escaped from New
Jersey for ten days in Nova Scotia and discovered the water was
crystal clear here. You could see kelp and fish down below as you
surfed. There were lobsters and crabs. Point breaks beckoned from
every turn in the coastal road. We found empty beaches and endless
stretches of uninhabited coastline - even here on the east coast of
North America. The water was cold, damn cold, and it was either
Jack or me who said it out loud for the first time in my life.
“Cold is only a state of mind.” And I recited that anthem,
shivering in my too-thin wetsuit, numb toes scraping on barnacles
as we climbed out of the sea over the rocks. I was beginning to
realize that many things were only a matter of attitude, what
Minnie called “perspective.”

The Vietnam War gave me
another perspective and on TV I saw young American men - kids like
me, really - carrying guns through jungles. Still others were
caught by the TV cameras literally running for the Canadian border
to leave the U.S. so they would not be drafted to fight in those
jungles. Border patrols from the American side were in pursuit
while their Canadian counterparts ran to assist the draft
evaders.

By then I could carry my own
board to the water. The board was shorter, but the water not as
clean as it had been on the Jersey Shore of my younger days and I
carried some pretty heavy baggage in my head as I paddled out to
surf those foamy sandbar waves.

In the dense
mist

what is being
shouted

between hill and
boat

These were the words of an
ancient Japanese haiku that I read late one night while taking a
break from my job loading trucks on the night shift at North Penn
Transfer. I'm pretty sure I was the only guy who read books on Zen
Buddhism during the coffee breaks of the long night. Some guys
studied Playboy, some ate sandwiches, a few dozed off while I read
Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki and came to the conclusion that I could
learn all there was to learn about the world from anything I chose:
skateboarding, philosophy, surfing or poetry. I did not discuss
this with my co-workers, although I sometimes would ask them what
they truly believed in.

BOOK: Driving Minnie's Piano
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ads

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