Here is an excerpt from my book “Red Jewel.” Read more about this story through the link above:
“There was one incident that occurred to me about a month before we
left . It had a profound effect on me. It happened just before the New
Year — that week between the holidays — when nothing of importance
is really going on. Red Jewel was berthed on the breakwater, bow in
and facing the shore, the stern secured to some hard point on the stone
breakwater. On one side of me was Skip. On the other was some dude
named Peter of whom I barely knew. He seemed to be out of his depth,
nerdy looking, about thirty I would expect. We never really hit it off as
friends or neighbors. He kept to himself most of the time other than the
odd hello, good morning and small chit chat like that. But one evening
he asked if I would accompany him to a meeting in Waikiki. This I did.
He took me down to a small building located on a short side street
that bore north off of Kalakaua Avenue down in the Waikiki district of
Oahu. There in an upstairs room we met up with about twelve people
all of whom appeared to be close associates of Peter. It turned out that
Peter was a born again Christian and part of the Jesus movement here
in the Hawaiian Islands. This was not surprising to me as the Jesus
movement was huge in the early 1970s. I witnessed it first hand in my
home town of Toronto where many of the young people I knew, many
of whom were juvenile gangsters, petty criminals, drug dealers and users,
converted to the movement and became fanatical in their beliefs and
their personal convictions. They wanted to share their enlightenment
with a non-suspecting audience of their own personal road to Damascus.
There were many a Saturday night in the parking lot of the local pool hall
where I was caught up in their rhetoric and preaching with no escape
route in sight. That is not to say I was not a Christian or a believer. No,
I was just more subtle with my faith. I was not an in-your- face kind of
guy when it came to spirituality and the supernatural. My relationship
with God was a personal one.
Nevertheless, I spent the evening with Peter and his friends singing
Psalms and praising the Lord. I was more of an observer than an active
participant but I did admire their commitment and tried to be seen as
among them as an active colleague of the Lord. I was impressed with
their devotion, especially those young men and women, who were not yet
worldly or experienced in life. Living on blind faith alone brought them
all a sense of peace and wonderment, fulfilment, purpose, happiness.
My only hope for them was that the burden of life, of living, of making
a living would not undermine their contentment and positivity with the
aura of cynicism and despair that life’s burdens can deliver.
Peter and I left the meeting with a renewed sense of self, at least for
him as I had always been a believer. It seemed to me that these people had
to justify their spiritual beliefs, their existential existence in the world
and their faith overtly. The revival meetings became their lifeline from
the real danger of backsliding into a world of pleasure and deception.
It was that world that many of them knew too well and were keenly
frightened of.
We got back to our boats and said goodnight. Nothing more was said.
I fell asleep mindful of the evening events. A sense of peace enveloped
me. I was content. I was out for the count. The next morning Peter stopped me before I could leave for my morning routine of coffee, smokes, and “S” square times two.
“Jim…Jim, I hope you enjoyed the meeting last night. I hope we weren’t
too presumptuous in our faithful exuberance with you.”
“I did Peter…and no you weren’t. Th ank you very much for inviting
me.”
“Just one thing Jim” Peter went on, “I had a hard time falling asleep
last night so I came back topside for a short spell to clear my mind,
rationalize my thoughts.”
I nodded to him
“The strangest thing occurred to me Jim. And I hope you don’t feel
ill with me for telling you this as I know how this sounds. But it is the
truth, so help me God.”
He had my undivided interest now.
“Yeah, go on”
“While I was sitting there in reflection of the night’s events, a vision
enveloped my senses. It came over me, smothered me with warmth but
more importantly it came over Red Jewel. There in the pulpit of your
sailboat sat an angel. It, or she, or he was resplendent in white: a brilliance
of righteousness with an aura of holiness. It was a guardian angel Jim. I
know how this sounds but I swear it to be the truth. I had to tell you.”
“Really?” was about all I could say.
