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By David Laing Dawson
Do you remember Bobby Gimby? "CA NA
DA. We love you." He who achieved sudden and brief fame for writing
and playing a song that matched a sudden and brief period of Canadian
jingoistic celebration. It was 1966 about to become 1967. We played
his song several times during the final hours of 1966, and again,
right after Auld Lang Syne, in the first moments of 1967.
For many years I’ve wanted to tell
the story of the Eve of 1967 in a play. But I couldn't find my way
into the play and I was afraid that once in it, I would not find a
way out. Perhaps set against a backdrop of great events of the time,
a struggle of ideas and politics and social change. We were still
mourning John Kennedy. The Vietnam war was building in sound and fury
and lies and death. The students of The Sorbonne barricading the
streets of Paris. The Red Army trashing China. The people of Prague
standing up to the tanks of the Soviet Union. America at war with
itself. And Canada about to celebrate its hundredth birthday with
Expo '67. Make love, not war.
But my New Year’s Eve was a smaller,
more personal story. It didn’t really matter what was going on in
the outside world.
My mother was living in an apartment
in a small complex with a nice view of Victoria. She had just been
released from a psychiatric ward following a course of electroshock
therapy. It had worked some. It had quelled her sleepless, despairing
agitation, and given her some peace of mind. Her smile had returned,
if a little brittle and tentative.
In the same apartment complex lived
Tommy and Dixie. Tommy had recently retired from teaching grade
school. Their only daughter had, curiously, surprisingly, eloped with
a young man on the back of his motorcycle. Tommy was dying from
Cancer of the stomach. Dixie was drinking too much.
These were not people one should leave
alone on New Year's Eve. My mother told us she would be spending
New Year's Eve with Tommy and Dixie in their apartment. He would be
more comfortable lying on his own couch in his own living room with
his own bathroom close by. Would I come to this New Year Eve's
Party? Tommy would like to see me.
My wife and I, students in Vancouver,
had options. Places to go, champagne to drink, friends to kiss, music
to dance to, weed to smoke. But I asked her if she would mind, if it
would be all right, this year, to spend New Year’s Eve with my
mother. New Year's Eve with Tommy and Dixie and my mother would
certainly need her: young, healthy, lively, and very cute in those
gogo boots and miniskirts and blond Julie Christie wigs. "Of
course," she said.
We dressed in my mother's apartment
that New Year's Eve and, unable to stall any longer, walked with
plates of food, champagne and wine, along the corridor to the other
apartment. Tommy was indeed lying on the couch, a bowl by his side on
the floor in case nausea overwhelmed him. He was receiving
chemotherapy, which he knew was having no effect beyond making him
nauseous. Still, he smiled when we entered, and acted like a host,
and talked a little, and joked.
Valerie, Tommy and Dixie’s daughter,
would not be coming. Her parents, she thought, had not yet accepted
the pot-smoking bike-riding dufus she had married. I felt,
remembering her from her childhood and early teens, that she was very
lucky to have found someone with whom to run away.
Besides Dixie and my mother, there was
another woman at the party. Invited as someone else who should not be
left alone on New Year’s Eve. A Mrs. Edith Stelk, in her fifties,
tall and lean, a worried, puzzled look constantly playing across her
face. My mother had filled us in before we left her apartment: Mrs.
Stelk had been married to one of the Stelk brothers, who owned and
operated a hardware store, above which Dixie and Tommy had lived for
many years.
Only a month before, in November of
1966, Edith's husband had taken a trip to Seattle with his mother,
staying at one of the better hotels. And on a Sunday afternoon, in
the perpetual chill and drizzle of rain from Puget Sound, Edith's
husband had jumped from the window of their hotel room.
That was our cast of characters:
Recently widowed Edith whose face and voice, no matter what else was
being said, kept asking the question, "Why?" Tommy, horizontal,
between bouts of nausea and shallow breathing, making jokes and
predictions and resolutions. My mother, smiling wanly, at times lost
to her own thoughts and reveries and questions. Dixie, with a
brooding face, drinking, and then blurting out, whenever Tommy made
reference to the year ahead, "How can you say that, knowing you’ll
never see another year?" And rushing to the bathroom in tears. And
coming back and saying, "How can you make jokes at a time like
this?"
But such adaptive resiliency we humans
have. Tommy would make his jokes. We would babble inanely, play
music, pour drinks, listen to Bobby Gimby, and only pause for a few
minutes to let the truth, blurted out by Dixie against all laws of
civilized discourse, dissipate from the room like a bad smell.
At some point Tommy asked me, a
medical student, why they insisted on giving him Chemotherapy when
they knew it would not help. I did not have an answer for him. CA NA
DA. We love you.
Maybe this would make a good piece of
theatre. The horrible smell of truth blows from the stage but the
characters keep playing Bobby Gimby on the stereo. Over and over. One
more time boys. Before we face the new year alone and wondering.
Auld Lang Syne is a melancholic song.
I’m sure we did it justice when we sang it that year. And then
right back to Bobby Gimby. Did you know that Gimby was a member of
our CBC's the Happy Gang, that one of his songs became the national
anthem of Malaysia, and that in his later years he lead a band at the
Leisure World Retirement Home in North Bay? Bobby was an optimistic
man. We might not have survived that New Year's Eve without him.
My mini-skirted gogo-booted pretty
wife and I spent a week at Expo 67 the following summer, staying in a
communal pad in the old city of Montreal. My mother lived to travel
and look after all her sick and dying friends. Tommy died in the
spring of 1967. Dixie became one of the friends my mother looked
after while she mourned and took a few years to drink herself to
death. Nobody was ever able to answer Edith's question and she
moved to Florida.
I can't write this story as a play.
I don’t know how to end it. I don’t know what lessons to draw
from it. The world came to Expo 67; the theme was the future. The
Czechoslovakian pavilion was full of wonder. Progress and joy filled
the air. Bobby Gimby played his horn.
Maybe we need both songs. Gimby's: "There'll be happy times. Church bells will ring, ring, ring."
And Auld Lang Syne's: "We'll
drink a cup of kindness yet for times gone by"
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