Читать книгу Strange Way to Live - Carl Dixon - Страница 10

Let me tell you a little about what led me to here. I’ve been a professional singer and musician since I was sixteen. I’ve had some success, seen some things, and made a decent living, even a good living at times.

I come from a modest background, born in the northern steel town of Sault Ste. Marie in the last days of 1958. When I grew up in “the Soo” in the 1960s, the temperature always hit forty below in the long winters and stayed chilly in the short summers that came to that thickly forested country around Lake Superior. Idyllic, if you like that sort of thing.

I’m like most white North Americans, descended from Europeans who immigrated here to seek improved prospects or to escape calamity. My father, Ronald Francis Dixon, was born in Sudbury in 1925. Ron was the tenth of twelve children in a family of Irish-English descent, and the seventh son of a seventh son to boot. His father, John Albert, graduated in medicine from McGill University in Montreal in 1907. I was tickled to learn that, among other extracurricular activities, my grandpa was athletic enough to captain the McGill hockey team. Dr. John Albert “Bert” Dixon went on to a long career in medicine, notably as head of surgery at Sudbury General Hospital for twenty-two years. Bert also opened medical practices in the Ottawa Valley and on Manitoulin Island at different stages of his life. For a time, in the early years, he made house calls with a horse and carriage. Unsurprisingly, his role as physician in these small communities gave the family some slight standing.

My paternal grandmother was Agatha (née) Watters of Ireland. Agatha was a fierce Irish Catholic, which helps explain the twelve blessed arrivals to the Dixon home. I’m not sure of much about Grandma Dixon. She was trained as a nurse, but I don’t know if she worked in Bert’s practice. She was in her seventies when I came along. I was always a bit frightened of her when we went to visit.

My father told me that Dr. Dixon lost a large amount of money, the greater part of the family fortune, on a highly speculative mining stock investment during the Great Depression. This unhappy outcome reduced the family’s socio-economic standing, and on one or two occasions when my father’d had a few drinks, he would complain that he and all the brothers and sisters “should have been rich.”

The Dixon parents were strict with their children and kept things going with their huge brood along hard lines in those times of deprivation. They sent Ron to the CNE fair in Toronto, with its rides, midway, and variety shows, with a quarter in his pocket. Even in the 1930s there wasn’t much you could do with two bits. “Make it stretch” was the advice offered.

Bert and Aggie somehow found the money to place my father in a Catholic private school called Scollard Hall. They hoped this experience might lead him to God and the priesthood, or at least to taking life more seriously. The Catholic high school had rather the opposite effect, if it had any effect at all aside from instilling bitter memories. Ron used to threaten to send me to Scollard Hall on a few occasions when I showed signs of teenage rebelliousness or lack of seriousness.

Still, there were many stories of happy childhood memories. The task of raising twelve children must have been a strain, but my grandparents both lived long and well (to eighty-six and ninety-three, respectively). The family was a hierarchy; the eldest children were expected to manage the youngest and relieve Mama’s burden. Actually, this responsibility fell mostly to the daughters, while the eldest boys were out making their mark. Ron was tenth in birth order, and along with his little brothers Dick and Des was cared for by his older sister Mary. He always had a special love for Mary, as have I.

Many of the “Dixon dozen” served in the military in the Second World War or after. Ron, my father, was in line to be shipped to Europe with his army unit when VE Day arrived, thank God. When the VJ peace was signed on that battleship in the Pacific, my dad’s unit was again awaiting assignment.

There were ways in which my father could certainly be considered a sort of wizard, as befitting his seventh son status. Ronald Dixon was a brilliant, interesting, and artistic man who, alas, spent most of his life as the unwitting plaything of his powerful emotions. His working-life career was as wildly varied as his considerable talents and intelligence. Here was a man who was at different times an army officer, a miner, a logger, a steel plant worker, a radio DJ, a TV news announcer, a newspaper writer, an elementary school teacher and principal, a high school math, English, and art teacher, and a university professor in journalism. He was a poet, a writer, and a painter in oils, as well as an athlete and an animal lover. He was a gentleman with a refined sense of manners and gallantry. He would go to any lengths to entertain children. My own children adored him.