“I know…I know…I know Jim. I know this sounds crazy but it
happened. As God is my witness. He paused for a brief moment to collect
his thoughts and then continued. “Then the angel looked directly at me
Jim, and smiled, and then looked over your boat. It spread its wings out
and then in as if to signal to all of the world…to me…protection. Don’t
you see Jim? You and Nigel have nothing to worry about, Red Jewel has
the protection of the Lord. You will be safe.”
I didn’t know what to say to Peter. All I could do was offer a grin of
questionable understanding. It was an uncomfortable moment: for Peter
to tell me this and for me to acknowledge his supernatural experience.
“Thanks for that Peter. It is reassuring for sure.”
I looked forward to the pulpit. Th ere was nothing there but the
stainless-steel guardrails and the boats beyond the bow. Nevertheless, I
smiled, and nodded my head to whoever may be there, unseen, except in
the spiritual domain.
A sense of security came over me and I felt extremely happy.
We need another one…for sure.
I mentioned Al Stewart in my last post’s music segment. Here is his perfect song. Perfect in that the lyrics are poetic and lyrical and it has piano, strings, acoustic and electric guitar and a haunting sax. Enjoy:
“She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running like a water color in the rain…”
“It was a modest but cozy house, across the road
from a small park or parkette. We were not rich by any stretch or
even well off, yet we were the first house on the block to have a
TV. Why? Because my dad was an avid baseball fan and he
desperately wanted one, as all of the major league baseball
games of the day were beginning to be televised. He could watch
a game every Saturday afternoon while my mom was outside
cutting the grass with our state-of-the-art, hand-powered push
mower. He got a TV and serendipitously I got a nickname that
would haunt me for the rest of my life. Gilly, as in Junior
Gilliam, a baseball star of the day whom my dad had great
respect for.
Given that my dad’s name was John and I was named
John, I was John Junior of course; and since my dad loved Junior
Gilliam and I was also a junior, I got the Gilliam moniker. I
could have handled Gilliam but Gilly? And parents being
parents, or grownup adults, think that other kids are really stupid,
but they’re not. They picked up on the Junior Gilliam moniker
immediately and faster than you could say “take me out to the
ball game” I was called Gilly—for ever and ever, for eternity, or
for as long as I lived. A parent’s logic never fails to amaze me
and the unintended consequences associated with their dumb-ass
decisions in name calling. You have no idea how many black
eyes can be attributed to that one lapse of judgment on my
parents’ part. Sooo cute, eh Gilly? Gilly, Gilly, Gilly! Yeah, right.
Wham, Wallop!
One day, and I’m not too sure what day actually, I found
myself riding in the back of a large truck. It was huge and dark
and noisy and full of furniture. I was with an older cousin, I
think. This was so cool. Jerking and bouncing round the chairs,
cushions, and tables in the back of that truck as we plundered
along the pockmarked, pot-holed roads of the west end of the
city. I do believe it was February, a Saturday, 1956, a mild winter
—part of the other hottest year on record. Where were we going?
I wasn’t really sure at the time, but I do believe that my parents
hit their Shangri-La: a house in the ’burbs. We were moving out
and away from the downtown core with all of its excitement,
excrement, and hot, humid, heavy, smelly summer air to the
fresh, healthy, and quiet wide-open expanses of suburbia. Houses
galore! All looking about the same. Design features of a post–
World War II housing boom: two story houses with a large
dormer in the back only accentuated on the street by those
narrow and long, single story, brick bungalows. Street upon
street, row upon boring row, with the requisite single maple or
elm tree in the front yard. Wow! We had arrived.
