Driving Minnie's Piano (2 page)

^{Dave said he believed in
No-Doz. It was the only thing that kept him awake and kept him
going at the job. My partner, Mario, said he believed in God. He
said if he didn't believe in God, his father would beat the shit
out of him. Bill said he only believed in money. It was pretty
straightforward and anyone who said otherwise was a fool or a
liar.}

^{For some reason, I believed in
surfing, and I believed in being in love and I believed in Canada
even though I didn't know much about Canada. I did not believe in
America but I did believe in Walt Whitman. I believed in writing
and I believed in the ideas of Zen even though I didn't always
understand them - which is maybe why I liked Zen so much. I
believed in Minnie playing the piano and my grandfather's ability
to grow corn and lima beans. I believed in the love that my mother
put into making homemade tomato juice and Sunday dinner. And I
believed, foolishly or otherwise, that all things are
possible.}

^{But that was all a long time
ago. I did not believe I would be here, still alive, when I was
fifty. This was a conceit of my generation, but maybe a conceit of
all young men and women. I had some kind of lofty goal of seeing
directly into the true heart of the world, following a path created
by words and ideas. It had a physical geography that would take me
north and back to the coast explored by Jack Parry and myself not
long before the demise of The Wipeouts.}

^{Music and surfing led me here,
as did politics and the advice of my grandmother Minnie. Minnie
understood that if I stayed in New Jersey attempting to endure the
Ronald Reagan dynasty, the life would be squeezed out of me. “Nova
Scotia sounds wonderful,” she said. “All that
coastline.”}

^{It is
obvious to most that the purpose of surfing is not to get from
point A to point B. In fact, to think of surfing as having a goal
or a true purpose at all is, well, pointless. The point, if there
need be a point at all, is to be
on
the wave, to be riding
it, to be
in
the present tense of the experience, tapping
the energy and being fully aware of everything. If the air
temperature happens to be minus twenty degrees, if the sea beneath
you is littered with chunks of ice, if the wind in your numbed face
is laced with small pellets of ice, this makes the scenario all
that more intense and personal. This assures you that you are fully
alive. And that is always a good reminder.}

^{What follows is a narrative
about a time and a place. I'm older than the narrator of this story
now but not necessarily wiser. I continue to worry and I've
maintained many of my desires, one of which is to attempt to record
at least one version of the true world, even as it slips through my
fingers.}

^{Lesley Choyce}

^{Lawrencetown
Beach}

^{Nova Scotia}

^{The Turning of Summer}

^{At six o'clock on a hot, muggy
South Jersey farm morning, my grandmother would put on the oldest,
most beat-up clothes she owned, place a floppy straw hat on her
head and go out into the field to pick peas, string beans or
sometimes both. I would arrive at my grandparents' farm at about
eight o'clock and Minnie had already put in a day's work. She hated
midday heat like her worst enemy and would deprive the hot day of
any satisfaction by sneaking out into the fields and working before
the sun had hardly any chance at all to work up a
sweat.}

^{And so my grandmother, Minnie,
won almost every battle with the New Jersey sun by being an early
riser. Mid-morning in the cool asylum of my grandparents'
voluminous basement with the satisfying smell of a smooth, damp
summer concrete floor, she snapped beans and shelled peas for hours
at a time. I understood why peas had to be released from their
cases but never understood the business of breaking beans in half.
I was only thirteen and there was so much I didn't understand that
it probably didn't matter.}

^{My grandfather, a stout,
wonderfully opinionated man in his sixties, picked corn and
sometimes tomatoes later in the day when the offending heat of the
sun granted him permission to curse long and loud and with good
reason. But peas and beans were a woman's work and I assumed that
things had gone this way since the invention of
agriculture.}