Ron’s restless spirit and relentless curiosity were part of the reason for his many lines of work. It also seemed to him that most people and most situations grew simply intolerable over time, and his efforts to raise other people to his standards of behaviour were not always appreciated. I guess he was a bit judgmental. This came out in his keen ability to home in on things that just weren’t right and then put that thought into scathing words. It was a trait that was to last throughout his life.

From watching my father, and from my own experiences, I’ve learned that emotion travels much faster through us than does thought. Strong feelings short-circuit the intellect and can leave even the greatest thinker trembling with misguided or misdirected anger. This was a frequent occurrence for my father. As one elderly librarian hotly upbraided him on the day after he’d made a fuss about something with her, “You were wrong, Mr. Dixon … and so loud about it too!” That line became a classic in our family.

His powerful emotions, which resulted in continual changing of jobs and homes, led my father inevitably closer to the fringe. Ron was well liked by many, and he often gave selflessly of his knowledge and ideas. At the same time he would be appalled time and again by the expressions of human nature and the ways in which people would often not live up to the highest ideals in conducting their affairs. Dad’s sharp tongue could be unleashed at unexpected moments, as his beautiful, polished manners gave way to a sudden torrent of outrage. He was a seeker of truth and beauty in a world populated with the unpredictable and unmanageable, the hell of “other people.” If I were to ascribe a thought to him, for much of his life I’d make it: Why do you all have to be like that?

A self-imposed distancing from his disappointing fellow humans led him into near-isolation in his last years. A man of so much brilliance should have been staying highly connected with society. He was unfortunately so frequently misunderstood (or, alas, sometimes understood all too well) that to engage him might turn upsetting for all concerned, including himself. It must have been difficult to navigate a world in which so few people were able to live up to one’s lofty standards. As brilliant and loving and sentimental as he could be, dear old Dad marginalized himself through behaviour that he was either unable or unwilling to control. That continues to be an important lesson to me.

Ron sure had a fun side, though. Put together quick wit, intelligence, energy, a desire to please, and a quirky outlook and you get a man who would constantly conjure up improbable things to say and do. My mother often says he made her laugh through their whole life together, and that talent to amuse is what made her stick with him. I guess it may be true when they say that’s what a woman really wants in a man: someone to make her laugh.

In his last years Ron was happiest with his books, making corrections to the author’s work in the margins, or painting oil on canvas, or working on supposedly impossible math problems. His mind was keen to the end. We lost Dad to a heart attack on December 29, 2009. He would have been eighty-five on the following June 13. I miss him every day.

My mother, Marje (Mar-yeh), is the polar opposite of my father in many ways: cool, calm, composed, enduring, stoic, but also extremely intelligent, with a surprisingly wicked sense of humour. She quietly set about making a solid home base wherever my father’s fancy led us. Mom also set about becoming a reliable and substantial force for earnings and savings power. Marje is remarkable for her capacity to analyze a situation and find the smartest solution. Her knack of climbing smartly in every new workplace that our travels took her seemed so normal, I thought everybody was like that. An early example of a “working mom,” she knew how to budget, cook, raise children, and keep a marriage together while going to work every day and exceeding expectations. I owe to my mother’s example whatever I have of sticking to things and of enduring, whatever happens.

My mother’s family is Estonian; they fled from their homeland on the Baltic Sea during the Second World War, when the Russians invaded for the second time in modern history, in 1944. My grandmother Hella Magi was born 1911 in Voru, a small town near the Russian border. Her maiden name was Jaason, an educated family we would now call upper-middle-class, with a large lakefront property as well as a farm on the other side of the lake. Her father, Juhan, was a banker and a director of the local arts council.