What a house that was. A big, two story, red brick monster, as
all houses are big to a five-year-old. It sat on a fairly large
suburban lot. The front yard had the requisite decorative tree in
place with a back yard that was really huge. I had to curtail my
excitement because under all of the dirty, brown-grey melting
snow of February was grass. And grass grew, and I could not
pretend to believe that while my dad watched his ball games
Saturday afternoons in the late spring and summer months that
my mom would be content to be out cutting the grass. Delusional
thinking for sure that was. That bit of suburbia, an urban Rockwellian
scene of nostalgia, of Dad watching sports on TV every
Saturday afternoon with mom out in the yard working with the
suburban plow would not continue forever, for I was getting
bigger. I was getting stronger, and sooner or later it would be me
out pushing that World War I–era push mower. And like those
ugly, scary, out-worldly war machines, our push mower cut grass
about as well as those first tanks careened and mowed across
no-man’s-land.
The backyard was fantastic. Great for a kid. It had two
distinct areas. The upper yard, close to the backdoor, came
equipped with a state-of-the-art sandbox complete with coarse
sand and four wooden sides with triangular corner seats, for
heaven’s sake. Seats! It was bordered on one side by the paved
single wide driveway and a very large and separate two car
garage. In 1956 this was unheard of for a working class home.
Why was this important? A paved driveway? Snow of course!
Snow had to be shoveled. I couldn’t depend on my mom forever
here. Sooner or later I would be obliged to take up the shovel
and, well, shovel.
The other side of the yard was fenced to separate our abode
from that of the neighbour. The double car garage was so wide
that the upper part of the backyard was about twenty yards
narrower than the lower portion, with less grass to cut. The lower
part of the yard, the back forty, dipped down about three feet and
was separated from the upper yard by a tiered terrace. The back
forty had large garden beds laid out in a square pattern with raspberry
bush accents around the perimeter. Yet all I could think
about then was the potential for a backyard rink, for when snow
melts during a winter thaw, water runs down the path of least
resistance and pools—in this case, from the upper reaches of our
yard to the lower back forty. When water freezes, as it invariably
would, we had a ready-made skating rink. Dad would never have
to leave his TV and construct a backyard rink for us kids. I was
so excited and so was he!
My sister had other issues. Not my oldest teeter-totter sister,
but my second oldest sister, the penultimate one. In the wintertime
she saw the snow covered upper portion of the backyard as
her blank and open canvas… a blank canvas in urban snow-
house design. She wanted the whole of the back forty as well to
lay out a “planned city” of urban snow, but I had to put my
galoshes down and stop her in her tracks. As a compromise I
agreed to help her in the layout of her snow walls, her snow
rooms, and the snow halls of her snow designs.
We always did this at night. I don’t know why, but always at
night, when it was really, really cold and frosty out—so cold that
each breath took your breath away, and the snow glistened like it
was embedded with a thousand specks of diamonds, especially
under a clear, moonlit star-embedded sky. And if we were really
lucky, the green fluid hues of the dark winter’s northern sky
shimmered and danced and wove a pattern that was frighteningly
beautiful and soothingly fresh, paradoxically frigid yet illuminated
by such a warm glow. And oh so quiet. For two little kids,
we felt sure that we were all alone in the whole wide world. This
was pure magic. To a five-year-old kid, life was indeed magical
and good.
Life was good!”
Taken from “I Thought I’d Died And Gone To Heaven.” See the link at the top of the page for more information.
Did ya know: We have now entered the era of Global Boiling – so says the head of the UN. Don’t know about you but this summer has been fantastic. Blue skies and warm temps every single day.
Did ya know that scientists say the Gulf Stream will collapse in 2025. These same experts are out to lunch. All of their predictions – every single dire one of them since the 1960s – have never materialized.
Did ya know that only God controls the weather.
Climate anxiety is going through the roof and the cats are not happy about it.
Enjoy yourselves. Get outside and enjoy the day.
“Old Admirals” by Al Stewart. Tells the story of the Royal Navy’s Lord of the Admiralty Jackie Fisher and his rise up the ranks in the later half of the 1800s and years up to World War 1. In my opinion Al Stewart is a highly under appreciated musician and story teller. I particularly love the brass aspects of this song. Next? Al’s perfect song.