^{I was relegated to menial
teenager tasks like weeding pigweed from tomatoes or, worse yet,
suckering corn. “Sucker” turned out to be a most appropriate term.
The theory was that you cut off any side shoots from the main stalk
of corn and the plant would put more energy into producing healthy
ears of corn. The only good thing about this job was that I got to
use a machete. And every thirteen-year-old boy is infatuated with
machetes. As was I. But the rest of the suckering job sucked. It
was hot, sweaty work and I sneezed a lot. I think my grandfather
paid me fifty cents an hour. I learned to hate corn pollen and it
turned out the only sucker in the cornfield was me. Years later,
corn researchers in Iowa discovered that suckering did no good
whatsoever to the corn. It even did more harm than good. Farmers no
longer sucker their corn and teenagers are spared all that
misery.}

^{Some days I got sick of the
work and retreated to sit in the basement with my grandmother and
watch her snap beans in time with the snapping of the gum that she
chewed. Nowadays, if I ever chew gum, I think of Minnie. Every time
I pop a stick of gum to unclog my ears on an Air Canada flight to
Toronto, there's Minnie shelling peas in the cool basement of my
youth.}

^{My grandfather went by the
name of Gaga. Why he let the world call him that, I'll never know.
It was the name that my brother and I called him before we had
established a firm grip on the use of the English language. Minnie
was short for Grandmom and Gaga was short for Grandpop. We must
have had considerable authority in our early years because the
names stuck fast. So Avery and Eva, their real names, became Gaga
and Minnie. They never complained once, that I know of, about the
name change and pretty soon everybody seemed to forget their real
names.}

^{My grandfather was the only
member of my family that would genuinely curse out loud. He had an
amazing amount of venom in his voice and a southern pent-up rage
that came from growing up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Gaga
had strong opinions about war and politics. World War One was the
best thing that ever happened to him. Harry Truman became president
because he couldn't run his own hardware store without going
bankrupt. And John F. Kennedy - well, you didn't want his opinion
on Kennedy.}

^{But my grandfather did not
usually swear outright about politicians unless they were township
politicians trying to raise his taxes. Everyone in my extended
family hated taxes so much that they spent much of their adult
lives discussing the problem. But as far as I know, nobody ever
actually did anything about it. I think that hating taxes was a
kind of adhesive that kept both sides of my parents' families
united. When I eventually grew up - it happened around the time I
was twenty-seven - I decided to move to the country that had the
second highest tax rate in the world. Go figure the logic in that.
But now that I'm older, I've come to the conclusion that this is a
good thing. The higher the taxes, the better the country is to live
in. This logic will no doubt anger everyone in my family and I
won't bring it up at the family reunion, but there it is, plain and
simple.}

^{My grandfather swore the best
when he was working with the wire that he put up for the lima
beans. Most farmers in New Jersey thought lima beans weren't worth
all the trouble. You had to plant the bean seeds, put up posts all
along the row, install twin parallel lines of heavy gauge wire from
one end of each row to the other, top and bottom, and then create a
wavy V pattern up and down the entire length with binder twine. All
so the finicky lima bean vines would grow tall and have something
to hang onto. And eventually produce lima beans.}

^{In order to put up the wire,
my grandfather would park the 1949 Chevy truck at one end of a row
with the wire mounted on a big spool on the back. He and I would
take one end of the wire and walk it the length of the field and
then hammer it onto the posts. It all wouldn't have been so bad
except for the fact that, according to my grandfather, the wire had
a mind of its own. And in that mind, it did not like him. He knew
for certain that the wire was out to get him - trying to tangle
itself in impossible metallic Gordian knots or snapping, kicking,
jamming, jabbing and generally trying to poke out the eye of any
human fool enough to come within its steely
region.}

^{So when things went wrong,
Gaga cursed long and loud. Once, when an outstretched cable snapped
mid-field, it whipped itself with ferocious force, attacking my
grandfather and hurtling like a spring back in my direction where I
was stationed at the spool in the truck. I threw myself onto the
sandy soil and put my hands over my head as the wire thrashed at
the truck cab. My grandfather had been whipped in the face, slashed
across the hand and then knocked down.}