Estonia had been under Russian rule for two hundred years, but the collapse of Czarist Russia after the 1917 revolution was the chance for the little country to declare its independence, even though Communist sympathizers agitated in their midst for alignment with the revolution. The small but determined Estonian army repulsed a Red Army invasion in 1919. After a year of fighting, Russia signed a peace treaty in 1920 in which it gave up any future claim over Estonia’s territory. This left Estonian Communists seething with resentment, awaiting the next chance. Juhan Jaason would pay dearly for his prominence in free Estonia when the USSR invaded in June 1940.

My maternal grandfather, Rudolf Magi, born in 1905, came from a small village called Pormanni. It no longer exists, having been bulldozed during one of the Soviet collective farming or industry schemes. After completing his studies, Rudi made his way to an education in military college, where he became the youngest cadet ever to graduate. His first posting as a young officer took him to Voru, where he met Hella at the local music and dance hall. Married in 1931, they had “three years’ honeymoon,” in Hella’s words, until the arrival of their first son, Rein, in 1934. Then came Tonu in 1936 and finally my mother Marje in 1938.

Rudi went to Officers Higher Military College, where he earned a captain’s rank. He served in the Estonian army in that rank until the end of the Second World War.

My Grandma Hella (Jaason) Magi is one of my heroes in this world, a survivor and thriver without equal. In January 2011 I attended her hundredth birthday party and performed a song for her with my daughter, Lauren Hella, the great-granddaughter named for her. My elder girl Carlin helped Lauren read the birthday greetings from the Queen, the prime minister, and various other dignitaries, including the president of Estonia.

Hella often regaled me with stories of the family’s escape from the Russian invasion. In 1944 the Germans were losing the Eastern Front to the strengthening Russians. Rudi saw the threat looming, and in concern for the safety of his children he managed to get a secret letter to Hella in the south, urging her to leave Estonia with the kids as soon as possible. While the Russians were entering the northern part of Estonia above Lake Peipus, she gathered up her three children, including my mother (then six years old), and they were able to evacuate on one of the last trains leaving Voru.

Hella could have gotten her mother out before the Russians arrived, but her mother, Elisabet Jaason, felt she was too old to start over in a new country and refused to leave her homeland by getting on that train with them. My grandmother had already seen her father and her brother, Juhan and Juhan Jr., arrested by the Russians during the first Soviet invasion in 1940 and sent to slave labour camps in Siberia, where they subsequently died.

Like most Estonians, Hella knew that worse was to come under a second Soviet occupation. Only Communist sympathizers were pleased to see the Russians return. Hella waved goodbye to her mother and ensured the safety of her children and herself by getting on that train.

In the end Elisabet was not singled out for persecution under the Soviet regime as a former capitalist. Marje tells me her grandmother had been kind to the Jewish people in Voru and helped some of them to live through the Nazi occupation. She and Hella both believed that Elisabet was so kind, generous, and good, she charmed even the Communists.

The Magi family’s boarding of the troop train was followed by a week of rough travel on changing trains in order to put safe distance between themselves and the Russian advance. My mother remembers riding in open cattle cars with other refugees for parts of the journey. The family sometimes slept in fields beside the tracks while awaiting the next train’s arrival. There’s a lovely story of the day when Marje lost her dolly somewhere on the train and all the German soldiers helped her look for it. It is humanizing to think of them that way.

South from Estonia through Latvia and Lithuania, then to stops in Poland and finally into Germany: this was the course their journey followed over the next months. My grandma got her children into refugee quarters in southern Germany, just as the collapse of the Third Reich began all around them. From their town they could see the distant flames of the firebombing of Dresden. The family bounced around a number of German towns as refugees in the next years, while the chaos that followed the surrender of Germany slowly turned the corner to recovery under the Marshall Plan.