Randy Meisner, co founder of the legendary band, The Eagles, has just died 26 July at the age of 77 years. He played bass guitar for the band until his departure in 1977. He co-wrote the song Take It To The Limit, which was one of the Eagle’s earliest hits and an Eagle’s classic:
An excerpt from my book: I Thought I’d Died and Gone To Heaven. More information about this book in the link above.
“I am reminded of one really weird and unexplainable moment
that occurred to me while waiting to go into the confessional to
confess my indiscretions and sinful works and sinful deeds and
equally sinful thoughts. It was a Saturday afternoon, springtime,
around 4 p.m., the scheduled time for confession at our church.
And given that the church was right across the road from our
house, that day or time of day didn’t really cause me an inconvenience.
Run across to the church, do my thing, say the requisite
number of Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s, and Glory Bees, and voila,
the slated soul was clean, snowy white again, all black spots
disappearing into the sinful ether. Then run back home to catch
the latest Tarzan edition on TV or tales from the really dark
continent, awaiting a supper of hot dogs, or better still, Kraft
Dinner—with ketchup!
I am sitting there in the cavernous church: nonplussed, and
wondering what I’ll be confessing. There was that list of sins of
course, both venial and mortal, to contemplate. The church,
being really well organized after thousands of years of practice,
and not wanting to waste anybody’s time, the priest’s or mine,
had a list and that list was all-encompassing. It must have been
quite interesting and comical fun coming up with the list of
venial and mortal sins.
I would have loved to have been part of that Working Group or Ecumenical Council, for certain. Yes, a sinful checklist of remembrance was the way to go. Did I do this? Check! How about that? Check. Masturbation? What is
that? More on that later! Uncheck? Murder? Nope, uncheck
unless thinking about murdering my oldest sister was a sin?
Uncheck that. On and on it went. Meantime, while I was sitting
there waiting to go in to meet my fate head on, I suddenly came
down with a horrific case of the hiccups: bad, violent, non-relenting.
Each hiccup shook my entire being.
Ever try to mask or hide a hiccup in a confined environment
like a church, or worse yet, the claustrophobic confines of a
confessional? It is not pretty. Your cheeks bulge out; eyeballs and
pupils expand outwardly in a Feldman-like manner; the stomach
contracts then expands in rapid succession; and, like an uncontrollable
fart, a growling sound begins its emanational rise from
the lower bowels of the human body, bypassing the stomach then
running up the oesophagus in its belch-like fashion, or in the
Catholic vernacular, like a resurrection. The gut, it hurts. The
whole sensation repeats itself over and over and over again until
those hiccups run their course. With each attempt to mask the
hiccup the sensation becomes worse and deeply magnified.
Embarrassed, I sat out in the pews near the back of the
church not even daring to think about going in to that dark,
dank, and tiny expanse that they called the confessional. The
interior of those tiny cells, abreast of and on either side of the
priest’s chamber, have a unique odour about them. Here, some
fifty years later, as I am writing this, I can still sense that smell.
A toxic mix of incense and sweat, interspersed with a whiff of
stale tobacco and alcohol, for all of the priests smoked and
drank. Once inside and kneeling there was no escape, for the
priest knew you were there given the little panic-type button
that activated a beep for the priest’s sake and a tiny red light
outside of the cell once your knees pressed into the red foam of
the kneeling pad. All the priest had to do then was to slide the
small grated sliding door to the left or to the right as need be
and you were trapped—trapped by the priest’s undivided attention,
until absolution. I am sure that every Catholic knows and
remembers the sound of that small sliding door opening and
closing.
I couldn’t even think of how I would handle that situation.
“Bless me father—hic-up—for I have hic-up—sinned. It has
been hic-up—one—hic-up-ed week since my last hic-up-ed
confession.” Good thing that I didn’t stutter, for heaven’s and the
priest’s sake!