^{It was the maddest I'd ever
seen him and I too was now convinced the wire was out to get both
of us. I wondered why he didn't give up on lima beans. The problem
was that my grandfather loved to eat them. He had grown up near
Chestertown, Maryland, with large platefuls of delectable lima
beans and his was a lifetime commitment to growing and eating good
beans. For those of you who have only bought them in a can at
grocery stores, you'll never understand why one man can have such a
passion for a mere bean. Good fresh lima beans are really pretty
amazing. And my grandfather was willing to risk his life (and mine
too) to wage war, year after year, with uncontrollable, even
hateful (his word), wire, rather than forego good lima
beans.}

^{In contrast to the lima bean
wire wars, World War One was like a long holiday at the Jersey
Shore, Gaga said. On that perilous day when my grandfather had been
attacked by the wire, he walked back to where I was at the truck.
He was fuming. I was afraid that he was mad at me. But it was the
wire. He cursed it up and down and sideways. He kicked at it, he
spit at it, called it things my thirteen-year-old ears had never
heard before or after.}

^{We left the wire that day,
left it there tangled in the greatest convoluted knot of madness
ever conceived by the physical universe and we walked away. I was
glad he wasn't mad at me but, in truth, I may have been responsible
for not keeping the right tension on the stretched out wire. I
dawdled at the wire spindle, daydreaming of all the things I would
rather do than help stretch out lima bean wire. I often daydreamed
about surfing my 9’6” Greg Noll slot-bottom noserider surfboard. It
was either that or girls. Denise or Patty or Cathy. It was around
this time that I discovered that every other one of my girlfriends
(at least that was the term I used for girls I had a crush on) were
named Cathy. My infatuation cycle would go like this: Cathy,
Debbie, Cathy, Patty, Cathy, Denise and so forth. Sometimes it was
Kathy with a K. And I identified heavily with the Everly Brothers'
song of this time called “Cathy's Clown.” I believed “Cathy's
Clown” was the best song ever written. Much better than anything
Mozart, Beethoven or Bach could come up with.}

^{And so the wire had defeated
my grandfather that particular summer morning. But we came back to
it later in the day and punished the wire until it was stretched
onto the posts and hammered into place into a kind of lima bean
wire crucifixion. Gaga, in better spirits from having had a large
lunch of oysters sent up in a can from the Chesapeake Bay, said
that all you really head to do was “chide” the wire and it would
work for you. Before we had been “wrestling” with it, fighting it.
My grandfather had realized he had to rise above the problem, not
stoop to the level of the coiled wire. His newfound attitude was a
complete success.}

^{Later in the summer he would
say that this was the best lima bean crop he'd ever seen. But the
remainder of the New Jersey farming universe would mostly continue
to believe that lima beans were not worth the
effort.}

^{Once the wire was firmly in
place, Minnie and I wove the binder twine top to bottom on the
parallel lines so that the vines would eventually thread around
these improvised trellises. I loved the smell of binder twine but
would later discover that the smell was actually a toxic
preservative put on the twine to keep it from rotting. In my youth,
I grew up loving the smell of all kinds of things that I would
later learn were harmful, poisonous and deadly.}

^{It's a long list, really, but
some of the favoured smells on my hit list included leaded gasoline
and binder twine preservative. Creosote was way up there. (Can
anyone smell creosote without thinking of being a kid at the beach
or sitting under a wooden bridge?) Most insecticides had an
interesting smell. In those days, trucks drove around Cinnaminson
Township spraying big misty clouds (that looked just like
Lawrencetown fog) of toxic gases that were supposed to kill
mosquitoes. Most of my friends and I loved the smell of that
poisonous cloud. At least one ill-fated classmate made a hobby out
of riding his bike around behind the mosquito truck, in his own
private, sweet-smelling fogbank. He was admired for his audacity
and loyalty to that special aroma but it led to disaster. He was
hit and almost killed by a driver who couldn't see him. David was
slammed into the truck, right near the nozzle dispensing the mist,
and then fell onto the curb. But he lived to tell the tale and such
a cataclysmic event garnered envy from many of the guys in my
class.}