Then my grandfather Rudolf re-entered the stage. He’d somehow survived the fighting and by stealth escaped Estonia ahead of the Soviet invading armies. He searched the refugee settlements for his family until he found them. Rudi was reinstalled as head of his family. Having him back in place meant that the Magis could now apply to leave Germany for North America. This possibility had until then been denied them while Hella was the sole provider without an adult male. At first they applied to go to the United States, but the application was rejected because my grandfather, who’d started the war as an officer in the Estonian army, had technically, albeit unwillingly, also served with both the Russian and the German armies.

After six years of hardscrabble refugee life, the reunited Magis were accepted as immigrants to Canada. They arrived in 1951 to start life over in peace. We who have always lived in North America, where there’s been no large-scale conflict in almost a hundred and fifty years, can’t truly appreciate the profound importance of that idea. Peace is a primary component of happiness. Without peace, there is no security, no prospects, no planning for the future. If you don’t have it, it’s all you seek. People will leave behind their precious things, friends, and familiar surroundings just to have a chance at attaining peace for themselves and their families. This is why so many Estonians after the Second World War wanted to get as far away as possible from Europe.

The Magis landed at Halifax with their possessions in a few sea-locker trunks. Once processed at the government of Canada immigration docks, they again made a long train journey, inland to the fertile farmlands of Southern Ontario. A family of willing workers, they established their first household in their new land in the town of Fruitland. It was a one-room shack, provided by a farmer to the fruit-pickers who laboured there in the harvest season. Rudi, Hella, and the three children all went to work in the orchards to earn a little money to get them started.

My mother was enrolled in the local school and was humiliatingly placed in the grade one class at age thirteen because she knew little English. She made a supreme effort to catch up and within a month or so was promoted to the age-appropriate level.

It was my mother’s lot to have the same limitations placed on her as on most young women of the time. She was expected to go to work as soon as possible to help the family, while her two older brothers were to go to university and take on professional careers as engineers. This they all successfully did. Marje began part-time in the workforce at thirteen and full-time immediately upon graduating. Her intelligence did ensure her rapid advancement through a long professional career. She never was without a job until her retirement from Employment Canada after many years.

There was also an expectation that my mother would meet a nice Estonian boy in their émigré community and stay within the culture. This did not interest her; she found those boys dull. Along came my father during one of his many job stops, this time as an inspector for the Workmen’s Compensation Board, where my mother worked as a secretary. She was eighteen, he was thirty-one. They were both smitten. Some people were agog at the difference in their ages, and the Magi family had their doubts about the wisdom of the union, but Ron made Marje laugh, and he was not dull.

They married a month after Marje’s nineteenth birthday, and I was born thirteen months later. Fifty-two years of dedicated matrimony followed. I have a sister, Christina, a little over thirteen months younger than me. My sister’s birth apparently made things a little awkward for my mother. The males of the Magi family had been prepared once already to fetch their daughter and sister home on the train from far-off Sault Ste. Marie, convinced that Ron was proving unreliable as a husband. Marje was certain her mother, who had already questioned her daughter’s choice, would now tell her that she’d only compounded the mistake by having a second child. Marje didn’t want to hear it, so she didn’t tell her.

In later years Grandma Hella would tell the story of going to the Soo to visit her daughter and grandson in spring only to discover this unknown newborn sleeping in the home. “My goot-niss, who is thiss?” Grandma exclaimed. Her anger at being deceived must have been softened by the joy of seeing the newborn Christina. Perhaps Marje had counted on that.

I was probably a typical older brother in my treatment of Christina. As wee ones we were great playmates, and then as I got to eight or nine, I grew very self-conscious that I couldn’t be seen with a girl. My poor little sister had to put up with her mildly mean old brother. I had to take her on the bus every week for a year to the doctor’s office in Sault Ste. Marie for her allergy shots when I was nine and she was seven because Mom was working and Dad was off in some other town. I’d make her sit in a different seat and then tell her to walk far behind me, as if we didn’t know each other.

As we matured into high school Christina followed a similar path to me in her own way with music, athletics, and the arts. In time I was able to more openly show the love I’d always had for her, and she has always been an enormous supporter of my music career. Christina is the kind of fan every artist needs.