I sat there in the pew for what seemed to me to be an eternity.
As the time marched on my hiccups seemed to get worse. I
prayed and prayed that they would stop but no heavenly dispensation
came my way that day. I held my breath for what seemed
to be minutes but no luck. I looked directly into the glare of the
afternoon sun but again no reprieve. Finally I sensed that I was
the only young soul left sitting in the pews of the church, still
hiccup-ing. Just then the priest came out from his priest-cave,
looked around in the late afternoon sunlit church, with its long
shadows and soft beams of spiritual light accentuated with particles
of floating, flickering dust, and spotted me. It was Father
Docherty. He was a fatherly Father of our church: nice but somewhat
of a lush. Chubby, but not fat, with cherubic features,
weathered and somewhat rustic with a fractured nose and
pronounced limp from his athletic days of playing ice hockey for
the “Holy Rollers.”
His robes hung over him in disarray. He was more of a slob
really, or should I say heavenly slovenly. He always drooled so it
was wise to give him a wide berth to avoid the spittle for, as
mentioned earlier, second-hand spittle was a fate worse than
death or penance for someone as young as me! He had a high
squeaky voice which did not adequately or accurately personify
his physical features.
How did I know he was a lush? Several of my friends were
altar boys—assistants to the priest while celebrating mass. And
Father Docherty always celebrated the 10:15 mass. That was the
time that the semi-high mass at our church was celebrated. And
one dictum that every young lad or lass in the parish knew was
never ever go to the 10:15 mass. It lasted an eternity. And being a
semi-high mass meant more wine at the offertory segment of the
celebration. It was the altar boy’s job to carry the small carafes of
water and wine from a side table hidden from view from the
parishioners up to the altar area such that the priest could mix the
water with the wine. Only in the case of Father Docherty’s
masses, there was no water, only wine, and lots of it, in two
carafes: one being white to resemble water, the other being red to
symbolise the blood of Christ. By the end of the Mass, Father
Docherty’s limp became more pronounced as he began to slur his
words. This was not really a problem because no one in the
church was paying attention by this point in time anyway, and
even if they were they couldn’t understand Latin.
“Morrison,” he commanded. “What’s the problem?”
I thought, isn’t it obvious, Father?
“I have the hiccups, Father, really hiccup-ing bad so I cannot
say my hic-up-ed confession with these hiccups.”
“Come here.”
I obeyed and when I got within reach of his massive arms he
put his left arm around me, chuckled somewhat, and told me not
to worry about the hiccups as he led me to the confessional.
Perhaps he was impatient for this session to end so that he could
run back to his own quarters and watch Tarzan.
And at that exact moment in time, without a doubt and with
no exaggeration on my part, when he slung his left arm across
my shoulder, those hiccups ceased immediately.
Is this a saintly, beatification-worthy moment? Probably not
in the overall Catholic scheme of things, but for me it was an
experience that I never forgot. It was right up there with my
Uncle Rupert’s guardian angel apparition on that dark and stormy
night when he was just a child; or my dad’s miraculous recovery
from cross-eye-ed-ness after visiting Ste Anne de Beaupré’s
shrine outside of Québec City with his mother. Truth or fantasy?
Don’t really know, for I was an impressionable and innocent soul
back in those days. Cynicism had not yet manifested itself or
wrestled away or destroyed my enthusiasm for life nor my innocence
or naïveté as yet. Only happy thoughts!”
Shrinks are God’s way of telling us we have too much money. Catholic shrinks are more hands on.
She resembles my elementary school principle.
Written 2,000 years ago:
Take heed that no man deceive you. Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.
St Paul’s letter to the Roman’s – written almost 2,000 years ago. I do not profess to make judgement of any kind here or pontificate but I find that these warnings made by Paul to the Romans about the dangerous trappings of a future world are unbelievable and accurately prophetic when taken into account in today’s reality.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. (Gaia anymore, environmentalist’s creed.)
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.
